High school coaches adjust to two-a-days changes

As a player at Jacksboro High School in the 1970s, Aledo head coach Steve Wood can distinctly remember going through two-a-days in the weeks leading up to the team’s season opener. In Wood’s recollection, the twice-daily practices were hot, hellish and heavy on conditioning. Water breaks came few and far between; instead, the Buchanan coaches would give their players thumb-sized salt tablets. Now, though, the days of coaches doling out salt tablets in lieu of water breaks are over. And for Wood’s Aledo team, so too are two-a-day practices. The Bearcats did away with them entirely in 2012 when the UIL passed laws that banned two-a-days during the first four days of practice, prohibited them from being held on consecutive days, and increased the minimum amount of time between workouts to two hours. Instead of holding two practices per day, Aledo now simply holds one extended practice that, per UIL rules, can’t last longer than three hours. Woods said that while going away from two-a-days might have had a small effect on his players’ conditioning level, the difference has been negligible. “You’re only going to get so much out of the body for so long. It’s a long season. The whole key is being at your best at the end of the season to me. I think sometimes we overrate the amount of time you practice equates to wins theory.” Wood’s Aledo program, which won the Class 5A Division I state championship last season, is not alone in doing away with two-a-days all together either. Some, such as Arlington Martin and annual powerhouse Trinity, went away from holding them even before the UIL’s restrictive laws came into effec “We’ve always had the attitude that if you’ve got a five gallon bucket of enthusiasm, that bucket needs to last the whole season,” said Trinity head coach Chris Jensen, who started out there as an assistant in 2000. “Don’t dump it all out on the first week of practice, or for the first game or whatever. So we’ve kind of as coaches taken the approach of don’t overdo it.” That formula has apparently been successful for Jensen and the Trojans, who have relied on a ground-and-pound approach en route to three state championships in that time. “There’s that old school mindset, if you’re not working all day every day, practicing, you’re not trying to win,” Jensen said. “That’s not the case. That hasn’t been our mindset since we’ve been here.” Another reason some schools have gone away from the old-school, two-a-day tactics may have to do with the work players are putting in before mandatory practices even begin. Arlington Martin is one of many high school programs that hold voluntary workouts throughout the summertime, where players are allowed to receive instruction from coaches as long as it pertains to strength or conditioning and not football. Warriors head coach Bob Wager said that in his nine-plus years with the program, participation has been great. As a result, so has his players’ conditioning level when they step onto the field for day No. 1 of practice. “I think old the adage of ‘let’s use two-a-days to get our football team in shape is gone,” Wager said. “If you don’t come to camp in shape, you can’t even run an effective practice. I think what used to be used as a conditioning period and a period of time in which you got your football team ready to go is really more focused on the installation and the fundamentals.” Arlington Martin’s 2015 campaign, like Trinity and Aledo’s, officially kicks off Aug. 10 with the first official day of practice. During the weeks leading up to each team’s season opener, don’t expect to see two-a-days — or salt tablets — make a return.