Every coach has had a practice get away from them.
Warm-up takes five minutes longer than expected. A drill needs more explanation. Competition gets good, so you let it run. Suddenly there are 20 minutes left and several things on the practice plan haven’t been touched.
A good practice plan isn’t just about what you’re going to train. It’s also about being intentional with how you’re going to use your time.
Start With the Time You Have
Before choosing drills, start with the total amount of court time available.
If you have two hours, you have 120 minutes to work with. Decide how you want to invest those minutes before filling in the details.
For example:
- 10 minutes — Movement and warm-up
- 20 minutes — Serve and pass
- 25 minutes — Skill development
- 25 minutes — Team systems
- 30 minutes — Competitive play
- 10 minutes — Flex time / finish
Now you’re not trying to squeeze a collection of drills into practice. You’re building the practice around the time you actually have.
Give Every Block a Purpose
Before deciding on the drill, decide what you’re trying to accomplish.
Instead of:
“Passing drill — 15 minutes”
Try:
“Serve receive — create better communication and movement between passers.”
Once the objective is clear, choosing the right drill becomes much easier.
It also helps coaches avoid one of the easiest practice-planning traps: choosing drills simply because we like them rather than because they serve what the team needs that day.
Use Drills Your Team Already Knows
A good practice doesn’t require a collection of brand-new drills.
In fact, familiar drills can make practice more efficient because athletes already understand the setup, rules, and expectations. Less time explaining means more time training.
Build a core library of drills you trust and organize them by skill, purpose, intensity, or whatever makes sense for your program.
Then modify the scoring, constraints, or emphasis based on what you’re trying to accomplish that day.
The drill doesn’t always need to change. The purpose can.
Know What Can Move
A practice plan should provide structure without becoming rigid.
Some drills will need more time. Others won’t work the way you expected. Sometimes the team is getting exactly what you want from an activity and stopping because the clock says so doesn’t make sense.
Build some flexibility into your plan.
Know which parts of practice are priorities and which blocks can be shortened, moved, or eliminated if necessary.
That way, when practice changes—and it will—you aren’t making every decision on the fly.
Keep an Eye on the Clock
This sounds simple, but it’s one of the easiest things to lose track of while coaching.
If you planned 15 minutes for an activity, know when those 15 minutes are up.
You don’t necessarily have to stop. But you should make a conscious decision to continue rather than looking at the clock 30 minutes later and wondering where practice went.
The plan should guide practice, not control it.
That’s one of the ideas behind Blocq.
Build your practice with timed training blocks, pull drills directly from your library, and then take that same plan into the gym and run it from your phone or tablet.
You always know where you are in practice, what’s coming next, and how the actual practice compares to the one you planned.
Because better practice planning isn’t about squeezing more drills into the same amount of time.
It’s about making better use of the time you already have.
— The Blocq Team