CoachesEducation.com

Dear Coach,

I have enjoyed your site and its growth for the last couple of years. There is good information on this site and I have a question.

I have always wanted to incorporate some fun activities into my practices, however, my knowledge of fun activities that are relevent to track conditioning is limited. I work my athletes hard and they go through a lot when training with me and, as a result, I would like to reward them every now and then with a fun day. At a clinic two years ago, a coach from Marquette University suggested flag football. Please help me come up with some enjoyable activities for my team.

Sincerely,
Stuart Belizaire (sbelizaire@aol.com)

Stuart:

Here is my philosophy about having fun activities. I like to incorporate fun activities into the preparation phase which parallels the early pre-season.

We play soccer two days a week, on a Tuesday and Thursday, which is a high lactate workout and the athletes really enjoy it. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday we do high volume work. Even when it rains we still have our workout. We did this in January. One year, a national caliber athlete participated in this program who became the number one athlete in the country, along with a relay team that placed in the top seven. We also scheduled softball for the Spring break. After the season, we played volleyball, basketball, softball and went swimming.

Other fun activities include pizza after a meet or breakfast after a Saturday workout. This will develop camaraderie among the athletes.
It is best to incorporate fun activities during the pre-season because you should be concentrating on competing during the competition phase.

Coach George Payan

I am a thrower from NJ. My coach does some things to make practice more enjoyable. One thing is he uses a rubber ball that he throws and we have to sprint to catch it. This works on reaction and speed and makes you forget about doing sprints because you are so focused on the ball. Also he has the 'if a coach can do it, you can do it' attitude so you find yourself trying new things to do better than your coach.