People remember how something starts and how it ends. Coach the bookends of your practice on purpose.
I picked this idea up from a martial arts instructor who grew his school from twenty-five students to two hundred and fifty. His secret wasn't a better curriculum. It was that he obsessed over two things: what a student experiences in the first part of every session, and how they feel when they walk out. The first ten percent and the last ten percent are what people remember. That's true in a dojo, and it's true at your practice.
Think about how most practices run. We script the meat of it down to the minute, the team periods, the inside run, the individual work. Then we let the start drag and let the end fizzle out with conditioning everybody dreads. We spend all our attention on the middle and leave the two parts people actually remember to chance.
Flip that. Here's how to coach the bookends:
- Open with energy. Start with something fast and competitive that sets the tone. A simple one-on-one period with everybody circled up and fired up tells your team what the standard is for the whole practice. The first ten percent sets the temperature.
- End on something they'll talk about. Close with something competitive, fun, or built around the team pulling together, so kids leave feeling like they accomplished something. The last ten percent is what they carry home.
Here's the test I'd use. When a kid gets in the car and a parent asks, "How was practice?", you want him grinning. If your practices are boring to start and leave no sense of accomplishment at the end, that's exactly where your attendance and your energy go to die, especially in the offseason when nobody has to be there.
You don't have to overhaul your practice plan to do this. You just have to stop treating the first and last ten minutes like throwaway time. Coach them as hard as you coach your inside run, and you'll feel the difference in how your kids show up.
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