Championship teams don’t dominate by outworking everyone. They dominate because they practice smarter, not just harder. Every minute on the field carries value, and for Lindsey Wilson College Head Coach Phil Kleckler, efficiency isn’t optional — it’s a competitive advantage.
His program, one of the top in the NAIA, logs more than 2,000 reps per week. Yet, their edge doesn’t come from exhausting players. It comes from structure, clarity, and competition — all built to make practice more purposeful and game performance more automatic.
Purpose Powers Every Minute
Coach Kleckler designs each session around a clear goal. Players don’t simply run plays; they understand why they run them. The process starts in the meeting room, not on the field.
“We try to do as much as we can from a meeting standpoint before practice in terms of our players understanding the schemes or the adjustments we’re trying to do.” (02:12)
By doing the mental work first, players arrive on the field ready to execute, not guess. Every drill serves a purpose, and every rep moves them closer to mastery. When athletes know the why, efficiency naturally follows. The team wastes less time explaining and more time sharpening.
Competition Fuels Growth
Kleckler keeps his players sharp by building competition into every practice. His goal isn’t just to fill reps — it’s to make each one count.
“We want practice to be competitive… If you don’t have your players in a competitive environment all throughout the week, then you can be shell shocked sometimes.” (01:05)
Starters and backups battle through live, game-speed situations. Scout players challenge the first team daily, driving constant improvement. This structure ensures that every athlete feels invested and every rep carries weight.
Competition also balances intensity. By rotating depth and managing workloads, Kleckler keeps his team healthy and hungry. The result is a high-rep practice week that builds endurance without draining players before game day.
Technology Enhances Efficiency
For Kleckler, to practice smarter, not just harder, means embracing tools that streamline preparation. Lindsey Wilson replaced old scout cards with GoRout, a digital platform that delivers plays instantly to players and coaches.
“We don’t do hand-drawn cards or any of that anymore. Everything’s electronic. It allows our coordinators to look at the cards before practice, too.” (05:58)
This small shift changed everything. Coaches stopped wasting time managing paper or explaining formations mid-practice. Instead, they focused on teaching, correcting, and improving execution. Technology didn’t replace coaching — it enhanced it.
Consistency Builds Confidence
Kleckler’s practices don’t depend on constant reinvention. Instead, he emphasizes repetition and consistency. Players know what to expect, transitions happen fast, and fundamentals get reinforced daily. That steady rhythm allows them to react, not overthink, when it matters most.
Young coaches often chase novelty, but Kleckler’s approach proves the opposite works better. Master the basics. Repeat them with purpose. Build confidence through consistent habits. That’s how players stop practicing to survive and start practicing to win.
Final Thoughts
Efficiency in football practice doesn’t mean rushing through reps — it means giving every rep meaning. Phil Kleckler’s program shows what happens when a team aligns its meetings, competition, technology, and consistency around one principle: practice smarter, not just harder.
The best teams don’t simply work more. They prepare better.
See our sponsor GoRout in action!
Related:
The Coach’s Playbook for Career Advancement: Build Relationships That Open Doors- Brad Wilson
From Practice to Game Day: Designing a Weekly Defensive Plan with Purpose
More on Coach Phil Klecker
Podcast transcript
Keith Grabowski (00:01)
Welcome to the Art of Practice presented by GoRout. Today we’re joined by Phil Kleckler, who’s the head coach at Lindsay Wilson College. They’re currently ranked number 10 in the NAIA and are among the nation’s most consistent programs, averaging nearly 43 points per game on offense and holding opponents to under 18 on defense. But what’s equally impressive is how efficiently they practice. Lindsay Wilson is routinely near the top of GoRout’s college leaderboard.
logging over 2000 reps in a single week, which is an elite level of tempo and takes an elite level of structure to run a practice like that. So coach, it’s great to have you here on the podcast again. It’s been a while.
Phil Kleckler (00:41)
Yeah, I appreciate you having me on anytime we join and talk with you and have people learn about our program. We’re always excited to do that.
Keith Grabowski (00:52)
So Coach, you’ve built a very detail oriented program, obviously very efficient too. When you think about practice identity, what do you think makes you guys unique or stand out in the way that you do it?
Phil Kleckler (01:05)
I think that the biggest thing we want to do as coaches is we want practice to be competitive. Obviously on game days, on Saturdays, it’s a competitive environment. And if you don’t have your players in a competitive environment all throughout the week, then you can be shell shocked sometimes. When your opponent hits you in the mouth or something to that extent, you face some adversity, all those different types of things.
