Tigers begin new off-season regime

The Texas high school football state championships are underway in Arlington and many teams are watching from home. The teams playing at AT&T Stadium are among the top in the state.
Snyder head football coach Wes Wood has a plan to build one of those teams.
After guiding the Tigers to a 3-7 record and a playoff berth in his first year as a head coach, Wood and his coaching staff entered their first full off-season with the Snyder High School athletes.
Wood said he and his staff got to work designing and putting together the program Snyder athletes were going to go through and came up with a three-phase program focused on creating discipline and camaraderie amongst the athletes. Wood said a key part of the program was going to be building his athletes’ agility.
“One thing that I feel like set us apart and something we can get a competitive edge this offseason in is agility,” he said.
That is evident in the elements of his off-season workouts.
Wood and his coaching staff decided to break up the off-season into three phases: Strength, agility and technique.
In the strength phase, the Tigers will utilize the weight room to build muscle and bulk. Wood has his players lift three to four times a week, including a lightweight lifting circuit every Wednesday designed to build “mental toughness and endurance,” according to Wood.
“Obviously, you have to dedicate to the weight room,” he said. “That is where championships are built. You have to be strong and big in order to push people around and win the trenches.”
Phase two of the Tigers program is the agility phase. Wood and his staff put the athletes through different agility drills all designed to increase the athletes’ coordination. These workouts include a variety of mat drills, sleds, bleachers, jump ropes and more.
All football players will be expected to work out with the track team as if they were a member. Whether they choose to compete on the team is up to them, according to Wood, but he expects his athletes to participate in the track workouts.
“The thing that set us apart and what allowed us to compete at a championship level at Muleshoe (High School) was our agility. We are going to do all sorts of different fast-paced agility drills that put our athletes in awkward positions in order to make them better all-around athletes,” Wood said. “We are going to put our kids in a lot of different situations that make them become more coordinated.”
The third phase focuses on technique. Wood said this will come closer to football season when the players start working on football fundamentals and going over offensive and defensive schemes.
A regular week is broken down like this: On Monday, the Tigers do a lower body lift and then finish with agility drills. Tuesday has an upper body lift with agility drills. Wednesday is circuit day and Thursday is full body lifting with agility drills.
Friday is competition day, Wood said.
On competition day, the athletes are divided into teams that compete in drills for a championship belt and bragging rights. Wood said this helps create the competitive edge he expects of his players.
“Competition day is huge for us because it is going to breed success,” he said. “It really makes your cream of the crop, the kids that refuse to lose, rise to the top. When we get to Friday, they are competing for bragging rights over the rest of the team. Competing brings out the best in everybody.”
Wood and his staff expect that a full-offseason with the players will help lift the Tigers to the next level in 2020.
“It’s going to be really advantageous for us,” Wood said. “To be able to mold these kids into what we see in them and to what our offensive and defensive schemes need. Being able to put them through my offseason, or what is going to become the Tiger program, will really help and hopefully it pays dividends in the future.”