How we built a rugby practice plan template for coaches with day jobs

A rugby practice plan template should do most of your planning before the week starts. Ours does. We’re three coaches with jobs and families, and for most of a season our practice plan got written in the last ten minutes before training, usually by whoever got there first.

What fixed it was splitting practice in two. The parts that never change (warm-up, water, debriefs, the finisher) are locked into a template once. The parts Saturday decides (stations, the forwards and backs split, conditioning) are left as open slots. On the night, planning practice means filling those slots and nothing else. Here’s how we built ours, and how it turned into a five-minute job.

Why practice plans eat your week

Our coaching staff is three people with jobs and families. Most weeks the practice plan gets written in the car park, about ten minutes before the first player turns up. Nobody decided that. Work runs late, a kid needs picking up, Saturday’s match takes the headspace, and the plan is the thing that gives.

The trouble is that a plan written at the last minute is usually last week’s plan with a few names changed. Same warm-up, because nobody had time to think of another. Same finisher. The middle of the session, the part that should be about what went wrong on Saturday, gets whatever drill the coach holding the clipboard remembers first.

What fixed it for us wasn’t finding more time. It was making the plan smaller. Most of a practice doesn’t change week to week, so we stopped rewriting it. We keep a template with those parts locked in and leave the rest open. As the season goes on our drill library grows, and filling the open part of the template has become a five-minute job for whichever coach gets to it first.

The rugby practice plan template: what to lock in

Start with the parts of practice you’d write the same way every week anyway. For us that’s most of the frame:

• Warm-up. Same every week. The squad knows it, so it starts on time even when a coach is still parking.
• Water breaks. Always at the same point in practice. Put them in the template and they stop getting skipped when a drill runs long.
• Debriefs. A short debrief always comes before the drill stations, so everyone knows what the stations are for before they split up.
• Unopposed. The team run-through near the end stays the same shape.
• Team debrief. The finisher. Every practice ends the same way.

None of that needs a decision on a Tuesday night, so it shouldn’t take any of your planning time. Lock it in once and the template carries it every week.

The test for whether something belongs here is simple: if you’d write it identically next week, lock it. If you’d change it depending on how Saturday went, leave it open.

Open slots: what changes week to week

Everything we leave open is decided by Saturday. Three parts of practice stay open in our template:

• Drill stations. Fundamentals, picked from what we saw in the match.
• The unit split. Forwards and backs apart, each working on their own list.
• Conditioning. Same slot every week, different intensity, set by how the squad is recovering.

Here’s a recent week. On Saturday our defensive line speed was slow, we struggled to get double tackles on, and our rucking was strong enough that we wanted to keep it that way. Those three became the stations: line speed, double tackles, rucking. In the split, the forwards went to scrum work. The backs carried on with line speed, plus dominant running and kick defence into counter-attack.

None of those drills were in the plan on Sunday morning. The slots were, along with their minutes and the kind of drill each one needed. That’s what makes the template quick to fill: the open slot already says 20 minutes, contact, high intensity. You’re only choosing the drill, not rebuilding the practice around it.

Station blocks with a slot in them

Our station block is the most open part of the template. It’s built as three stations, 8 minutes a rotation, and all three are open slots. The block itself is fixed: where it sits in practice, how long each rotation runs, how many stations there are. What goes in each station isn’t. Intensity, category, contact: all of that changes week to week with whatever Saturday showed us.

Three stations is the plan, not a promise. If numbers are short, or a drill needs more bodies than three groups can give it, we drop to a two-station rotation. That’s a call we make during the warm-up, once we can see who’s actually turned up, and the stations get adjusted on the spot.

We split players randomly. That keeps an even mix of experience and positions in every group, so a station isn’t five front-rowers and a nervous 15.

The point of leaving the stations open in the template is that the shape is already decided. Filling them is choosing three drills that fit 8 minutes, not designing a rotation from scratch.

Five minutes on the night: fill the slots and go

The last practice I planned in five minutes, I planned on my phone while packing up at work. None of us had got to it during the week. We’d already talked about what we wanted to work on, so the thinking was done; nobody had written it down.

So while I was shifting gears from work to coaching, I opened the template and filled the open slots with drills from our library that hit what we’d discussed. Warm-up, water, debriefs, unopposed and the team debrief were already there. The only decisions left were the ones that mattered that week.

In SetPiece that’s a short trip. Plan the practice from your template and every open slot shows as To fill. Tap one and the drill library opens already filtered to what the slot asks for: the category, intensity, contact and tags you set when you built the template. If nothing matches exactly, the closest drills are listed first, so you’re never staring at an empty list.

By the time I left the office the plan was done, and the other two coaches could see it before we got to the pitch.

If you’d rather have the template do the remembering, start free with SetPiece. Build the template once and fill the slots each week.