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Steps in the loop
Scott Leech Training · Field Manual
Gym Fast Is Not Game Fast
We spend so much time in the offseason about getting faster, getting faster, getting faster, but then too often we have these kids that you put them on the field and they still just don't play at speed and you wonder like, "Hey man, this kid's got a great fly 10 time. Why is he not getting better?" Leech · Scores and Stops, Offensive Skill Development
The 90-Second Teaching
Football is not choreographed. If a kid knows where his foot lands before the whistle blows, that is not agility. That is a dance routine. Change of direction is a path you already know. Agility is a path you have to read first. Every drill in this system is built to make him read.
Creating and closing space is the whole game boiled down. On offense, can you get open. Can you make the defender miss, get the separation, buy the yard. On defense it is the opposite. Can you close the gap and still be in a position to finish when you get there. If you do not close space correctly, you never make the play in the first place.
The spine of all of it is the OODA loop. Observe, orient, decide, act. The drill is not the point. The drill is the constraint that forces the loop to run under load. Speed up the loop and a kid who was a step late becomes a kid who is a step early. That is the difference between a good fly 10 and a good football player.
Sec. 1 · The Wedge
In 2018 I was at Merrimack College. I still have the tape of our offseason training. We worked hard. Nobody was loafing. But when I go back and watch it now, almost none of it looks like football.
This is a sample of our offseason training back in 2018 when I worked at Merrimack College and you know I go back and I cringe at these videos. It was great training, don't get me wrong. We got after it hard, but you can see all of our drills here. And the only one that I'm really proud of in terms of a create and close space drill is the one where the guy goes left or right right here depending on the bag. One drill out of an entire off season mimics a game-like environment. That's not good enough. It's just not good enough. Leech · Scores and Stops, Intro
Here is the trade nobody talks about. Getting a kid stronger is solved. Getting a kid faster is solved. Every program in America has a plan for both. Almost nobody has a plan for teaching that kid to use it against a live human being who is trying to stop him. So you build a 4.4 guy who runs like he is in sand the second somebody stands in front of him. Track speed is linear and predictable. Football speed is creating and closing space.
I will take the team that has done a ton of these drills, that has been in these situations over and over and over and over. I'll take that team any day because I know how to get them stronger. I know how to get them faster. I know how to get them more explosive. Can I do all of those things and then put them in these situations? That's going to be a dangerous team. Leech · Scores and Stops, Intro
There is a safety argument too, and it is the one that gets the least airtime. A kid who has practiced creating and closing space arrives in better positions. Better positions mean fewer bad collisions. Teaching this in the offseason makes you a safer football team in November.
Sec. 2 · The Architecture
The OODA loop is a military term. It came out of fighter pilot work: the pilot who completes more loops faster wins the fight, even in the worse airplane. Football is the same problem with grass instead of sky. An agility ladder trains Act. It trains nothing else. The kid already knows the pattern. Nobody is making him observe, nobody is making him orient, nobody is making him decide. That is why ladder work never shows up on Saturday.
The loop gets taught twice in this system. Same four steps, completely different content, because creating space and closing space are opposite jobs.
Offense · Scores
The four offensive skills
As an offensive player, you're for the most part in control of the situation because you know your next move. They don't know your next move. Get them to overcommit. Get them to make a decision before you've made a decision so that you can make a different decision and get past them. Leech
Defense · Stops
The four defensive skills
Mastering and understanding your leverage allows you to limit the offensive players options and funnel them into less advantageous situations. More often than not, we want to leverage the football back inside. Why? because we have more help coming from inside out. Leech
Notice what reliability buys a kid. When you can repeatedly show that you will not overrun a play, that you will not overcommit, that you will keep your shoulder square, you get on the field. Coaches play the reliable guy. That is a recruiting pitch you can make to your own backups in February.
