The first three weeks of preseason that just wrapped up with our women’s lacrosse team at UMass was one of the most professionally rewarding periods of training for me, personally, because of the alignment we had on staff and the critical thinking that went into making the plan. We approached it from a coactive model way of thinking and were careful to weigh the potential consequences of our decisions in every coactive.
Unfortunately, at the end of week three we got hit with a university-wide one-week pause on all activities but the principles and the thought processes that helped us tackle these first three weeks will also help us restart back from this quick hiatus.
I’m going to dive into each coactive and the key decisions we made in each that led to a quality overall product.
Psychological:
The most important but often most overlooked aspect of sport. Are your athletes happy and engaged?
When we had our girls on campus in the fall, we noticed that the stress of the pandemic and all of the accompanying restrictions were weighing on them a little heavier than we all anticipated. When presented with new information, we made sure to act on it. Instead of doing exactly what we did in the fall and expecting a different result, our head coach made the executive decision to give an entire second off day during the week. In the past, only Sundays were completely off. Now we were going to give them Wednesdays off as well.
I think this decision was the most important one that we made as a coaching staff and boosted the quality of work in everything else we did because the engagement of the student-athletes was so high. Our overall volume of work performed in a week did go slightly down but overall volume of quality work went up. We had them asking for and wanting more as opposed to them ever dreading having another practice. The result was 5 very high-quality practices throughout the week, both subjectively and objectively.
The coactives often work in a give and take relationship (eg. peeling back on some aspects of practice during finals week because we know their cognitive load will be high) but they are not necessarily always in opposition. When making decisions it is not always this versus that. The psychological coactive serves as somewhat of a force multiplier for the other coactives in a way that none of the others do. If you completely miss the mark on your technical work in a given week, it won’t necessarily ruin your tactical or physical work. But if you miss the mark on your team’s psychological well-being it can have quite the ripple effect. Get this one right and everything else is boosted, get this one wrong and it can drag down a beautifully periodized plan in a heartbeat.
Technical:
As alluded to above, there is give and take to every coactive and it is important to evaluate what the needs are of the team in front you in order to maximize your time on the field. Do we have the athletic advantage in most of our games? Are we a team that relies more on tactical awareness or technical prowess? Do we have good depth as a team or will our starters be expected to play more than usual? These are some, but clearly not all, of the questions you need to be asking as a staff in order to optimize preparation.
The current team we have is incredibly technically skilled but sometimes lacks the tactical wherewithal in key situations. When I pushed the staff to trim as much fat as possible from the practice plan in order to ensure that we are being as efficient as possible with our energy, this is a point that came up. Just because you’re used to doing X number of minutes of skill work throughout practice every day does not mean that you have to continue to do that same number. As you master certain skills, you can shift your focus to other areas of the game that require more time. For us that was on the tactical side.
This evaluation of our current team’s needs is something that needs to happen more often in organized sport. If your practice plans look more or less the same for the entire year or, even worse, over multiple years, despite the strengths and weaknesses of your team fluctuating over that time, then there is no way you are maximizing your preparation time. Without a constant review of the team’s needs, you’ll be spending too much time in one area, while underpreparing in others. There is also another scenario, which is sadly the most common, where you recognize you need more work in a certain area but fail to peel back in other areas and the overall volume of work starts rising at an unsustainable rate.
Did we still need to work on skills? Absolutely. But knowing that we were already at a high level of skill, we fit those skill environments into our tactical drills wherever possible. Building the optimal daily/weekly/monthly practice plan requires careful consideration and constant review.
Tactical:
Our lacrosse staff does all of the deciding on what areas we need to work on tactically. I simply help them organize those specific drills and scenarios onto certain days in order to maximize our physical training and ensure that loads are being progressed in a safe and efficient way.
Small sided drills put the girls in scenarios where there is a relatively high proportion of changes of direction but the environments are small enough and crowded enough that the absolute velocities reached are lower. Contrast this with full(er)-field scenarios where the changes of direction go down but the overall velocities attained are higher due to the less crowded playing space and more field to build up running velocities. The claims I am making about proportion of changes of direction and running velocities are not only logical conclusions based off of looking at the environments subjectively with your eye but they are backed up by objective data, our Catapult GPS system.
