Free practice plan maker

Why a practice plan needs a clock

Most practice plan templates are a list: warm-up, passing, small-sided games, scrimmage. A list tells you what to do and not when to stop doing it, so the passing drill that is going well runs ten minutes long, the scrimmage the players were promised gets squeezed to five, and the cool-down never happens. The fix is not more discipline. It is a plan with a clock on it.

This plan maker puts a start time beside every block. Choose how long you have, 60 or 90 minutes or whatever the booking says, and the running total sits next to it as you add blocks, so you see "10 min over" while you can still do something about it rather than at the side of the pitch. The printed run sheet keeps the same clock down its left-hand edge, so at 6:32 you can see you are three minutes behind without doing arithmetic while somebody asks where the bibs are.

Build it from drills that work

For soccer and basketball, the drill picker is our practice drill library: the 4v1 rondo, a passing triangle, 1v1 to goal, crossing and finishing, the three-man weave, the Mikan drill, shell defence, closeouts and more. Each one arrives already timed, with its coaching cue written under it, so the run sheet tells you what to say as well as what to set up. Every drill has its own page with the setup, the coaching points and an animated diagram, and the plan links to it.

For rugby, field hockey, netball, baseball and American football there is no drill shelf yet, so the page says so and you build the plan from blocks instead: the one-tap set (team talk, warm-up, conditioning, water break, small-sided games, scrimmage, cool-down) and any line of your own, such as "Lineouts, forwards only" or "Fielding stations". A block is a name, a number of minutes and an optional cue, and it prints the same way a drill does.

Every plan starts from a template rather than a blank page: a team talk, a warm-up, two drills, a water break, a scrimmage and a cool-down. Change the minutes, rename anything, move a block up or down, or remove it. The page keeps your plan in this browser, so a reload does not lose it.

The run sheet

Press Download the run sheet and you get one page with the sport, the planned length, the total and every block in order with its start time, its minutes and its cue, plus a box to tick as you go and ruled space at the foot for notes on how it went. It is free, with a small Playmaker mark at the foot; Pro removes it. It is built to be read at arm's length on a clipboard, so the type is large and there is one block per line. Print it on A4 or US Letter.

Save it and run it every week

A plan you made once is a plan you will want again next Tuesday. Press Save this plan and, after a free sign-up, it is waiting in Sessions as a real practice session. There you can add your own plays beside the drills, set the day and the kick-off time so the sheet prints real clock times, and print it again whenever you need it. Saving a plan does not use up any of a free account's saved plays.

If you also run set pieces from a sheet on match day, the match-day sheet puts them on one page, and the play wristband maker prints plays for a wrist coach.