Early into our full pad, tackling portion of fall camp in Pop Warner I was able to make an extremely simple observation. While it’s very much the case that offensive skill players will tend to bounce everything outside if they can to find space out of a desire to get away from would-be tacklers…they’re largely right to do so.
We were running drills to try and teach block destruction and leverage on the ball from the secondary. So we’d give a quick toss to a player and have them hit the perimeter like you would on a swing screen or quickly bounced run, then we’d have two receivers throwing blocks on the safety and corner.
The goal was to teach the defensive backs how to leverage the ball and fight through blocks to do so. What we quickly found was that anything that got on the perimeter was a nearly certain score or big gain. Some of the plays probably would have been stopped short of the end zone if we’d had the linebackers and D-line on the field, but it still looked pretty rough.
Teaching young kids to tackle each other is probably one of the harder tasks in this venture. It takes time to de-program their natural inclination to not run into contact. Guess which types of players end up in the secondary?
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