The Best Football Drills For Kids: Offensive Line Part 3

Finally the third and final piece to the puzzle of our Best Football Drills for Kids who Play on the Offensive Line! Getting out of your stance. This is how we teach a young player how to get out of his stance and into pass protection.

To sum it up, our whole lives we were taught to "kick slide." Which traditionally meant to kick your back foot backward and pretty violently, which would pull your front foot back with the momentum.

The way we explain it makes so much more sense and as soon as we taught this method to our players I saw immediate improvement. We teach it as "Drive Steps" instead of "Kick Slide."

What we wanted was for them to Drive off of their front foot violently which meant they were pushing themselves back instead of pulling. This complete shift in body weight and momentum was visible immediately. Instead of them waiting on their front foot to catch up with the back (kick slide) they were driving their entire body back and ready to take on contact or switch directions much sooner because their back leg was always in a loaded position.

Just by changing the words used to teach the technique the players instantly understood what was expected.

This lead me to think about other ways we have learned over the years to call things linguistically and how we could reword things to get better results. It made perfect sense. When you tell a kid to kick slide that's exactly what you are going to get, a kick. When you tell them to drive off their front foot you get exactly that! AMAZING (sarcasm)!

Sometimes as coaches we over think things which leads to them being more difficult than what they are. If you want the player to drive off his front foot then tell them exactly that!

Here's the best part! When you teach them to run block it is the exact same verbiage but now they are driving off their back foot to initiate movement. These techniques are shown in great detail in the two prior posts in this 3 part series. Click here to view Part 1 or Click here to view Part 2

Learning how to teach players to do what you want them to do comes down to the language you use. It's no different than having a playbook with 1,000+ plays to memorize. It's just not realistic. If you have a system that flows nicely and the language makes sense they will play faster, perform better, hit harder, ect. The less they are thinking the better.

If you'd like to see how we install our offensive system it's available by clicking here. How to Install the Up Tempo No Huddle Spread Read Option Offense.