2007.12.18

On many occasions, I have been angered by Mini-Mattis's coachesÕ lack of attention to detail. I take their lack of focus and lack of instruction personally. That is unfair.

Exercise and physical development is an extremely high priority to me. For many youth coaches, it is just a couple months out of the year hobby. For my family, physical development is a year round pursuit. Beyond that, attention to finite detail is paramount.

As a point of example; the past several days, Mini-Mattis has been doing a marching in place drill. Key points:

1) Knee drive
We are practicing him snapping his knee up to a 90 degree position while keeping his chest up. The explosion comes through the hips.

2) Arm swing
Mini-Mattis has a very bio-mechanically inefficient arm swing pattern. On backswing, his right elbow often stops at his hip while his forearm extends. At the back position, his right arm is often completely straight. We have to fix that. Ideally, the arm will be broken at a 90 degree angle at the elbow throughout the entire arm revolution.

Your legs can only move as fast as your arms allow. Proper arm swing is crucial to reaching optimum speed potential.

An added element to this, as each arm reaches the forward position, Mini-Mattis tends to his arm across his body. This is inefficient. We need all movement taking us straight forward. Pushing across our body only serves to slow us down.

3) Explosion
We start slow and focus on appropriate movement. Once we are satisfied that the movement is bio-mechanically correct, we continue to increase the explosion level. We are trying to develop the appropriate fast twitch muscle response. The movement needs to occur in the amount of time it takes to snap your fingers.

Mini-Mattis will do three sets of five with each leg on this marching drill each night. The drill takes less than 5-minutes. The nightly repetition will help to develop and reinforce his muscle memory. By this summer, he should see some benefit from this drill. It is amazing what just 5-minutes of work each day can do over the course of six months or a year.

Anyway, I am slowly coming to the realization that it is impractical to expect Mini-Mattis's youth coaches to display the same attention to detail.

Football factoid: The NCAA Division III national championship game between Mount Union and Wisconsin-Whitewater had a higher TV rating (1.4) than any weekend NBA or college basketball games on the ESPN channels.

On Sunday, Mini-Mattis and I spent close to two hours working on field goal kicking. We spent about an hour outside in the 20 degree weather with 20 mile per hour winds and about an hour inside kicking into a net. See, we had been watching the Browns vs Bills game on TV. Phil Dawson made a 48 yard field goal in blizzard like conditions. It was probably the most ridiculous kick I have ever seen. He made it - straight down the middle.

That prompted us to break out the Phil Dawson kicking DVD. We watched for about 20-minutes as Phil explained and then demonstrated ever facet of the kicking game.

speed training knee drive explosion youth training speed training knee drive explosion youth training speed training knee drive explosion youth training speed training knee drive explosion youth training speed training knee drive explosion youth training