Youth Tackle Football Drills

You teach tackling in youth football by adding contact in stages, never all at once. Start with the approach and the breakdown stance, move to head-up form in the air, fit the shoulder on a bag, then take a controlled live rep at a jog. The head stays out of every contact, the shoulder delivers the hit, and the arms wrap to finish. Speed is the last thing added, only after the form holds.

That order is not a style choice. It is how the governing body of the sport sequences the skill, and it keeps a young player safe while the habit forms. The crown of the helmet never leads, the eyes stay up so the tackler sees what they hit, and the near shoulder strikes the near hip. Get those three right and the rest of tackling is detail. Miss them and no amount of toughness makes the contact safe.

The Contact Progression: Fundamentals to Full Speed

The drills on this page sort into six stages that build on each other. A coach can spend a week, or a full preseason, climbing them, and a player only moves up when the stage below is clean:

• Approach and breakdown. Track the ball carrier, take the right angle, and arrive in a low, balanced base. No contact yet.
• Form and fit (no contact). Groove the head-up tackle position and the shoulder strike in the air and against a held bag, with zero force.
• Shoulder tackling on a bag. Add the strike zone and the drive, hitting the thigh and hip board and running the feet through it.
• Live form tackling. The first controlled tackle on a teammate at a jog, form over force.
• Open-field and angle tackling. The hardest reps, one defender against one runner in space, and the pursuit angles a defense uses to swarm.
• Confidence for timid tacklers. The speed-by-steps and get-comfortable-on-the-ground work that brings a hesitant player along safely.

Heads Up Form Is the Non-Negotiable

Every tackling rep in this progression starts from Heads Up form: head up and out of the contact, eyes on the ball carrier's near hip and chest, the near shoulder striking the runner, arms wrapping for control, and the feet running through the hit instead of stopping at it. USA Football's Shoulder Tackling system(opens in new tab) breaks the tackle into five fights, track, prepare, connect, accelerate, and finish, and names the techniques a youth coach teaches in order: the Form Tackle, then the Thigh and Drive, then the Thigh and Roll finish. The drills below follow that same sequence so the contact a 10-year-old absorbs in practice matches the technique they will use in a game.

Safe technique is half the job. Knowing what a concussion looks like is the other half. USA Football's Heads Up Football implementation guide(opens in new tab) packages the tackling progression with proper helmet fitting and concussion protocols, and the CDC's HEADS UP concussion training for youth coaches(opens in new tab) walks every staff member through recognizing the signs and removing a player who shows them. Run the training before opening day, not after the first head knock.

Why the Tackle Earns Its Own Guide

Coaches repeat one line at every level: missed tackles lose games. In youth football the math is brutal, because a single missed tackle on first down turns a four-yard gain into a long touchdown when the secondary is still learning angles and leverage. A defense that brings the runner down on first contact creates short fields and forces the other team to drive the length of the grass. That is why tackling earns a deep guide of its own rather than one bucket in a larger list, and why the safest programs drill the tackle every single practice instead of once a week.

You win or lose a tackle before contact. A defender who arrives low, balanced, and square to the runner can strike and wrap; one who arrives upright or lunging has already lost the rep. The first stage trains the feet and the eyes with no contact at all: the breakdown stance, tracking a moving runner, and taking a pursuit angle to a spot ahead of the ball. Start here with every player, whatever the age, and add the drills you want to your session as you read.

A good breakdown is the same low, athletic base a defender uses to shed a block and a receiver uses to break a route, so the footwork carries across the field. The conditioning and agility work in the parent youth football drills library builds the quick feet that make every breakdown sharper.

Now your players learn the tackle with the force turned off. Before anyone hits a moving target, the head-up fit and the shoulder strike have to be automatic, because the one thing you cannot coach on the fly in a live rep is keeping the head out of the contact. These drills check the fit position point by point and groove the near-shoulder strike in the air and against a held bag, all at walk-through speed. A player earns the next stage by showing you the same clean form every rep, not most reps.

No-contact form work is not a warm-up to rush through. It is where the safety habit is built, and it should fill far more practice minutes than live tackling does. The contact-budget guidance in the football practice plan template shows how to weight a week toward this kind of low-contact rep and keep full-speed tackling to a small, deliberate slice.

With the form grooved, the strike meets a real target. Shoulder tackling is the heart of the Heads Up method: the near shoulder hits the runner's thigh-and-hip strike zone, the arms wrap, and the feet drive through the contact. Keep the head up and to the side the whole way, never leading. These drills add the hit and the drive against a bag a partner holds, so your player feels the force of contact without the risk of a full collision. Run them once the head-up fit from the stage before is automatic.

This is the first time the technique meets a live body, and it is where your control matters most. A teaching tackle is not a game collision. The ball carrier moves at a jog, the tackler strikes with clean form, wraps, and finishes the runner to the ground safely with the head out of the contact, and only then do you tick the speed up a notch. Keep these reps controlled and on soft ground. Let a teaching rep turn into a highlight hit and you trade your player's safety for nothing.

