platoon football at the h.s. level

Coach,
This was the first season that we went to a pretty straight forward platoon system. We had a good deal of success overall and felt that we were by far a better second half team then everyone we played. We had three players who started on both sides of the ball and had two other players who saw action as starters on one side and played a good deal on the other side of the ball throughout the season. All sophs. were two way players unless they were a starter. As for our practices, we would view Tues. as an offensive day, meaning any two way player + sophs would go through ind./group/inside run/skelly/team as an offensive player only and Weds. would be our defensive day. This also meant that during film session after practice, those two-way players would go to their ind. film session of that day. Each day we would start our practices out with 1s vs 1s for 15 mins after stretch and agilities. "O" would run our offense against our #1 defense. It was our "challenge" period and the kids really looked forward to it on Tues. and Weds. We did have some injury issues from this session, but overall we felt it was worth the trouble. After "challenge" we would break up into pos. areas for everyone for 10/15 mins and then move to group. After this we would split into inside run on one field and skellyon the other field. #1 DBs would start against #1 skilled players in skelly, after a while the DBs would get the #2/#3 in to play. All def would follow the script and run our opponents secondary and blitz packages. never live on a rec. Inside run would put #2 O-Line and #2 skilled players against #1 def line/backers. #1 O-Line would do footwork drills lead by our center (senior captain). After 15 mins we would switch skilled people and #1 O-Line and #1 skilled would go against #2/#3 def. #2/#3 skilled players would go against #1 DBs to start and we would rotate some remaining secondary people in. Wed would be almost the same schedule but with the focus on 'D". We would finish up our practices by giving the off side of the ball 20 minutes of team time and then work on special forces for that day.
I hope this gives you some insight to what we did. By the way we had approximately 60 players this year to start and finished up with 52 by season's end. By the end of the season we had 5 soph starters going one way that we believed would have never played that much varsity if they had not had a chance to work in the system this seasonand get that additional position area work everyday.
We picked off/def players to go one way after our second scrimmage. As OC I had the last pick after a good deal of our athletes went to the defensive side of the ball with the exception of our QB who was set aside as an Off player from the start of last year. Throughout camp almost everyone else was a two way player within reason. We did a mock breakdown after Spring Ball and used that breakdown as a model until after that second scrimmage. We did end up moving three players to the other side over the course of the season.
if you have any questions feel free to email me at mab4124@ptdprolog.net
Mike Boyer