(I’m still getting caught up with this summer’s activities and photos.)
Jack and Owen attended the Offense-Defense football camp at Rider University the first week of July. They had both done the camp last year.
Jack is very keen on getting a chance to “go live.” What can I say; he likes to hit.
O-D Camp is the only one we’ve found that is full contact. Despite that, I don’t think it’s the best football camp we go to.
I do think young football players need to practice hitting and being hit. I’ve seen several excellent athletes who skills and aggression dropped dramatically once they put pads on because they were very afraid of hitting. It doesn’t matter how great your skills are when you’re in shorts, hitting is part of football.
HOWEVER, Jack and Owen — probably because they wrestle — have absolutely no problems with the hitting aspect of football.They’ve got that down and are ready to focus on other aspects.
The O-D camp’s whole focus is a “game” they play the last day. By the afternoon of the first day of camp, the players are divided into teams, assigned positions and practice for the “game.” So the whole week of camp becomes sort of an extended scrimmage.
(And, if you’ve read any of my earlier posts on football, I believe that extensive scrimmaging is one of the biggest wastes of time at football practice. I’ve been taking the USA Football coaching course and they agree with me. One of the first sentences in the course book and one that they repeat over and over is that “a scrimmage is not a practice plan.”)
Devoting a lot of practice time or camp time to scrimmaging makes things easy on the coaches. They can just watch the skill players run their plays and make comments. Jack wanted to get practice as a lineman at this camp. On one hand, that was a good decision, because there were about a zillion players who wanted to be a running back or a linebacker. On the other hand, he regularly sat around for 20 minutes at a time, taking a knee in his position on the line while the coaches fussed with the quarterback and ball carriers. UGH.
There wasn’t any well-thought out plan for substitution in the scrimmages, so playing time was extremely unequal.
There were some great coaches there. When they did spend a little bit of time on specific position and technique drills, the young coach who was teaching the linemen was excellent. He reminded me of Ryan from Total Soccer; he didn’t let the players get away with being sloppy on anything. Coach Toomer (Amani Toomer’s father) is a real character, all bark and very little bite. He works with the very youngest players in camp each year and does a great job at teaching them football culture.
However, on the whole, I was disappointed that the boys didn’t learn more specific skills and didn’t get much time to practice them, beyond the scrimmaging time. Photos from camp are here.
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