While you don’t want to rely on your receivers being able to pull off the spectacular catch, it can be a huge momentum swing when
somehow a receiver snags a ball they had no business getting their hands on. And while we don’t make it a huge focus in practice, we don’t spend sometime every day working on making those extremely difficult catches.
One Hand Warm Up
I like to do this as our first drill for receivers when we start out. It’s a great warm up drill, and its alot of fun for the kids. The premise is simple – have the receiver line up at the line of scrimmage, drop back, and put a bit of air underneath the ball, allowing the receiver to chase it down.
Now here’s where it gets tricky. Instead of reeling the ball in with two hands, as we want our receivers to do whenever they have the chance, we want to simulate a situation where their other hand might be tangled up in the defender or otherwise unavailable. So the goal here is to extend one hand and pull ball in tight into the armpit, making the one hand catch.
Sideline Catch
One of the most difficult catches to make because of the incredible physical coordination it requires, here we’ll practice making the catch by the sideline and stamping our feet down inbounds. While most levels only require you to bring one foot down, here we will do our best to get two, just widen the referees margin for error.
Setup two garbage cans a couple of yards away from the sideline, and have your receivers line up infield. On your command they’ll begin to sprint over to the sideline, and leap over the garbage cans. As they jump, you’ll throw them a pass right at the sideline, with the idea being they will make the catch and get both of their feet down in bounds.
This can be a very unnatural feeling – we naturally want to put our feet out in front of ourselves to either stop or continue our momentum. But here you’ll want to tell your players to let their legs go limp, and allow their feet to drag on the ground, trailing behind them as they fall out of bounds.
And if you’re more concerned with stopping the big play on defense than creating it on offense, make sure to check out this pro recommended defensive back drills!