As a sports performance coach, not trying to exert influence in this area is a mistake. It can be easy to think that this is the sport coach’s domain and they don’t mess with the weight room so I’m not going to mess with practice. This is leaving a lot of value on the table. I have never once told a sport coach to perform or not perform a certain drill. Instead, I frame the discussion as more a reorganization, because that’s exactly what it is. Consolidating like tactical stressors to certain days in order to attain desired physical outcomes is a conversation that any critically thinking sport coach can get behind. Moving a few drills around from day to day within a week can transform a practice plan from good to great.
We have 5 different themes of practice that have emerged from these conversations. Purely technical days, small-field emphasis, full-field emphasis, a mixture of the previous two, and full scrimmage days.
A great way to start this conversation if your sport coach does not split things up like this (stolen straight from Keir Wenham-Flatt) is to ask, “Coach, what is the physical emphasis of the day? I want to make sure I am matching that emphasis with our weight room work.” The response to this is often some sort of admission that there is no physical emphasis, and you’ve now got your entry point to start the conversation of organizing tactical work.
The below chart shows our first 3 weeks of practice for our defenders. The maroon bars are total distance in yards and the black line shows high speed distance in yards. Our threshold for high-speed distance is any distance traveled at or above 70% of max velocity for each individual player. You can see a fluctuation in high speed volumes throughout a given week as well as overall progression of high-speed volume across the entire cycle. And while it does appear that overall volume hasn’t fluctuated much or that pure technical days are very high volume, those days include a higher percentage of walk-through type environments that isn’t reflected in this chart.
Unfortunately, at the end of week three we got hit with a university-wide one-week pause on all activities but the principles and the thought processes that helped us tackle these first three weeks will also help us restart back from this quick hiatus.
I’m going to dive into each coactive and the key decisions we made in each that led to a quality overall product.
Psychological:
The most important but often most overlooked aspect of sport. Are your athletes happy and engaged?
When we had our girls on campus in the fall, we noticed that the stress of the pandemic and all of the accompanying restrictions were weighing on them a little heavier than we all anticipated. When presented with new information, we made sure to act on it. Instead of doing exactly what we did in the fall and expecting a different result, our head coach made the executive decision to give an entire second off day during the week. In the past, only Sundays were completely off. Now we were going to give them Wednesdays off as well.
I think this decision was the most important one that we made as a coaching staff and boosted the quality of work in everything else we did because the engagement of the student-athletes was so high. Our overall volume of work performed in a week did go slightly down but overall volume of quality work went up. We had them asking for and wanting more as opposed to them ever dreading having another practice. The result was 5 very high-quality practices throughout the week, both subjectively and objectively.
The coactives often work in a give and take relationship (eg. peeling back on some aspects of practice during finals week because we know their cognitive load will be high) but they are not necessarily always in opposition. When making decisions it is not always this versus that. The psychological coactive serves as somewhat of a force multiplier for the other coactives in a way that none of the others do. If you completely miss the mark on your technical work in a given week, it won’t necessarily ruin your tactical or physical work. But if you miss the mark on your team’s psychological well-being it can have quite the ripple effect. Get this one right and everything else is boosted, get this one wrong and it can drag down a beautifully periodized plan in a heartbeat.
Technical:
As alluded to above, there is give and take to every coactive and it is important to evaluate what the needs are of the team in front you in order to maximize your time on the field. Do we have the athletic advantage in most of our games? Are we a team that relies more on tactical awareness or technical prowess? Do we have good depth as a team or will our starters be expected to play more than usual? These are some, but clearly not all, of the questions you need to be asking as a staff in order to optimize preparation.
