Teaching High School Offensive Linemen (7 pages, PDF)

Offensive linemen are usually the least-coached players on a high school roster, and they are the ones who decide whether the run game has a hole and whether the quarterback stays upright. This digitised Gridiron Strategies Special Coaching Report by John Shea, defensive coordinator at Cambridge Rindge & Latin High School, lays out the run-blocking and pass-blocking teaching progressions he uses to train linemen at the high school level — 17 drills in the order they should be taught, plus the fundamentals to key on at each step. The central idea running through it is to "teach the skill backward": start from the finished position and work back to the stance, so young linemen never develop the hitches in technique that come from drilling a skill they are not yet ready to perform whole. It is a 7-page article-format report with a searchable text layer, not a playbook and not a video.

What's inside

• Section 1: Run Blocking — broken into Progression 1 (Stance And Start) and Progression 2 (Contact And Follow-Through), with the reasoning for teaching the power position and the finish before the full block.
• The stance, point by point — a seven-instruction checklist from feet shoulder-width and a 90-degree knee bend through to bridging on the fingertips of the down hand, plus the case for resting the off hand on the calf rather than the knee (the off shoulder rides high when it sits on the knee, and the down shoulder always comes up, never the up shoulder down), 60 percent of weight on the feet and even toes because every block in the system starts with a lateral step.
• A four-step start — the mental weight shift to the off foot, curling the toes of that foot, channelling energy out toward the target instead of pushing back into the ground, and stepping so the nose finishes at the target with a wide base. Includes how a consistent snap count (roughly 80 percent of snaps on "one") lets linemen time the ball, and why you still have to vary it.
• Eight run-blocking drills in teaching order — Power-Position, Power-And-Foot Fire, Power-And-Walk, Knee-Walk, Power-And-Drive, Knee-Walk-To-Punch, Knee-Walk-To-Drive and Stance-To-Drive, each with its command sequence, the coaching points to look for, and the blocking-board set-up with rotation from blocker to defender.
• What to keep drilling in-season — the Knee Walk, Knee-Walk-To-Drive and Power-And-Drive are run all season, usually twice a week, and the report says which one opens the individual period. It also flags the drill to stop using once the learning period is over, because it builds hitches.
• Section 2: Pass Blocking — an eleven-point set-up-position checklist (inside foot forward, front knee to 90 degrees, back nearly perpendicular, hands at chest height ready to strike, eyes on the defender's inside number) and the three-step order of teaching: set-up, movement drills, then stance-and-set-up drills by the reverse-chain method.
• Footwork for the three things a rusher can do — the Kick-Slide for the outside move, the Pound-And-Drag for the inside move, and the strike for a straight charge, then the Footwork Drill that chains kick-slides and pound-drags through cones A to E (used one to two times a week in season).
• Four defender alignments, four techniques — head-up/inside, outside shade, outside rusher and wide rusher, including the common error of taking a pound step against an outside shade and opening a soft shoulder, the drop-slide for a rusher too wide to kick-slide, and how the quarterback's launch point decides which technique the tackle should use.
• Striking — coaching points for striking out and up to lift weight off the defender's cleats, plus the Strike-Timing Drill and the Footwork-Strike Drill, which the report prefers to the mirror drill because it matches live action.
• Eleven numbered diagrams covering the drill set-up, Knee Walk, both parts of Stance-To-Drive, Kick-Slide, Pound-And-Drag, the Footwork Drill cone layout and each of the four stance-and-set-up alignments.
• Why slow-to-fast works — the motor-learning argument that the relative timing of a skill is permanent while its absolute speed is plastic, which is the report's answer to "never practice a skill at less than game speed."

Who it is for

High school offensive line coaches, and head coaches who have to teach the line themselves. It is aimed squarely at the initial learning period with young or inexperienced linemen — the teaching order, the commands, the coaching points and the in-season maintenance rotation are all spelled out, so an assistant can run the progression without having invented it. The techniques are tied to a system whose blocks all start with a lateral step, and the report is explicit that you should adapt the stance if your schemes differ rather than copy another program's. The author also recommends passing these progressions to your local youth and feeder program coaches, since they will have your players for years before you do and bad habits are hard to break.