Sec. 3 · Drill Design
People think I am out here playing games and grabbing things out of a hat. There is more to it than that. There is a logical approach, and when you follow the progression it makes your players better. Five things are under your control. Change one and you have a different drill with a different purpose.
| Variable | What you change | What it does to the loop |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Size of the space | Width and depth. A 5x5 box, a 10x10 box, a 20x20 box. Same eight yard start, very different drill. | Tight limits how many moves he can make and keeps speed down. It is defense favored on purpose. Open it up and you get stops, starts, cutbacks, and a lot more running volume. |
| 2. Starting position | Static, on the move, or jet motion with both players already rolling. | Static is the beginner rung: first step quickness, easy read for the defender. Jet motion forces the loop to run at full speed before the drill even starts. |
| 3. Obstacles | Trash cans, barrels, hoops, and other bodies dropped into the middle. | Loads Orient hard. A barrel is a screen, a lineman downfield, a receiver and a DB locked in a block. Now he has to go over it or under it. Hoops force a curved run, because not everything in football is a straight line. |
| 4. Objective | Score left or right. Then: who is even getting the ball. Then: read your blockers with a sideline and a hash as your boundaries. | Loads Decide. Add one more question and the loop gets longer before it can close. |
| 5. Number of players | 1v1, then 2v1, 1v2, 2v2, 3v3, with a role for every body. | Roles are what separate a drill from recess. Am I the ball carrier, am I the blocker, are we vicing this thing together. Give three defenders a point each for a tag and one guy making the play is no longer good enough. |
When you have multiple players out there and they understand the role that they're being involved in, am I the offensive ball carrier? Am I the offensive blocker? How are we working together as help defenders? When you get all those things going, it takes it from games and turns them into drills. And we're trying to work on drills here. Leech · Scores and Stops, Variables in Drill Design
Sec. 4 · Build One
Set the five variables. It names the phase, finds the drill in the library that matches, tells you what part of the loop you just loaded, and flags the mix when it does not hold up.
Create and Close Space
Nothing is saved. Nothing leaves this device.
1. Size of the space · width and depth
2. Starting position
3. Obstacles
4. Objective
5. Number of players · and their roles
Static Face Guard Two-Way Go
Loop load
A reading of your five variables, not a measurement. Obstacles and bodies load Observe and Orient. The objective loads Decide. Space and the start load Act.
The full video library is 24 named drills across the three phases, each one demonstrated on film with URI players, plus the nine week progressions for skill guys and for bigs. This page teaches you the system. The course hands you the reps.
Sec. 5 · The Progression
Phase one can be your offseason or your summer. Whatever window you have, the first two to three weeks look the same: small spaces, simple decisions, mostly 1v1. We are not trying to overwhelm anybody. Give a kid too many options and the loop takes too long. Give him two and he has to decide and act right now.
| Phase | Space | Start | Obstacles | Objective | Bodies |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 · Weeks 1-3 Build the foundation |
Small. Close quarters, few moves available. | Static. First step quickness. | Almost none. | Score left or score right. | Mostly 1v1. |
| 2 · Weeks 3-5 Open it up |
Bigger, wider or longer. Running volume climbs. | Around a cone, off a curve, one man moving. | Cones and barrels in the middle. | Multiple goals to defend. | 2v1, 1v2, 2v2, sometimes 2v3. |
| 3 · Weeks 6-9 Make it football |
Biggest distances and largest spaces. | Jet motion. Everybody moving before the whistle. | Anything is on the table. | Read blockers, use the sideline, score. | All variations open, up to 3v3. |
You start out with generic drills. Then it starts feeling a lot more like football. Bigger spaces, more reactive, more open. As camp gets closer, the drills go from general to specific on purpose. And bad reps are teaching moments. Too much dancing in a two-way go and he gets tagged. Overrun a cutback drill and you give up an easy score. Show the kids the bad rep. That is half the coaching.
Sec. 6 · The Pushback
Every coach hits the same three walls. Here are the answers, the same ones I give inside the course.
Yes you can. We had a day last summer where we knew one coach was out. It was just the two of us. I ran two stations. The other coach ran two stations. We flipped groups, then flipped back.
The kids got through four stations worth of drills with two coaches on the field, and we used six different drills to do it because bigs and skill players got their own menu. That is the whole trick. You are not adding staff. You are stacking rotations.
The organizing rule is the rule of three. Split the team into thirds. One group is on the lasers, one group is doing ankle work and wall drive to stay loose, one group is doing create and close space work. Better spacing, more reps, and you can individualize by group.
I get that one a lot. Here is the answer: the five variables. Space, starting position, obstacles, objective, number of players. Every drill gets picked because of what those five settings ask of the athlete, and they get progressed in a specific order across nine weeks. That is not a hat full of ideas. That is a plan.
The tell is roles. When kids know whether they are the ball carrier, the blocker, or the help defender, it stops being a game and becomes a drill. If your kids do not know their role, you earned that criticism.
