Team Conditioning Drills for Lacrosse

with Corinne Desrosiers,
Florida Tech Head Women's Coach;
2016 Sunshine State Conference Coach of the Year;
former Merrimack College Head Women's Coach;
2008 WomensLacrosse.com Division II National Coach of the Year

As a coach, you need well-conditioned players. Assessing the fitness of your athletes as they return to your program after the off-season is an important component in determining the conditioning needs for your preseason and season.

In this video, Corinne Desrosiers outlines her conditioning plan for the season. She starts with a grading system that allows each player to improve for the benefit of the team. Coach Desrosiers outlines conditioning drills both with and without sticks. With a detailed walk-through of each drill on the white board, followed by her team executing the drills on the field, you will be able to enhance your team's fitness and conditioning starting day one of your preseason.

A Grading System for Conditioning

Desrosiers starts by explain a grading system for both individuals and the team as a whole, and how she uses it to determine the fitness of her athletes as they return from the off-season. Learn how she determines the metric for the individual athlete and how this ties to the team metric, and ultimately helps determine the conditioning plan for her season. Each player will be challenged to improve their times or reps for the benefit of the whole team. The philosophy is that each player is more apt to improve to benefit the team instead of self.

Conditioning Runs

With her series of intense conditioning runs, Desrosiers provides you with numerous options to vary the conditioning aspect of your program. You'll learn how these runs relate to the game and have more benefit than conditioning.

In her Spider and the Fly run, you'll see how players push themselves to win a foot race, which supports the concept of quick transitions down the field, recovery, and fast breaks. See how the competitive nature of this drill pushes Desrosiers' team to run the drill hard!

Coach Desrosiers gives these drills a competitive edge by putting players in groups according to their sprinting ability. This gives players an incentive to move up in a group or, negatively, move down if they are not performing on that day. This makes players more accountable regarding their performance during conditioning practice.

In-season, you may wish to taper back on the straight conditioning drills. Desrosiers takes you through three drills you can use in any practice that work on both conditioning and important offensive, defensive, and transitional play concepts.

The number of conditioning drills presented by Coach Desrosiers in this video, both standalone and within practice drills, are a valuable addition to any program. You will get a strategy to grade your team to boost their physical fitness!

75 minutes. 2018.