The current team we have is incredibly technically skilled but sometimes lacks the tactical wherewithal in key situations. When I pushed the staff to trim as much fat as possible from the practice plan in order to ensure that we are being as efficient as possible with our energy, this is a point that came up. Just because you’re used to doing X number of minutes of skill work throughout practice every day does not mean that you have to continue to do that same number. As you master certain skills, you can shift your focus to other areas of the game that require more time. For us that was on the tactical side.
This evaluation of our current team’s needs is something that needs to happen more often in organized sport. If your practice plans look more or less the same for the entire year or, even worse, over multiple years, despite the strengths and weaknesses of your team fluctuating over that time, then there is no way you are maximizing your preparation time. Without a constant review of the team’s needs, you’ll be spending too much time in one area, while underpreparing in others. There is also another scenario, which is sadly the most common, where you recognize you need more work in a certain area but fail to peel back in other areas and the overall volume of work starts rising at an unsustainable rate.
Did we still need to work on skills? Absolutely. But knowing that we were already at a high level of skill, we fit those skill environments into our tactical drills wherever possible. Building the optimal daily/weekly/monthly practice plan requires careful consideration and constant review.
Tactical:
Our lacrosse staff does all of the deciding on what areas we need to work on tactically. I simply help them organize those specific drills and scenarios onto certain days in order to maximize our physical training and ensure that loads are being progressed in a safe and efficient way.
Small sided drills put the girls in scenarios where there is a relatively high proportion of changes of direction but the environments are small enough and crowded enough that the absolute velocities reached are lower. Contrast this with full(er)-field scenarios where the changes of direction go down but the overall velocities attained are higher due to the less crowded playing space and more field to build up running velocities. The claims I am making about proportion of changes of direction and running velocities are not only logical conclusions based off of looking at the environments subjectively with your eye but they are backed up by objective data, our Catapult GPS system.
As a sports performance coach, not trying to exert influence in this area is a mistake. It can be easy to think that this is the sport coach’s domain and they don’t mess with the weight room so I’m not going to mess with practice. This is leaving a lot of value on the table. I have never once told a sport coach to perform or not perform a certain drill. Instead, I frame the discussion as more a reorganization, because that’s exactly what it is. Consolidating like tactical stressors to certain days in order to attain desired physical outcomes is a conversation that any critically thinking sport coach can get behind. Moving a few drills around from day to day within a week can transform a practice plan from good to great.
We have 5 different themes of practice that have emerged from these conversations. Purely technical days, small-field emphasis, full-field emphasis, a mixture of the previous two, and full scrimmage days.
A great way to start this conversation if your sport coach does not split things up like this (stolen straight from Keir Wenham-Flatt) is to ask, “Coach, what is the physical emphasis of the day? I want to make sure I am matching that emphasis with our weight room work.” The response to this is often some sort of admission that there is no physical emphasis, and you’ve now got your entry point to start the conversation of organizing tactical work.
The below chart shows our first 3 weeks of practice for our defenders. The maroon bars are total distance in yards and the black line shows high speed distance in yards. Our threshold for high-speed distance is any distance traveled at or above 70% of max velocity for each individual player. You can see a fluctuation in high speed volumes throughout a given week as well as overall progression of high-speed volume across the entire cycle. And while it does appear that overall volume hasn’t fluctuated much or that pure technical days are very high volume, those days include a higher percentage of walk-through type environments that isn’t reflected in this chart.
Physical:
One major note from the fall semester was that the first quarter of practice always seemed a little bit sluggish, as if the warm up we were doing was not sufficient to ramp them up into the first drills of practice. We addressed this head on. Our athletic trainer and I compared notes on how we thought we could improve the content of the warm up. But we also knew the intent and effort behind the warm up needed to go up.
In the past, the warm up had been player led and not a lot of emphasis had been placed on it. So not only did we take it back and have it be coach led, we were critical of ourselves as a coaching staff and ensured that we were doing our best to have that aspect of practice be engaging and stimulating. We wanted to provide a consistent structure while avoiding monotonous content within the warm up. Doing the same thing every single day gets boring no matter who you are.
