Three Ways to Make Your Practice More Competitive

We all want our teams to be competitive and to fight during games. If you want your athletes to compete at their highest level than you need to practice it. You need to create opportunities for them to be challenged and to compete every day. If you don't, your practices will begin to get boring and your players will not push themselves to their limits and that will be reflected during games. Below, you will find three ways to make your practice more competitive.

1. Challenge Teams. Create teams at the beginning of the year and keep them the entire season. I generally split my teams up based on offense and defense. We will have a Black team and a Gold team that will compete against each other almost every day. You can do many of your every day drills with the teams competing. In lacrosse, you can do ground ball drills with Black going against Gold. The first team to five wins and the loser runs. You can do sport related relay races, 1 v 1's, fast break drills, etc. The drills are limitless, but the key is to always have a consequence for losing or a reward for winning. You will find that the teams you create will take a lot of pride in winning these challenges and you need to monitor the team to make sure that it doesn't begin to get unfriendly.

2. Winners and Losers. Throughout your practice you will have a number of drills that require your players to go hard against others. Many of these are designed to simulate real game situations. You can easily turn some of them into competitions. In football, when my starting defense was going against the scout team offensive we would play a game called, 4 plays/5 yards. OK, I'm not great at naming at drills! In the drill, the offense had 4 plays to gain 5 yards. If they did, the defense ran or did pushups. In basketball, you might work on killing the clock. You have 10 seconds. If the defense manages to foul, offense loses. When practicing game situations, always have a winner and a loser. It promotes competition and doesn't allow your players to walk through the drill.

3. Benchmarks. Time and measure every thing! If you are a soccer or lacrosse coach, run a timed mile every single day. It holds your athletes accountable and creates competition between each other. Football coaches do 40 yard dash and shuttles a couple of times a week. Baseball and softball, time your players running the bases and from second to home a couple of times a week. Make sure that your athletes know that the times do matter. If you do partner drills, measure who caught the most balls in 2 minutes. There are many drills that you can time and measure to make it more competitive. It forces your athletes to give their best effort every single time.

These are three ideas and concepts that will help make your practice more competitive.  Use your coaching style to create even more opportunities.  They are there!  Your players will enjoy practice more and the results will be seen on game day.