Day in the Life of a High School Running Back

By Damarcio McCoy, M&M TIPster

When the 2008-20009 school year came around, 55.2% of high school students played a sport for their school. Football was the most popular with 1,112,303 students playing nationwide.

Of those football players some of them play the position of running back, which is the person who is lined up beside or behind the quarterback depending on what type of offense you run.

Being a high school running back definitely has its ups and downs. At my school I am the 2nd string running back behind my friend, but since we run the option spread we both see lots of playing time. During a regular day for us, we wake up around 6 o’clock and head to the gym to work out for about 30 minutes. We either lift weights or do conditioning drills.

Once we are done working out we head home to take a shower and get ready for school. When most of us get back to school we go into the cafeteria and eat breakfast before classes start. Once the bell rings we head to our lockers and to our classes. Our regular classes are over at 1:32 PM. The classes are made in a block schedule so we only have four blocks which are an hour and a half long. When these class are over the football players head to the field house and get ready for practice.

When we get to the field house and get settled in we all go to the film room and watch film on our last practice and on our next opponent. Once we are done watching film we get our equipment on and head to the practice field. The running backs stretch and go through our drills. One of the drills we do is the ball security drill, where one of us has the ball and our teammate gets behind us and tries to strip the ball from us another drill we do is but rolls where we roll to one direction and get back up quick while we keep the ball tucked tight. When everybody is done with their drills we go into our option period where the running backs, fullbacks, and quarterbacks practice our option plays for about thirty minutes.

After we are done with that we get into the inside period where on the offensive side its only the offensive line, running backs, and quarterbacks and on the defense it’s just the defensive line and the linebackers and we run a few plays against the defense . We have to run all of our plays to inside and as a running back this is where you take most of the hits going up the middle right into the linebackers. After we do this we go into 7on7 which is where the quarterback, running backs, and receivers run passing plays for about 30 minutes against the linebackers and the secondary. After we have a water break we do team, which is our scrimmage time until the end of practice.
On Friday nights is where it gets fun. After we get to the field house we watch film on the team we are about to play and when we are done watching film we go back to the school cafeteria and eat hoagie sandwiches. While we are eating one of the coaches reads us a bible verse and gives us an inspirational speech and after that the head coach talks to us for a little while about the upcoming game. Once we leave the cafeteria we head back to the field house to sleep till about 5:45pm. Then everyone starts to put their equipment on and get taped up by the trainers around 6:15p.m. We all go out on the field and run drills and go through some of our plays. After we get done with drills we go back into the field house to get a pregame speech from the coach, once we are done we head back on the field to run through the spirit line made of the band, cheerleaders, and some of the fans. After all this we have the coin toss and get ready for the kickoff.

And that’s a day in the life of me, Damarcio McCoy a running back for Muscle Shoals High School.