By John Shea, Head Football Coach,
Everett Huskies Youth Football, Everett, Mass
WATCHING FILM IS a common practice at the high school, college and professional levels of football. The idea is that players improve their performance when they can objectively see what they’re doing right and wrong, and what they need to do to improve their performance. All to often, however, players dread these sessions as they get constantly blasted by the coaches for their mistakes.
Watching film can be a great benefit to your athletes. It can increase player motivation, strengthen commitment and improve skill level. You must, however, have a plan to accomplish those goals. Film sessions shouldn’t be about assigning blame. They’re about fixing mistakes, strengthening positives and furthering the understanding of what you’re teaching.
Film-Watching Strategies
The following are five strategies we’ve found helpful in keeping our film sessions upbeat and constructive.
1. Keep group sizes as small as possible. The smaller the group, the more individual attention each player can receive. Rarely have we been able to break up into more than two groups, but even that doubles the amount of time that can be spent on each player. We usually watch film on our weight-lifting day. If we only have access to one VCR, we allow the backs to watch film while the lineman lift weights. Then we switch.
2. Focus on the positives. One of the best, and least-used, possibilities of film watching is to reinforce the techniques that players are already performing well. When you see an example of a well-done technique, show it several times and explain to your players why it was so effective.
Not only does this build confidence in the player that performed well, but it also motivates everyone on the team to want to be the person praised during the next film session. Also, this gives the entire team (or unit) a clear picture of how a particular skill should be performed.
3. Relate positives to your drills. Another thing we’ll do while we are reviewing positive plays is to relate the skills demonstrated on film to our drills. Showing your players how the big plays of the game were accomplished by simply executing the drills they perform every week in practice can greatly increase the intensity of your future drill work.
As coaches, we’re always trying to explain to players the importance of drill work. A live example demonstrated during a well-executed play can go a long way toward accomplishing that goal.
Sometimes you’ll be able to pause the film on a certain play and ask, “What drill is being performed here?” When your players come up with the answer themselves, it can be a powerful experience that will carry over to your next practice and drill-work session.
4. Relate individual techniques to schemes. When players see how different techniques come together to form your team’s schemes, it will improve their commitment. Defensive players, for example, need to see why there always needs to be a contain player, a fill player, a cutback player and how these techniques complement each other. Your players will work harder at developing their skills when they understand how it improves the team’s chances for success and how they are each responsible for one another on every play.
5. Correct mistakes effectively. Most coaches consider mistake correction to be the main reason to watch film. While it is certainly a very important reason, over the years our staff has found a few strategies that can help keep mistake correction from becoming a miserable experience for players and coaches alike.
First of all, try to watch the mistake a minimum amount of time. You don’t want your players to form too strong a picture of how not to execute a technique. Show the mistake once or twice just to make sure the player understands what you’re trying to show him, then pause the tape and walk everyone through the correction.
You want your players to see and feel the technique being performed correctly. After you’ve walked through the correction, have the player write down the correction in his notebook. If the player needed to stay lower during the technique, he simply writes, “stay low” in his notebook. If the player makes the same mistake later in the film, don’t make him stand up and perform it again. Instead, have him enter it into his notebook again. If at the end of the film session a player has “stay low” written down eight times, he’ll know what he needs to work on during the week.