I think that’s probably the biggest thing that we try to stress is being competitive and use the depth of our roster to get out the best of all facets of what we do, not only from offense and defense, but also from a special team standpoint.
Keith Grabowski (01:42)
Hold on, I lost my notes here for one second. So editor, clean this up for me. I moved the tab and I lost my notes. me one second.
All right, here we go. Okay, so coach, start here again on my question. Coach, when we talk about efficiency, it’s not just about going fast, it’s about making sure that you have meaningful reps and all that’s set up obviously by a purposeful structure. So as you’re designing a practice that does maximize reps, how do you do that without sacrificing quality?
Phil Kleckler (02:12)
I think we try to do as much as we can from a meeting standpoint before practice in terms of our players understanding the schemes or the adjustments we’re trying to do. And also that goes into with our prep team players and trying to replicate what our opponent does that week where we spend some time in the meeting room and.
and show them some video and do some different things with that too. to try to simulate that look. And it’s more than just 11 on 11 too. It’s group work and breaking things down. We try to do some of that every single day as well, whether it’s perimeter drill or one on ones or blitz pickup. I could go on and on about the different kind of segmented things where you can…
probably ramp the intensity up a little bit and try to keep guys safe and not have a bunch of bodies on the ground, all those different types of things. So we take our spots and when we do that, we’re not going out and busting heads every single practice and all those types of things. So it’s really trying to get the pulse of our team and what we think we need to have our team ready to play on Saturdays.
Keith Grabowski (03:18)
When you look at GoRout as the tool really for facilitating a lot of the efficiency, what you do in practice, what parts of practice are those used in besides the team? know, obviously places like 7-on-7, inside run, any other spots where you guys are utilizing GoRout to get your players, know, get your scout team or people serving as a scout team aligned.
Phil Kleckler (03:42)
Yeah, I think probably the the biggest decision when we went on board with GoRout for for me, we already had practiced at a high level. We had already had a way. We’ve done some things. Sometimes people have the philosophy of, well, if if it’s not broken, don’t break it type of thing, where I I just kind of have the philosophy of I always
want to evaluate everything within our program and how we do things and how we can get better. I think all college coaches could say where how much recruiting has changed. If you don’t change what you’re doing with the recruiting standpoint, you’re gonna get left behind. So I I felt like we needed to kind of rejuvenate our practice, what we were doing. And it was really from the standpoint of, I viewed GoRout as ability for us to keep our good prep players on the field longer.
Right? So an example of that would be, you have five offensive linemen that, you know, aren’t in your 2 deep. You know, you can play your five best guys against your first team defense. Every single rep, the first team defense is out there where if you had two huddles and you’re, you’re scout books and all that type of stuff, then you’re not going to get that, that competition. You’re not going to get the the quality of looks sometimes. And so I think that was, that was the big.
thing for me and deciding to go with GoRout was just maximizing that efficiency. But then also maximizing the quality in in terms of the looks we’re getting. And it took a while for us to grow into it. I had some assistant coaches that were pretty mad at me for that first year, learning how to do everything and all that stuff. But here we are in a good situation here this year and playing really well and I do credit.
some of what go routes done for us into that here this year. And I guess to answer your question, we try to use it as much as we can. Even when we do some good on good, we do some service periods and different things. And our second team defense is gonna have those GoRout looking at the call and it might be in our terminology and they can look at it real quick and say, all right, this is what we’re doing. But we
Try to maximize them and use them in every way we can and be organized with it. And we don’t do hand drawn cards or any of that anymore. Everything’s electronic. And it it allows our coordinators to look at the cards before practice too. Obviously we have some younger assistant coaches that are drawing some of those things. and doing some of those things. So it’s really helped us from a quality control standpoint to make sure the look and the blocking schemes and all those things are drawn exactly how.
how they need to be from the coordinator level, which I think is also paid off for us.
Keith Grabowski (06:22)
I’m sure too, like, you know, going back to the days of drawing cards and, you know, thinking about preparing to practice to be efficient in practice. I know, you know, we had our inside run book, we had our, you know, seven on seven book, we had our team books, whatever we might have that meant that you either duplicating or, you know, separately drawing up cards for each of those books and
boy, I don’t know that we could have drawn any more than we did, right? To think about getting 2000 reps in a week, you know, I think we were maximizing it, you know, with paper and marker at the time, but man, like this, the efficiency of it, being able to not have to redraw cards, because you’re, know, you’re pulling an image over into the system, just makes it so much easier and efficient, just in the prep of practice, I’m sure.
