Part One: The positive effect of video taping parts of practice.
Video taping practice changes the way players practice and provides an opportunity for enhanced communication between coach and player.
Football players, just like other athletes behave differently when observed. We noticed this last fall when the cross country team changed their course and added a leg of their run to an area parallel to our practice field. Every time the young men and women runners ran by practice our receiver's pass routes were ran a little sharper and board and chute drills were conducted with greater concentration by our offensive linemen. When a crew from the local television station appeared to take a few seconds of video, the intensity of play along the line of scrimmage during an inside run drill increased noticeably. This might simply be a case of "showing off", or maybe not.
A much misunderstood industrial experiment at an electrical assembly plant in the early 1900's developed the idea of the "Hawthorne Effect". Adding a neutral third party observer changes the way that workers work and players practice. Adding a video camera and taping any part of the practice heightens players' attention. The incredible part of it all is that your players don't actually need to see the video played on a projector or monitor for their behavior at practice to change. But that's the bonus.
Coaches that can find the time to watch a short video tape of a drill will discover immediate areas for correction. Coaches and players that watch practice tape together, even for a very short amount of time, always find a teachable moment. If a picture is worth a thousand words, imagine how many words a six second video tape of your Mike linebacker attacking the center with his wrong shoulder is worth!
Part Two: Nutz and boltz!
There are several ways to add video tape to your practice plan.
- Managers, injured players and student assistants all make good camera operators.
- Every high school has a group of students that help with school plays, musicals and other productions. These are the kinds of kids that want to belong to a group and would love the opportunity to be a part of the football program. The pop-out screen makes video taping a lot easier than it was even ten years ago.
Plan early with your student helpers. Arrange for them to attend several practices before school starts. Take the time to watch with them some of their early video taping attempts. Take good care of these kids, they are worth a lot to you, your athletes and the football program in general.
Five Rules of Thumb
- The smaller the drill, the closer you can be to the drill. A one on one drill, whether it is a pass protection drill, pass rush drill or a controlled tackling drill can be video taped on ground level just a few yards from the action.
- There is no one best angle to video taping a drill. The best approach is to allow every player the chance to rotate through the drill several times, each time changing the angle of taping. Being able to show players video from behind, in front and from at least one side is very beneficial.
- A little bit of height always helps. We constructed a mini-tower on the edge of our practice field. This tower used to be a part of a children's wooden play set that was cut-off at ground level and anchored to 2X6 skids. It only gets us up about six feet, but that is a very important six feet. There are some new, relatively inexpensive portable fifteen and twenty-five foot tripods that would certainly help to improve your video taping. (http://www.hi-pod.com/)
- Reinforce immediately. Rewind that camera and try to watch it with your players as soon as you can. We've tried to make it a habit of watching drill and scrimmage video on our way out to practice the next day. This gives the position coach enough time to review the tape himself and have a few positive comments planned for each player.
- Don't throw it away! Try to either archive the video using some kind of simple video editing solution or simply save and log the tape in a notebook. Everyone has a gifted player or two go through their program every few years and it makes a lot of sense to show younger players how the drill is supposed to look. It never hurts to show players how they have improved in just a few short months either, it is a huge confidence booster.