Getting in and out of your cuts as quick as possible is one of the most important athletic attributes that a player can have in football. While top end speed is obviously a huge advantage when players have a chance to use it, (i.e.: kickoffs, deep passes, etc.), there are quite a few more situations in a football game where a player will run 3-5 yards, plant, and change direction. It doesn’t matter if you want to focus on defensive line drills or focus on quarterback drills, they’ll all benefit.
That’s why I like to put my players through a variety of agility drills, not only to help improve their ability to get in and out of those cuts, but so that I can time them, and quickly make a legitimate assessment of which players on my team are the most agile.
Shuttle Drill
This is a very popular drill, in fact, it’s one of the drills that NFL evaluators use at the
draft combine to assess agility.
Setup 3 cones, one on each hash mark, and one right in the center of the field. You can run it one of two ways, either have the player start at the middle cone, sprint to one cone and touch it with their hand, run across to the cone on the far side, back to the middle again, and then straight out, anywhere from 5-10 yards straight out.
The other option is to have the players run in from 5-10 yards out to the middle cone, and then complete the back and forth shuttle from there.
Star Drill
Here we’ll set up four cones, in a star pattern. One on each hash mark, and then one in the center of the field, five yards south and five yards north.
The player will start at one end of the star, sprint to the right side, touch that cone, sprint to the left side, touch that cone, straight forward to the cone at the end, and then right back through the middle to where they begun.
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