Creating a Water Polo Practice Plan, Part 1

A strategic water polo practice plan usually takes coaches years of experience to formulate, test, and perfect. Even with experience, sometimes it is hard to create a concise plan that uses building blocks to execute a final routine. For all coaches time is also a limiting factor in practice design and the efficient use of your practice time is critical to overall success.

Let's use a centuries-old method to develop a plan based on military operational planning. Military operations involve mission planning at three levels: strategic, operational, and tactical. Small-unit training and operations involve developing skills in individual tasks, collective tasks, and squad-based tasks. I'll use the unit training methods to develop a practice plan in part 1. Here are some overall guidelines for each planning tier:

Individual tasks: Eggbeater, head-up swimming, ball-handling, shooting, passing, one-on-one drills

Collective tasks: group passing (3+ players), multi-pass shooting drills, 3/4 man counter attack, drills involving both perimeter and center players. 

Squad tasks: half court movement, full counter attack, 6-on-5, 5-on-6,
Tactical planning: defensive systems, offensive systems, substitution scheme, game situations
Operational planning: weekly practice schedule, hell-week(s) schedule, dryland sessions
Strategic planning: season schedule and practice intensity plan

I'll build an example practice based on back-planning from a tactical goal and add small-unit tasks:

(Tactical) Goal for the practice: Press Defense
(Squad) Team drills: press and crash, up in the lanes, counter out of a press
(Collective) Group drills: pressure passing, driving defense with a center pass, smart perimeter fouling
(Individual) Fundamental drills: over-the-hips, zigzag swims, change-of-direction conditioning, center defense, one-on-one drive defense

Instead of planning the conditioning and passing/shooting drills first, I have assigned an objective for the mission (sorry, goal for the practice) and planned drills leading back to that goal.

This is a powerful player development method because you can always refer to a drill that was just accomplished. This can help a coach from saying, "remember that drill from last week" and instead say, "we just did that drill 10 minutes ago". And this will be accomplish by design and not by happenstance. 

Try this a few times and you will quickly feel comfortable with the method. This can also force a coach to develop new and different drills to accomplish a goal. A gap between an individual task and a team task may necessitate creating a new group drill or a variation of a drill that you have already used.