I can promise you that the drills that I do in the summer show up on Saturdays. Leech
We have the film to prove it. A game-winning touchdown with under 30 seconds left, and the cut that won it is the same 1v1 in-the-box rep we took all summer. He had taken so many reps at it that he knew he could make that man miss.
You are not adding a period. You are changing what is already in one. We do not run gassers, striders, or 300 yard shuttles. Our conditioning is contact prep, competition, and creating and closing space. The three Cs of conditioning.
Match the drill to the day you already have:
| The day | What goes in it | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Max velocity day | Face guard work. Walk ball, static start, two-way go, four-way go. | Keeps them loose and busy while a third of the team waits on the lasers. Does not fatigue them for flying tens. |
| Conditioning day | Seven to ten minutes on the clock, as many 10 yard box two-way goes as you can get. | This is the conditioning. Find the kid hiding at the back of the line and put him up front. |
| Change of direction day | Skip pull drag for the bigs, back-to-back sideline 1v1 for the skill guys. | Pick a drill where the winning strategy is being good at changing direction. It pairs with the decel and lateral work you already program. |
And if that still feels like too much, it is as easy as picking one and saying, all right, we are just going to start with this.
Sec. 7 · The Proof
Unprompted, in their own words, on the Gridiron Warrior Podcast.
"I really, the kids really liked the scores and stops, like the, the agility competition stuff. Like when we first started doing it, I explained, you know, you get more from this than you do from a 5 10, 5, whatever. The enjoyment factor, like the, the energy factor of those drills compared to. Go touch this cone. Go touch this cone. Go touch this cone back. I think it's undeniable. You know, if you just are observing what movement concepts you're seeing, it's directly transferrable to the field."
Mike Serricchio
Gridiron Warrior Podcast
"We have dabbled in open-ended agility, which is not changing direction. Agility. You have to react to a component. What if he expanded his peripheral vision? And then he had these agility things. The OODA loop. And that was huge, man. That changed our summer. Really the last two summers, the addition of contact prep and then open-ended agility scores and stops."
James Burk
Gridiron Warrior Podcast, Episode 2
"Yeah. Oh, oh yeah. Absolutely. And it's because it's different than just angle tackle, which we've typically done. And it adds a different element to it. And you know, that's stuff we started doing in the gym. Early, early on, not just when we were out there in pads."
Chris Murdock
On using practice terminology in the weight room
"As long as you're doing that and you're checking the box, we've really gone back and, as long as we've got our yardage and we got our scores and stops type stuff, and we've got our contact prep and we've got our competitions, we're filling our yardage there, we may only need to go and backfill with some tempo runs here."
George Adams
On the weekly yardage math
Field Manual · Straight Answers
Reactive agility is change of direction plus a decision. A 5-10-5 is a pre-planned path the athlete already knows before the whistle. Reactive agility makes him read something live and then move. Football is reactive, so the drill has to be reactive.
Track speed is linear and predictable. Football speed is creating and closing space. A kid with a great fly-10 who has never practiced reading leverage, manipulating a defender, or varying his speed has raw horsepower and nowhere to put it. Gym fast is not game fast.
Observe, orient, decide, act. A military decision cycle from John Boyd. On offense it is read the defenders, orient to your blockers and the sideline, decide the move, act, then start a new loop the second the trail defender shows. On defense it is the same four steps aimed at leverage and the angle. Agility ladders only train Act. Reactive drills train the whole loop. The full teaching →
Five variables control every drill: the size of the space in width and depth, the starting position, the obstacles, the objective, and the number of players and their roles. Change one variable and you change the drill. That is what turns a game into a drill. Build one in the designer →
Yes. Run two stations each and flip. Two coaches, four stations worth of drills, six different drills across the session because bigs and skill players get their own menu. Staff size is not the reason it is not in your program. The staffing map →
Yes. There is a clear winner and a clear loser in every rep, so kids compete instead of surviving a gasser. Coaches who swap conditioning for competitive space drills report better attendance at summer workouts. If you cannot get kids to show up in June, this is the cheapest fix on the board.
Reference
Where This Comes From
Everything on this page is Scott's own teaching
Built for coaches. Not medical advice. The drill designer runs entirely in your browser and stores nothing.
The Course
Scores and Stops is the full system. 24 named drills on film with URI players, the three phase progression, nine week sample plans for skill guys and for bigs, and the application section that fits all of it into the schedule you already run. Youth to college. Works with the players you have.
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