During the preseason, I will have a couple of meetings with my coaching staff. During the first meeting, we will talk about offense. The second meeting we will discuss defense. The final meeting will focus on special teams and practice planning.

Offensive meeting

The first order of business will be to discuss our current roster situation. We will see how many returning players we have. We know the abilities of all our returning players and will usually keep them at the position they played last season. We will then try to get feedback on our new players from their previous coaches. We will take a look at how many first-time players we have as well.

Following roster evaluation, we will discuss our playbook. Playbook discussion includes: play installation, philosophy, formations, line splits, blocking scheme, position drills and our numbering system. My coaches and I will sometimes have to tailor our offense to accommodate our team’s athletic ability. As the head coach, I will always ask for feedback and ideas from all my assistant coaches.

Defensive meeting

The second meeting of the preseason will be solely about defense. Much like the first meeting, we will evaluate our current roster. Again, we will see how many returning, new and first-year players we have. I will go ahead and assign position coaches and our defensive coordinator. During the meeting, we will discuss position responsibilities within our scheme. We will speak about what we did well and where we need to improve. We will then spend a great deal of time talking about our defensive philosophy:

• Proper tackling technique.
• Keeping the head up!
• Alignment.
• Pursuit to the football. 
• Block destruction, getting off blocks.
• Creating turnovers.
• Playing together.

Special teams 

Last but not least, special teams.  We spend a fair amount of planning and practice time on our special teams. We take a lot of pride in our special teams. Many other teams will not practice special teams as often as we do. This means we can potentially have a distinct advantage in this phase of the game.

My coaches and I will spend the first part of the meeting talking about our production this past season. All my coaches will give their feedback and ideas on how to improve our special teams. We will have conversations about our kickoff, kick return, punt, punt return and extra point schemes. We will also create or improve on our onside kick, extra point block and onside kick recovery alignment and philosophies. I will appoint my special teams coordinator as well.

Practice plans

Once we complete our special teams meeting, we will get right into our practice plans. We will plan out our first day of practice. We use the first practice to evaluate our players. We will talk about what drills we want to implement. We want to do drills that will show who our athletes really are. We will also implement drills that will reveal who our most coordinated players are. 

After we plan out the first practice, we will work on our preseason practice scripts.  We have two phases of practice: preseason phase and season phase. The preseason phase consists of play installations, player evaluations and how to block and tackle safely and effectively. The season phase of practice will consist of play repetition, conditioning, game planning, film study and, as always, practicing safe and proper technique. 

Jeff Hemhauser writes for YouthFootballOnline.com.