Best Drills For Recievers

Nothing beats going out every day and throwing the ball around. We encourage the skill position players to go to the park and play pickup, backyard games. At least they will be out working, sweating, thinking and playing with the football, and hopefully throwing it and catching it. (We do fear them turning to tackle games which inevitably leads to someone with a broken collarbone, but we stress this as well.)

However, there are other drills. One is to improve hand eye coordinator. Find a brick wall with all the grooves and inlets and such you can find, and stand a foot or two away. Toss a golf ball against it, and the golf-ball will bounce off in a basically random direction. Catch the ball with one hand and immediately toss it back, and it becomes an often quite challenging ordeal of hand-eye coordination and catching the little ball.

Also, I think if you can maybe encourage them to play catch with a larger football, say real NFL or at least college size fully inflated, catching the smaller high school ball becomes much easier.

Other than that we don't do that much else. I've seen a lot of fancy contraptions but I've never been so convinced they work. We spend a good amount of time early in the year spent on learning all the proper ways to catch and try to continue to emphasize these throughout the year, and we do work on it quite a bit in practice from early on and not. I think it is important if you teach the fundamentals of catching in simple terms and work on it constantly, then in the offseason when they go to catch the ball they will be more likely to follow good form and not simply build bad habits.

Hope that helps.

get receiver reaction balls. you can catch 100 passes in 15 min. they are a poly ball attached to a elastic cord. the player throws the ball and it snaps back at them. you can put them in the weight room and kids can get a ton of catches. I also believe in sending one home in the summer time for kids to catch passes.

the thing with receivers is you have to coach both the feet and the hands. cone drills are the best at teaching sharp breaks and a player to lower his center of gravity.

a school I formally coached for had the receivers use plastic balls attached to fences via a bungee cord...the receivers were at that fence before, during and after practice every day... they got massive amounts of catches every day because they could throw it and catch it themselves...