Through-the-Box
A Coaching Spotlight on Marblehead's Eric Campbell
The Scoop
12 The Scoop / Spring '17
Eric Campbell coaches the U15 Select team in Marblehead, has been a two-time All-Star coach nominated by his peers, is an EMLOA official, and a former youth player with Wellesley Youth Lacrosse who went on to play in high school (Wellesley) and college (Endicott) and coach at North Andover High School and Salem Academy. In his third year of coaching at the youth level (although he also has youth coaching experience from his days as a high school athlete working with the youth program in his town), The Scoop caught up with Coach Campbell to discuss his favorite drills, philosophies, memories, and inspirations.
THE SCOOP: What lessons from playing lacrosse stick with you as you focus now on coaching?
ERIC CAMPBELL: The lessons I learned from my coaches at both the high school and college is that team and hard work is everything. You just don’t get better by showing up at the field for a couple of hours. You need to be in the work on your own time—be accountable. Hit the wall, get into the weight room and be in shape. If you do those things you are not only making yourself better, you are making your team better.
SCOOP: What's your overall philosophy for coaching youth players?
EC: I just want to make sure our guys are having fun, learning something new about the game and that they are going to be prepared for the “next level.” There is no better joy at the end of the season when a player comes up to me, shakes my hand and tells me that was most fun he’s ever had.
SCOOP: How do you approach practice planning?
EC: I never want guys standing around for too long. Everything we do is set into time blocks and we make sure guys are rotating all the time. One or two reps and we are changing out who is in and who is out. I learned during my first year that our team was always starting practice a little “flat.” I look to start practice with something very high energy. Odd man situations and ground ball drills tend to wake our guys up right away. We then break out into offense and defense. Both units will do some type of stick work, shooting or footwork. From there we jump into the team oriented part of practice. This could range from rides/clears, half field 6v6 or man up/man down. We try to leave the last 10 minutes of practice to end on some type of end of game situation. That is usually driven by what happened in our last game. This could be killing the last two minutes of the game, trying to get ball back in the last two minutes, a set offensive play