Ideas for training drills when players outnumber equipment

[jacob]

At leicester uni we've recently acquired an extra load of freshers from our janurary sports fair. This meant that on wednesday we had 25 guys turn up for training, and the club only has 10 helmets/sticks/gloves

A couple of the guys have their own stuff, and we supplemented some drills with women's sticks, but it was still very difficult

What i ended up doing was setting up three stations with different drills and players had to keep swapping equipment and we finished with a 5-a-side tournament

Any ideas on stuff we could do with limited equipment? I don't want people to be put off because trainings are boring

Thanks

[julius125]

When working on defence, you want to encourage players to use their body as well as their sticks... So what you could do is have an attack on D scenario with the defenders not using sticks and only being able to push with their hands together... Just remember that if you are doing a game-like situation to tell the attackmen not to go straight for the shot or leave their stick unprotected, but aim to work on moving around the goal or cutting/driving through the crease, making the space, etc.

It's especially good with freshers who have only just picked up a long stick, as it discourages them from going straight for the check which won't really have much effect on an attackman driving full-paced with their stick protected by their body...

Hope you find this useful...

[ibop]

stubbies can be handy as well, bits of dowel, long enough to get two gloved hands together on them and not much more, great for teaching proper bodying. think we've used tackle bags at one point as well

[Ash]

you can do line drills, and other rotation drills, with passing sticks to the front of the queue. Its not ideal for consistency, but it works well.

Then games with half in with the kit, while the others do fitness, or someone does tactics/rules with them.

[petegriffin]

If your already doing drills on stations it's worth doing some defensive movement drills.

Set up cones along zig zags and run side steps keeping your hands 'up field' and turn at the cones, normally you'd throw out a poke at the cones but with no sticks just get the change of direction nice and quick.

Also, you could run slide drills without sticks. Have one guy running in on offence beating his man up top and have a defenceman slide up to him from the crease and break down, stop the momentum and send him down an alley.

Both of those are pretty excellent D drills.

Also, if you can trust the attack not to shoot its pretty easy to run through your man down/zone defence set up with the attack whizzing it around the outside and the D zoning it up in the middle to get the idea and movement into your mindset.

[jacob]

Thanks for your suggestions, as it turns out today we only had 12 guys turn up! But I'm sure your ideas will come in handy in the future