Home / Featured / Interviews-Drills / Podcast: Coach Cannella, U Mass, The Swarm Lacrosse Drill
Recognized as one of the nation’s top lacrosse coaches, Greg Cannella is in his 17th year at the helm of the University of Massachusetts program. Cannella has brought his Minutemen to seven NCAA Tournaments, winning seven tournament games since 1997, claiming six New England championships including 2006, won the 2001, 2002, 2005 and 2009 ECAC Lacrosse titles. He was named ECAC Coach of the Year for the fourth time in 2009, joining his selections in 2009, 2004, 2002, and 2001 and New England Coach of the Year four times including the last two seasons. He was named the 2006 USILA National Coach of the Year after leading UMass to its first-ever lacrosse NCAA Championship game.
At the time of this podcast they are having an incredible season. I was so happy that Coach Cannella took the time to get into real detail on their unique practice structure at U Mass, and a number of great and frankly pretty different perspective on drills. He is a passionate coach that has an awesome perspective including not so much focusing on plays, but running what they want to run out of their different sets.
The specific skeleton for his practice plan is really different than most of the sixty plus coaches we had interviewed at the time of the podcast. It is a mixture of speed transition drills, then kind of settled, then back to fast paced drills then back to teaching etc. You can hear all the details in the full podcast for Premium Members including the skeleton work on clears, to live riding and clearing (including their ‘open set’ clear,) to 1V1 building to 3V3 out of their sets, to transition to full field then back to 6V6… and closes with a detailed dialog on their success on man up with is way above the national statistics.
We also got a great drill he refers to ‘Crushing the Field, Short Field 5V5,’ you are going to love it, and we also combined it with their ‘Swarm Drill’ which we preview in the ‘Preview Sample’ below which available to all of our free members, click and listen to Coach Cannella describe this cool drill in his own words. It only takes a few minutes so please take advantage of his experience and this drill that can do so much in so many ways. This technique he uses to ‘Crush the Field’ build more speed in practice and more touches. For more on this please check out the article in the ‘Article Section’ of the site.
If you like what you hear from this great coach, please consider his camps for your players, For the U Mass camps visit www.umasslaxcamp.com, and for his work with the recruiting camps, please visit, www.peak200lacrosse.com.
Audio Preview, Crush the Field 5V5 then Swarm from U Mass Lacrosse…
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