How important is traditional conditioning

We do not do any "traditional conditioning" at all during the season. During early season we incorporate a "county fair-type" agility period into our practice. During the season we use pursuit drills and punt/kick-off coverage as our conditioning drills. Offensively we will use "perfect plays" for conditioning. Perfect plays is nothing more than running plays vs air and sprinting 5-10 yds or to the ball.

Gchuck,
Every year we go in to the preseason saying that we don't need a separate conditioning period because were gonna keep the tempo up in everything we do, and every year we seem to drift away from this and get back to a traditional conditioning segment. I think the concept is excellent but I have rarely seen it truly work. Just my opinion. Plus, if they have to run versus the CLOCK they can't dog it and it toughens them up. I like to play mind games on them when they are sprinting- I tell them they are on offense and give them a hard count, they jump they do it again. Tell them they are on defense and snap the football, but give them a count anyway! I always get them at some point.

I think setting a standard and measuring at the very beginning of the season is a GREAT idea. We do this, and we falt out tell them that we'll know what they did w/ their summer on "Judgement Day".

TigerONE,
Have you ever had anyone mention that longer distance running isn't scintifically beneficial to a football player because football is a series of explosions, etc? Well, I have. I understand the science in that statement, but I believe that you gotta be at some kind of general fitness level to be able to run a mile, and to me it is simply a gut-check for our kids, so we do it every monday of the season.
I ABSOLUTELY agree w/ the goal of always improving too. I hate using the word "maintain".

Men, I also coach wrestling and I'll tell you that lack of conditioning makes cowards of anyone!

We open our practice everyday with our conditioning. On Mondays we do a 10 min run the length of the football field. The athletes will run from one goalline to the next. They sprint between the 40's.

Tuesday: 3-4 300 yard runs. All Linemen under 60 sec. is the goal, but we all have the huge kid who cannot run so we may let one kid slide. Small guys: Under 52 sec.

Wednsday: 3-4 40 yard crushers or we do the Big 4. Sprint 40, backpedal 40, Karioka 40, bear crawl 40.

Thursday: 2-4 15 or 20 yard sprints

JD

I played at a small D-III school (Aurora University). We did very little conditioning. Our head coaches' opinion (which I agree with) was that if you didn't show up in shape, your simply weren't going to play. Obviously, it was easy to do that considering that we had 90 guys on the team. If, like me, you coach at a po-dunk school, it is a lot tougher to put the onus on the kids. The kids can count, too, and they know that if there is only 20 kids on the roster, they will probably play, whether they are in shape or not.

Fortunately, our kids are usually in shape because many play three sports and almost all play at least 2.