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June 21, 2010

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I'm Norm Eash the head football coach at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, Illinois. I've been the head coach here for the last 24 years, played here, and played for my coach Don Larson, who was here for 32 years. So we've only had two coaches here in the last 56 years. It's a great place to come to school and a great place to coach. Every coach has his area that he feels is his specialty and I've always been on the offensive side of the ball. I have a lot of trust in my defensive coordinator Mike Murray. I work with about all areas on offense, but I coached the offensive line the most. You can have the greatest quarterback, receivers, running backs, all the best skill kids in the world. But if you don't get it done up front, it isn't going to happen. I have a saying, "without the horses the ponies don't run." So I believe you need to take a lot of time working with the guys up front so that your other players have a chance to make plays. I'd like to talk to you today about some of our circuit drills that we do. It's a pre-practice thing, it's something that we do before everyone comes together. I think these drills will work at every level. This should be a relaxed time. I want them to have some fun. I think offensive linemen are a little unique. Our first drill we just work on our stance. I believe in teaching a right-handed and left-handed stance. The next thing we do is work on pipes. We get some PCV pipes and cut them so they're about 14 inches long, you can pick them up at the hardware store. We're going to lay those pipes down on the field on a line and we're going to teach steps and aiming points, that's where it all starts. Proper footwork and proper placement is so important at the college level. As we work on our steps we don't want our feet coming off the ground too far. We're going to work on an uphill step and a slide step and we always teach a 4 to 6 inch step for teaching purposes. We also teach a reach step, a bucket step, and an open step. The players work on these starts and steps on their own the first few minutes of practice. Then we go to the boards- the 2 x 12 boards and were gonna work on getting their hips and ankles warmed up. We're going to work on waddles and go as low as we can and slow as we can just to get warmed up. Then we're going to work on low shuffles as we go side to side. We are very, very low on these drills. For our dynamic drills we like to use football drills, so that we are simulating football movements as we warm up and stretch. At Illinois Wesleyan we do our stretching within our segments. We will come together into a very short team warm-up. Then we get back on the boards and work on slide steps and lateral steps. We also work on our waddle steps. Then we're going to angle the boards and work on our steps at an angle. They have to take a bucket step or open step to begin. The next warm-up we do is called a redirect drill. Defensive linemen are moving all the time so we have to teach our players to open their hips and redirect their movement. As a coach I will say set-hut and they will take a one step start, cock their elbows and then change direction, whichever way I point. It gets them to react and we go through it very quickly. Then we work on our pass pro footwork and this is called zigzag. We're going to work on a hard post and a kick angle using cones that are a zigzag formation. Those are the two movements you use in pass pro. It's kick back, step back, kick back, step back, so this is how you get the zigzag.
We work on set by alignment. This is pass pro. In order to set you have to move your feet, so we have them practice their slide kick and their kick angle. We also use and work quick sets. This teaches them to get to their pass pro set quickly. Kids coming out of high school have trouble getting into their stance quickly so we drill that. We want to get our hands on the defensive linemen just as quick as we can. The last thing if we have time is we will work hands. This is a leverage game and we tell the players low hands win. We will work a sensitivity drill where the offensive lineman has his eyes closed and must keep his hands on the defense as his hands are knocked away. We then do what we call a trap drill. We then do a wedge drill where the defender knocks our arms away at the elbow. The last drill we do is a spin drill where the defender spins and we have to keep our hands on him and move with him. We tell our players to step in the direction of the spin and drive the bus. These are all drills that we do before practice, it works on their technique and gets them warmed up and gets them thinking about their responsibilities. Once they learn this they can run the drill themselves and your older players can teach your younger players. If anyone would like to talk to us more about line play you can come in and talk to us any time. That's what football coaches love to do and we are always available for your questions. We run a line camp in the summer that we have been running for 20 years and it's a great teaching Camp. We hope you can use some of these things in your program. Thank you
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