We saw immediate results from this, instead of the first 15-20 minutes of practice after the warm up being a glorified extended warm-up, we got quality work done right from the first whistle.
Coming back from an 8-week winter break, we knew we needed to be careful about leading the girls back into significant volumes of high speed running and high-speed changes of direction. To accomplish this goal, we started out the first 3 days with exclusively technical work. There was no drill directly against an opponent. On the fourth day we sprinkled in a little bit of extremely small-sided work against an opponent. Day 5 was our first off day and we had a staff meeting to assess. The best question that our head coach asked in that meeting was, “From where we are now, do you think we should progress intensity or volume first?” We ultimately decided on intensity. Build up to the highest intensity game environments that you will encounter, then worry about building the volume and density of work from there.
We gradually built out to larger and larger environments and made sure that once we got to the point of full-field work, we oscillated between full-field emphasis days and small-sided emphasis days. You can see in the chart how this results in days with more relative high-speed yardage and some days with fewer. Our emphasis on building intensity over volume first can be seen through our high-speed yardages going up at a much faster rate than our overall volume. It is important to note is that this entire plan can be implemented without any of the technologies we have. The Catapult is a nice luxury to have in order to double check our planning, but it is by no means necessary if you do a good job ahead of time of manipulating the environments you are putting your athletes into and intently watching practice.
From a weight room standpoint, we opted for a high frequency/low volume approach given where we were in the calendar year and where our main physical loads were focused. When we get into game weeks, we moving to two lifts a week, the emphasis of those two days shifting throughout the season based off of how the team is feeling and the density of our games. During preseason, we had four lifts instead of two and I took the volume that we would typically perform over two days and split it into four. This resulted in lifts that lasted 20 minutes but were high quality and efficient. Our head coach doesn’t feel the need to blast our girls with volume for the hell of it, so we are able to get in good quality strength training, even post-practice, throughout the year.
You’ll also see on the chart that we insert some low-volume supplementary max velocity training one day a week throughout the season. This will typically fall on a Monday or Tuesday depending on when our games are throughout the week. We bring out the lasers and time a 10-yard fly immediately after our pre-practice warm up. There are some sports, like soccer, where you can manipulate drill structure in such a way to put the athletes in a true max velocity scenario, but in lacrosse with there being an implement in the athletes’ hands, I felt it would be beneficial to make sure we have at least one exposure a week in a “sterile” environment where they can freely run. Also having it be in a separate environment means we can time the sprints which creates some friendly competitions and serves as a “heat check” to see if we are feeling relatively fresh as a team.
An important insight from our athletic trainer is that we don’t really have any girls coming in and asking her for treatment on small soft tissue things. Using practices or games missed as an objective indicator is a good metric to use for overall health but it’s also important to get the subjective side. A roster that is fully participating in practice but has 15 girls coming in regularly for little nagging issues is a very different situation than a roster that is full participating and also not having to get any sort of treatment outside of basic recovery modalities.
Wrap Up:
When we come together as a staff to evaluate the efficacy of our plan, it’s important that we have everyone involved in the meeting and giving input because everyone has a slightly different lens. I see things that our head coach might not. Our assistant head coach might see things that our athletic trainer does not. We all have slightly different areas of expertise and this means when we come together and share those different views while using common language and baseline assumptions, the team is better for it.
I hope you can tell that this article was by no means meant to be a copy and paste, cookie cutter type article where you can implement this exact plan. Instead, look to take the questions we were asking, the culture of critical thought, and the staff-wide collaboration and apply it to your own situation. Your answers to the big questions will be different than ours and thus you will make slightly different decisions than we did. Just as our own answers next month or next year will be different and the plan we implement will adjust accordingly.
One major note from the fall semester was that the first quarter of practice always seemed a little bit sluggish, as if the warm up we were doing was not sufficient to ramp them up into the first drills of practice. We addressed this head on. Our athletic trainer and I compared notes on how we thought we could improve the content of the warm up. But we also knew the intent and effort behind the warm up needed to go up.
