Do Your Drills Match Your Scheme?
By: Chad Wilson – All Eyes DB Camp
Instagram: @alleyesdbcamp
Ever heard the curtains don’t match the drapes? Well get your mind out of the gutter. To make my point, you can’t have floral print curtains with pinstripe drapes in your living room. Likewise on your defense, one must cooooooooordinate when it comes to drills and scheme.
Many a time I have seen DB coaches fall in love with drills they either picked up online or at a clinic and make them part of their regimen. While there is nothing wrong with that, you must ask yourself “is what we are doing daily in practice what we are likely to do on gameday?”
There are a lot of great drills out there and some of those drills hit home on the basics but if you are a predominantly press man football team, do you want to spend most of your individual period working on back pedaling and coming out of breaks? If you rarely play press, do you want to spend a great deal of time working on mirror drills from a press alignment in practice? That might give your cornerbacks great feet but will it help them play off the ball for 50 snaps on Friday or Saturday?
The same way we don’t take a hammer to the woods to cut down a tree, is the same way you don’t send your guys on the field on game day with the wrong set of tools for the job. Determine the scheme that you are playing. Take a strong look at what your players are doing the most on game day and apply drills that will maximize their game day movements. It seems like a simple concept but a lot of times DB coaches will fall in love with certain drills and they don’t really apply to the scheme that their particular defense is running.
One other point I want to make. In most schemes, the cornerbacks and safeties have different responsibilities and often a different set of required skills. If you are the only defensive back coach for your team, be sure to split your drill time up between those drills that are advantageous for the cornerbacks and those working skills for the safeties. If you have an assistant that you can trust, consider having a time during your Indy period where you split up the corners and safeties to get more time doing position specific work.
When game day comes, your entire unit will benefit from more specific work that applies to the scheme that is being run by the coordinator. Happy coaching.
Chad Wilson is the owner of All Eyes DB Camp and author of "101 DB Tips". He played college football at the University of Miami and briefly in the NFL for the Seattle Seahawks. Over his 15 year high school football coaching career, he tutored over a dozen Division I defensive backs and as a trainer has worked with NFL All Pros, first round draft picks, college football All Americans and Top 10 ranked high school football prospects.
