My continued dislike of the endzone drill and box drill

I'm coming back to this topic (see Seattle on trial) after letting it slide for a while (mainly because there are too many teams running the endzone drill at the Open Tour), but I want to reemphasize how both the endzone drill (or Seattle as we call it in Toronto) and the box drill should not be your goto warm up drills before a game or a tournament. They're not bad drills for beginners at practices, but they're not great warmup drills.

Pictured Above: Torontula at 2006 Easterns warms up with a huck drill with a soft mark. Tolya watches his throw.

My reasons:

• Too little touches including throws and catches. Approximately 30 seconds between throws on a team of 14
  
• Artificial cuts with no pressure
• No marking during throws
• Even the best end zone plays don't work that way as much as we all wished it would
  
• Too much standing around

What do you do instead? I'm not sure since each team is different, but stop doing the box and the endzone drill. Look at some leading teams and take note of their warmups.

For example this is a few drills that some of the Open teams do:

• Clapham's pair throwing with challenging throws including airballs and fastballs
• Johny Bravo's mini scrimmages
• Michigan's mark, cut, and throw drills
  
• EMO's dump and huck drill
• UBC's breakforce 45 drill

There's lots of other options out there. Think about what your team does on the field and warmup that way. If you're offense relies on breaks or opponents break you then practice breaks and marking them. If you have lots of huckers, then practice hucking. If you play a handler centric small game offense then play some small field mini-games.

Innovate...pass it on

PJ