In the past, the warm up had been player led and not a lot of emphasis had been placed on it. So not only did we take it back and have it be coach led, we were critical of ourselves as a coaching staff and ensured that we were doing our best to have that aspect of practice be engaging and stimulating. We wanted to provide a consistent structure while avoiding monotonous content within the warm up. Doing the same thing every single day gets boring no matter who you are.
We saw immediate results from this, instead of the first 15-20 minutes of practice after the warm up being a glorified extended warm-up, we got quality work done right from the first whistle.
Coming back from an 8-week winter break, we knew we needed to be careful about leading the girls back into significant volumes of high speed running and high-speed changes of direction. To accomplish this goal, we started out the first 3 days with exclusively technical work. There was no drill directly against an opponent. On the fourth day we sprinkled in a little bit of extremely small-sided work against an opponent. Day 5 was our first off day and we had a staff meeting to assess. The best question that our head coach asked in that meeting was, “From where we are now, do you think we should progress intensity or volume first?” We ultimately decided on intensity. Build up to the highest intensity game environments that you will encounter, then worry about building the volume and density of work from there.
We gradually built out to larger and larger environments and made sure that once we got to the point of full-field work, we oscillated between full-field emphasis days and small-sided emphasis days. You can see in the chart how this results in days with more relative high-speed yardage and some days with fewer. Our emphasis on building intensity over volume first can be seen through our high-speed yardages going up at a much faster rate than our overall volume. It is important to note is that this entire plan can be implemented without any of the technologies we have. The Catapult is a nice luxury to have in order to double check our planning, but it is by no means necessary if you do a good job ahead of time of manipulating the environments you are putting your athletes into and intently watching practice.
From a weight room standpoint, we opted for a high frequency/low volume approach given where we were in the calendar year and where our main physical loads were focused. When we get into game weeks, we moving to two lifts a week, the emphasis of those two days shifting throughout the season based off of how the team is feeling and the density of our games. During preseason, we had four lifts instead of two and I took the volume that we would typically perform over two days and split it into four. This resulted in lifts that lasted 20 minutes but were high quality and efficient. Our head coach doesn’t feel the need to blast our girls with volume for the hell of it, so we are able to get in good quality strength training, even post-practice, throughout the year.
You’ll also see on the chart that we insert some low-volume supplementary max velocity training one day a week throughout the season. This will typically fall on a Monday or Tuesday depending on when our games are throughout the week. We bring out the lasers and time a 10-yard fly immediately after our pre-practice warm up. There are some sports, like soccer, where you can manipulate drill structure in such a way to put the athletes in a true max velocity scenario, but in lacrosse with there being an implement in the athletes’ hands, I felt it would be beneficial to make sure we have at least one exposure a week in a “sterile” environment where they can freely run. Also having it be in a separate environment means we can time the sprints which creates some friendly competitions and serves as a “heat check” to see if we are feeling relatively fresh as a team.
An important insight from our athletic trainer is that we don’t really have any girls coming in and asking her for treatment on small soft tissue things. Using practices or games missed as an objective indicator is a good metric to use for overall health but it’s also important to get the subjective side. A roster that is fully participating in practice but has 15 girls coming in regularly for little nagging issues is a very different situation than a roster that is full participating and also not having to get any sort of treatment outside of basic recovery modalities.
Wrap Up:
When we come together as a staff to evaluate the efficacy of our plan, it’s important that we have everyone involved in the meeting and giving input because everyone has a slightly different lens. I see things that our head coach might not. Our assistant head coach might see things that our athletic trainer does not. We all have slightly different areas of expertise and this means when we come together and share those different views while using common language and baseline assumptions, the team is better for it.
I hope you can tell that this article was by no means meant to be a copy and paste, cookie cutter type article where you can implement this exact plan. Instead, look to take the questions we were asking, the culture of critical thought, and the staff-wide collaboration and apply it to your own situation. Your answers to the big questions will be different than ours and thus you will make slightly different decisions than we did. Just as our own answers next month or next year will be different and the plan we implement will adjust accordingly.