Phil Kleckler (07:12)
Yeah, and they’re gone are the days of windy day and the scout book blows apart and there’s sheets everywhere and you got people scrambling to get them on and they’re not in the right order. mean, those were the junction days from when I started coaching. So, we don’t have those problems anymore. We’ve had a couple windy days here this week and not worrying about that type of stuff. So, and just another interesting story. mean, I’m not gonna tell you who it was, but we went on the road this year.
And we’re warming up pregame and just looked in the trash can of our sideline and there’s some scout cards that were thrown away from assistant coach. And it wasn’t anything earth shattering or anything, it’s just like it eliminates some of those types of things that you might find the sons of bread from. So that did happen this year for us. So it was just an interesting thing and something we don’t have to have because everything is electronically for us with Gorough.
Keith Grabowski (08:05)
Yeah, we had that same thing happen, you know, sit down on the sideline and on the benches, the scout card book from the week. And it gave us an interesting peek on what were they really working hard on, at least on that particular day. So yeah, you avoid some of those as well. You know, looking at that, that’s a lot of reps during the week. I’m sure you guys film everything, look at everything for you. You know, again, the number of reps is great.
but we talked about quality as well and evaluating that. know, how have you seen that, you know, the effects on the quality over time and looking at film and being able to just, you know, evaluate all those reps.
Phil Kleckler (08:47)
Yeah, I just think another big factor is when people maybe see that from the outside in, they’re like, man, you’re running your team into the ground or any of those types of things. Reviewing film and meetings and everything is the single biggest practice tool we have, right? And so if we can have our defense defend 75 snaps on a Tuesday.
And you do that by Wednesday and you do that by Thursday, you’re a significant number of snaps where then when we’re playing in a game on a Saturday and we only have to defend 58, our guys are gonna be fresh. They’re gonna be those types of things. So we kind of ramp things up more at the beginning of the week and then kind of tear it as we go and get closer to game day. we’re not.
We’re not into those vests and all the other things that some of the bigger schools are wearing now and they track your mileage and all that stuff. But I think we utilize the depth of our roster to do that and we get some guys, some reps in terms of some twos and some threes. And again, we have our team ready to play on Saturdays is always what our goal is. So anything we can do to
to expose our guys to get ready, we’re willing to do that. so, again, that counts some of those reps when we do a perimeter period or we do some of those different things. But again, it allows our coaches to coach too, where we don’t have as many coaches holding cards up anymore. And we can actually get in there and coach while the other coaches signal in the next play into the iPad to send it to those things, all those different things. So that was another big factor for me too was.
Not having a few coaches hold cards up and everything and allowing our position coaches to coach. you really only need one person to run your prep teams essentially instead of maybe two or three.
Keith Grabowski (10:37)
Yeah, I think that’s been a benefit that’s been shared over and over on this series is that you think about the days of having to go in there with the card and tell this guy and that guy and by the time that coach is done, you know, explaining where everybody has to go and everybody’s up there looking and paying attention, there’s very little time to coach those guys up. So this is not just a practice efficiency tool. I mean, it’s a development efficiency tool. You are getting more time.
with those players, whoever it might be, whether it’s making sure like, I need you to play the technique the way these guys do it, here’s how they do it, or just coaching them up on his fundamentals in general. I think that’s one of the opportunities that Go Route opens up for
Phil Kleckler (11:19)
Yeah, I think when you talk about the development, it’s the development for your prep team players that it could be, we tell our team at the beginning of the year, mean, just because you’re on the prep team week one doesn’t mean you’re gonna be there week 10. And so it’s the development of that too, in terms of guys that compete and make plays against our offense or against our defense or on special teams. As a prep player during the year when you have an injury or those different types of things.
Those are the people that you’re gonna look to to call up on, to play for you on game day. So it’s the development of your prep and your practice players too. You’re trying to develop your whole roster and build the depth of your whole roster and not just a significant 25 people on defense and offense, all those types of things. We’re talking 65 to 75 people on each side of the ball in terms of how our roster is structured and doing those things.