Live tackling is where contact-restriction rules bite hardest. Many youth leagues cap full-contact practice time tightly, which is one more reason to spend the bulk of a week on the no-contact stages above and reserve live reps for a short, well-coached block.

The open-field tackle is the loneliest play in football and the one that separates defenses. One runner, one defender, and a lot of grass: get it wrong and a four-yard play becomes six points. These drills box the duel into a small space so the speed stays sensible, then build out to the pursuit angles a whole defense uses to swarm the ball. The lesson running through all of them is leverage, not raw speed. A defender who takes the right angle and stays square beats a faster one who overruns the play.

Open-field tackling is also where a missed tackle is most expensive, so it pays to know which defenders struggle with it before Saturday. Our football evaluation form grades tackling in space as its own line so you can spot the player who needs an extra angle-tackle block this week.

Almost every youth team has a player who pulls up at the last second, turns away from contact, or arm-tackles to avoid the hit. That hesitation is not a character flaw. It is usually fear of the contact or of going to the ground, and you fix it the same way you fix any skill: by removing the fear one step at a time. These drills do exactly that. They start so slow the player cannot fail, earn each speed increase with a clean rep, and teach the body to land and roll comfortably so the player stops bracing.

Throw a timid player into a full-speed hit they are not ready for and you can lose them for good. A string of small, safe wins keeps them. Praise the brave, clean rep over the big one, drop the speed the moment form slips, and a hesitant nine-year-old in September is often a willing tackler by midseason. Confidence is built from successful reps, not from being thrown in the deep end.

You coach the same tackling drill very differently at seven than at fifteen. The progression above holds from a first-year rookie tackler to a high school starter, but you dial the pace, the contact, and what you expect to the age in front of you. Use the bridges below to pitch the work at the right level for each group.

Tackling Drills for 7 Year Olds and First-Year Players

A seven-year-old in rookie tackle needs the picture of a tackle, not the collision. Live almost entirely in the first two stages: the breakdown stance, mirror-and-shadow tracking, fit-and-freeze, and the kneeling Hawk roll onto a soft bag. Make it a game, reward eyes up and a wrapped finish, and skip live tackling altogether at this age. A player this young who breaks down under control and gets the head up has done the job. Distance, power, and full-speed reps come years later.

Tackling Drills for 9 to 12 Year Olds

From about nine to twelve, the shoulder strike and the controlled live tackle start to click. Bring in the Thigh and Drive on a bag, the hit-and-wrap, the open-field square-up in a small box, and the angle tackle from two lines, run to a bag first and then to a jogging live runner. Players this age can learn leverage and pursuit angles. Keep full-contact reps short and tightly coached, and hold every rep to the head-up standard. The contact intensity should never outrun the technique.

Tackling Drills for High School Players

High school tacklers already own the fit and the strike, so the work moves to speed, open-field reliability, and tackling when tired. Run the live form tackle building toward (but never reaching) game-collision speed, the open-field square-up against a shifty back, and the pursuit-and-rally drill as a full unit. Demand communication and leverage on every rep. Players preparing for a strong opponent should weight the open-field and angle work heavily, since those are the tackles that decide tight Friday-night games. The head-up rule does not relax because the players got bigger.

The drills you ticked while reading collect into the plan below. Save it as an image for your phone, paste it into a sheet, or print it for the practice clipboard, so every defender works the same contact ladder week to week and earns each step by clearing the readiness mark instead of a coach's gut feel about who looks ready.

A tackler's progress is easiest to coach when you actually track a few markers, like a clean-form count out of ten reps, the top speed a player keeps the head up at, and the tackle success rate in an open-field rep. Numbers like those turn "be more physical" into something a young player can watch climb, and they show you who is ready for more contact and who needs another week at the stage below. Striveon's athlete-development tracking pins these tackling markers to each player's profile so a defender's readiness sits beside their evaluations and goals, and you base the call to add contact on what you have actually seen. Fit the tackling block into the wider week with our football practice plan template.

One Tuesday's tackling block gets a team through a week. A progression you trust, saved where any coach can pull it up, gets a program through a season and keeps every staff member teaching the exact same head-up form. That consistency is the whole game in a skill this safety-sensitive: when a position coach, a volunteer assistant, and a head coach all teach the tackle the same way, a player never has to unlearn something on Thursday that they were taught on Tuesday.

If you run a club program or coach alongside a staff, Striveon's drill library keeps every tackling drill in one place, each one annotated with your own cues and tagged by contact stage, age, and gear so every coach on the field runs the same progression in the same order and nobody improvises a personal version. Feed those saved drills into structured practice plans and the climb from a first-year rookie tackler to a high school starter stays organized and safe across a whole season. To see how the drills, the sessions, and each defender's progress link up in one workflow, read how structured training sessions connect planning to progress.