How to Coach Kickoff Return Schemes

In this episode of The Football Coaching Podcast, we’re going to break down your Kickoff Return schemes.

Special Teams are one-third of the game. Every coach says it. Most of us don’t actually spend that much time on it, though.

In fact, a big part of special teams comes down to execution. Limiting mistakes. If you can do that, you can make big things happen.

I posted 4 Special Teams units on our Twitter Poll @footballinfo. The winner by a big margin was the Kickoff Return schemes.

And why not? Kickoff Return is a huge key to scoring for your football team. It’s probably the single special teams unit where you have the highest probability of scoring (PAT/FG not included).

Plus this is what’s going to set up your field position on the next drive, or even the opening drive!

In this episode we’ll break down kick return schemes for handling deep kicks, sky kicks, squib kicks and onside kicks. Your schemes don’t need to be complex, but each player on your Kickoff Return Team needs to be ready for any of these kickoffs.

You’ll also learn how to use the right personnel on your Kickoff Return unit. If you’re just putting five back-up Offensive Linemen on the front line, you could be making a huge mistake that could cost you a win.

And last but not least, we’ll talk about practicing your Kick Return team. How can you get the most from these guys in the necessarily short amount of time that you have?

Links for Kickoff Return Schemes

In this episode, I mentioned Coach Lew Johnston’s Put the “Special” in Special Teams by Being Unconventional video. Coach Johnston has been a huge help to me this year, so… buy his video!

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