Here at FHC, we have hundreds of athletes and sports fans that follow their favorite Ranger teams season-round to keep up with the action. But behind every sports team, athlete, and coach, the practice planning to get your team to the state championship is rigorous and time-consuming. So what all goes into practice planning for coaches, and how does it vary from sport to sport?

For most coaches at FHC, the new season means a new group of athletes that will need to get into the swing of things before getting down to business, but this isn’t always the case. 

“I have an early season framework that has goals for review and new instruction,” head wrestling coach Brad Anderson says.”I also have standards for all the wrestlers called ‘The Ranger Way’ that we work through as a team. There are very few secrets in wrestling; it’s about learning the fundamentals and lots of practice and conditioning. So much of what I do is tweaked from year to year and designed a group of wrestlers that I will have.” 

Unlike some coaches as stated that ease their teams into the season, groups such as the hockey team have set practices every day of the week that focus on key fundamentals.

“Our practices are pretty structured,” head coach Bill McSween said. “Monday is competition drills all practice, Tuesday is practice to develop players skills, Wednesday we do systems practice, and Thursday the guys do flow drills and system practice.”

Although these practices seem pretty straight forward to most, not every team has a strict schedule it has to follow. Some teams get to be more flexible with how things are based on the opponent coming up. 

“It starts on Sunday when coaches all of the offensive and defensive coaches have a meeting, and we start to talk about what we want to do along with our new goals and plays that we want to use against that week’s opponent,” head freshman and JV football coach Anthony Sultini stated. “After that, we start planning out the sessions or periods of the daily practice plans. Generally for the freshman and JV teams, we plan Monday and Tuesday as our high reps, high intensity days that are based on the specific formations, personnel, and plays that we want to use against the team we face that week and Wednesdays are always our pregame run through practice which is a review of the game plan, scripts, and all of the special teams for Thursday’s game. The post-game practice on Friday incorporates watching the game film from the day before in hopes that we can learn from and get better based on what we view and then we end with our weightlifting for the week.”

No matter which way your team practices, there is no doubt that what you put into the game leading up to it is half of the battle in attaining the win, and after that, it is on the shoulders of the athletes to stay in the game up until the last second. Although many do not have an appreciation for the behind the scenes planning that goes into working things out, here at FHC, we are more than grateful to our coaching staffs for providing us with the practices and opportunities needed to make it all the way.