(Randall S Mar photo)
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What that usually means is that practice can’t ever be fun and it is likely to be slow, boring, and non-productive.
I can see it now, out come the cones, there are lots of balls, lots of whistles, and a lot of repetitive crap that very few people ever do in games. I have a good friend who calls these drills masturbatory drone drills, where the coach gets off putting his charges through a bunch of stupid drills just so he can feel good about himself and say he ticked the box.
How many times in a game have you run 3-5 yards and picked a stationary ball up with no pressure on you only to put it down 3-5 yards later with no pressure, yet teams do it all the time in practice. There are so many drone drills that they are too numerous to mention them all.
I don’t think that any player who is a serious athlete really believes that running around doing drone drills makes them any better at rugby. I certainly don’t. I have seen tons of guys who do the drills really well and really smoothly, but can’t perform a lick on the field.
If you want people to come to practice, make it fun. Make it worthwhile. Make it something that people want to be a part of. I personally like to play a lot in practice. The contact need not be at full intensity but the work rate is. When we do drills, I like them to be drills that have relevance to the game, so they tend to be situational and tend to have a lot of pressure associated with them.
I am not a huge fan of doing fitness at practice, but I find that the players do like it and that they enjoy the satisfaction of working hard as a team, we also do it because it is a way to check on their fitness, in the words of Ronald Reagan, “Trust, but verify.” I think that there are also ways to keep training at an up-tempo so that the players are getting fit by being competitive and not by being in boot camp.
As a player, the most enjoyable and most productive stuff we did in training involved competition, whether it was scrums, lineouts, rough touch games, tackling work, or live action. We all really liked the fun and couldn’t wait to go to training. As a coach, I find the same thing, when the guys are competing and I need to really focus on my analytical skills, I am having a good time when they are playing.
I am not saying to make practice a confusing mishmash like it is all spaghetti, but let them play a bit and give them opportunities to work from broken play, or set play, or defense.
Guys play because they like to play. Guys do not play because they have a fixation on some higher authority pulling out a whole lot of cones to make them do a lot of drills that have little to no relevance to the game we all love. If you want your players to prepare and to like playing, you must prepare and like coaching in a way that they like being there.