BLACK: Agility

Feet Redux

Posted by: ytttr Posted date: 1:50 PM / comment : 0 Agility, Offensive Line, Season, TFS

With Fall camp starting in 8 days, I had to head to Lowes again to build another (bigger, longer, badassier) OLine agility ladder.

(see earlier entry http://brophyfootball.blogspot.com/2009/05/feet-for-10.html )

After the 3rd week of Spring ball, either the grounds keepers just threw it out, or Harry Pfarrer stole it for parts to his latest construction project...

(frustrated!)

Okay, this time around it was even easier and twice as productive.

With 36" rungs (x 15) , 14" lengths (x 30), and 30 'T' joints, this was completely constructed in 5 minutes.

Shown here compared to the traditional speed ladder, you can clearly see the expanded width required to reinforce a shoulder-width 'football position'.

I highly recommend purchasing some $15 PVC pipe cutters - it makes this a snap!

Feet for $10

Posted by: ytttr Posted date: 5:00 AM / comment : 0 Agility, Football, Offensive Line, Season, TFS

For our Oline, (coordinated) feet are an essential part of what we ask them to do on any given down. To help develop their coordination and spacing, we encorporate speed ladder work in pre-practice. Typical speed ladders don't work because of the narrow rungs typically employed, therefore we have to build our own.

This weekend after spending a frustrating week using the old speed ladder, I constructed this Oline speed ladder out of PVC pipe (because I am not a welder). Everything cost less than $10 to construct and was much easier to build than I expected.

36" wide and 14" deep, affording the lineman ample room to maintain a balanced football stance vertically or horizontally.

My engineering is about as brilliant as Christopher Columbus' cartography, though.....I made it half as long as I thought it would be. The beauty is, we can continue to add more rungs to this piece in the future without any modifications (will need to double the length).