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When I think about team strategy, and how it should shape practices, a clip that frequently comes to mind is Molly Goodwin and Christine Dunlap's commentary on Above and Beyond 2, from 2000.

Their team, Lady Godiva, had won four of the previous five club national titles, and was going to win the next two. This was a team loaded with multi-year veterans, with relatively low player turnover. Surely, if any team in the division had reached a point where they could move beyond basic fundamentals, it was this team. Yet despite this, they probably spent as much or more time focusing on a few fundamental aspects of play as any team.

There are a couple lessons we can draw from this. First, almost every player has some technical flaws in the way they play the game, and by focusing as a team on basic fundamentals, you can reduce turnovers or defensive lapses. This is true to a far greater degree than most players or teams admit. The more successful teams, at least on the college level, spend a greater portion of their time focusing on simple fundamentals like completing dumps or downfield defensive positioning, as oppose to simply scrimmaging.

It requires discipline to hammer the same fundamental skills home practice after practice, but it is this focus on raising the skill levels of your team on a broad level that can give a team the depth it needs to compete with the top college programs. Scrimmaging alone will tend to reinforce the established skills of a few players, in stead of building up the players on the end of the bench who may only see a handful of touches. A good practice has varied drills and mixes conditioning with short scrimmages or other "live disc" activities, with the goal of emphasizing the recently drilled skills in a game situation.

Another point that the Goodwin/Dunlap commentary reflects is that you should practice the way you want your team to play. This may sound absurdly obvious, but many teams seem to ignore this. If your team runs a flat stack, for instance, then you shouldn't be spending your time running sequence drills out of a straight stack. If your endzone offense isn't based on cuts from the back to the front corner, then don't spend time running the drill with cuts from the back to the front corner.

Everything you do at practice is an opportunity to get your team on the same page, and to further hammer home the patterns of your team's offensive and defensive systems. Don't feel constrained by the drills you've seen used time and time again. Design a practice that gets your team playing the way you want them to play, using the patterns and the fundamental skills that you want to see on the field. Not every team should try to play the way those Godiva teams played, but every team should think critically about how well their practices fit their playing style.

Adam Tarr has been a longtime contributor to the UPA formats manual and knows his way around objective data. He now lives in Colorado.