At Home Drills to Increase Your Catching Ability in Football

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  In football, a lot of skills are involved in order to make a player an effective wide receiver. Wide receivers must know how to read the defensive coverage, remember offensive play calls, and run precise routes. While all these skills play a role, the overall effectiveness of a wide receiver boils down to a player’s ability to catch a football. It doesn’t matter how well a player is able to beat the defense if he can’t catch the ball. Fortunately, there are several drills that a player can do at home on his own time that can improve catching ability.
  
  

Tennis Ball Drill

• Throwing a tennis ball off of a wall and trying to catch it serves a dual purpose for football players. For one, the tennis ball is much smaller than a football, which means the margin of error for catching it is smaller. If a player can easily catch the fast moving tennis ball, he should have no problem getting his hands on the larger football. Basically, the drill serves as a way for the player to sharpen his hand-eye coordination without the need of another person to throw the ball.
  
  The drill also forces a player to increase the rate at which he secures the ball. Since a tennis ball is designed to bounce, it will pop out of a player’s hands much quicker than a football, unless it is properly secured. The difficulty of the drill can be increased by using only one hand to catch the tennis ball or by increasing the speed the ball is thrown off the wall.
  
  

Short-Range Drill

• Football coaches will often refer to the softness of a player’s hands when discussing useful attributes of a wide receiver. A player with soft hands can easily catch passes moving at high speeds, while a player without soft hands will allow passes to bounce off his hands. Fortunately for aspiring wide receivers, soft hands are more of an acquired skill than a physical attribute.
  
  In addition to the player being trained, this drill requires someone to throw a football. Standing only five feet apart, the person throwing the football fires a hard pass at the player who is training. Passes should not be at his face in case he misses the ball, but the passes should have a high amount of velocity to them. Facing the fast passes from short range will train his hands to handle the high speeds, becoming softer with time. Since the player will rarely receive a pass during a game from less than five feet, every pass faced during a game situation will seem slower and easier to handle.
  
  

Hands Only Drill

• A bad habit that many wide receivers develop that hinders catching ability is cradling the ball. This method involves a player using his chest to help catch the ball. While this method may make catching faster passes easier, it is ineffective during game situations because the ball can be easily dislodged by defenders. This drill is designed to teach a player to catch the ball without the use of his chest, and it requires two people.
  
  The player catching the ball should stand 10 feet away from the person throwing the passes, and he is not allowed to move his feet while attempting to make catches. The person should throw the passes away from the player’s body, forcing him to only use only his hands to make the catches. When this drill is repeated enough times, the player’s natural tendency will be to catch the football using only his hands, instead of his chest.