We talk about that with our team at the beginning of the year and it gets pretty competitive. We just actually did a kickoff versus kickoff, prep kickoff versus kickoff return last night. We haven’t been doing some things we’re capable of on the kickoff return team. Last couple games and we’re trying to challenge our guys and those guys are flying down and giving us great looks and making us work. And that’s what you wanna do during the week on a Wednesday so that we’re prepared on a Saturday so we can.
We can be better and do some things that we are capable of doing and what we want to do.
Keith Grabowski (12:43)
Coach, as we get into this last part of the regular season here, know, we’re in week eight now as we record this, you know, then into the playoffs. What kind of things do you look at in terms of adjustments to practice? You mentioned before making sure, you know, guys are fresh on game day, so it’s early week, heavier work, tapering as the week goes on. But are there any other changes you make late season to, you know, again, make sure that
Your best is out there on game day.
Phil Kleckler (13:13)
Yeah, first of all, we’re not talking about playoffs. I we’re kind of behind the eight ball. We lost the conference game last week and a rivalry game, all that stuff. But trying to see the big picture and what our team needs each week. This week here, we’re playing a really good opponent in Faulkner University and have kind of snuck up on some people and they’re really improved. And so we know we got our hands full in terms of our game here this Saturday, but we have a bye week.
the next week after that. coming off a loss and you never wanna react or panic or anything like that. But there were some things where we got exposed and how we were operating and doing those things. And sometimes those things don’t show up when you’re 62 to 13, those types of things. And it’s easy to gloss those things over. And again, we try to address those things and all that, but-
felt like we needed to make some changes in terms of what we were doing from a practice standpoint and kind of what we’d gotten into the groove the last three or four weeks. So we made some of those changes to try to get back to basics a little bit, try to work on some deficiencies that we have in all three phases. And our players have handled those things really well and they typically do when we put things in front of them. They typically do respond the right way for us.
We ramp things up a little bit just knowing that we have an off week the next week and knowing that we have a big challenge ahead of us and we wanna go into this bye week with going one to know here this week and feeling good about ourselves in terms of having two quality opponents left weeks nine and ten. So that’s our goal here this week.
Keith Grabowski (14:49)
Yeah, with a late season by, what’s the approach there? I know a lot of teams maybe get those mid or even early season, but for a late season by, how do you approach that?
Phil Kleckler (15:00)
Yeah, done it differently over the years. know, this we always typically play 10 games, even though you can play 11 in the NAI. So we naturally get two by weeks. You get one kind of after non-conference and then we get one during our conference because there’s an odd number of teams. So there’s going to be one team off each week, you know, with that. So after our first by here this year, after, you know, we’re at 4 and 0 and
Won a really tough game down in Reinhardt University in Georgia. Hadn’t lost a home game in two years. We didn’t play very well, but we found a way to come back and win and felt like our first team guys had really had some mileage on them. We’re talking about playing the number 10 team in the country, the number 18 in the country. We flew to Florida, the furthest trip we’ve made in programs history. So we just really felt like we needed to.
Kind of ease off some of those guys a little bit, at the same time, some of our second and third string guys maybe weren’t where they needed to be. So we did a lot of good on good stuff with those guys trying to build those guys up and had our ones go through individual and warm up and do some things, but didn’t take a lot of reps during that week until towards the end of the week when we were in helmets and kind of got back to it before we were getting into opening conference play with the.
another quality opponent in Georgetown College. So obviously we played well in the Georgetown game and I think we handled that really well. So haven’t thought through exactly how we’re gonna do it next week. I think Saturday’s game is gonna be a big part of that and where we’re at as a team and a program. But there’s been times where we haven’t been playing well and hadn’t had the record we were capable of having those things and then.
We haven’t taken our foot off the gas pedal for some of those guys too. So I just think as a coach, you know the pulse of your team, lean on our leadership council, our captains, all those different types of guys to see how the team’s feeling. And then in a bye week, you just gotta adjust it to do what your team is needed and really focus on yourself. And I think a lot of that during the week, no matter what the opponent is, focus on yourself. Don’t worry so much about your opponent. How are you blocking? How are you tackling?
How are you doing the basic fundamentals with that? And I think the really good coaches that have guys that look themselves in the mirror and focus on your own output, you can be successful. You talk about not beating yourself, all those different types of things make people beat you. And those are things that we try to focus on as well.
Keith Grabowski (17:34)
Coach, to wrap up today, what advice would you give a younger coach out there about designing practices that build confident, fast-playing teams?
Phil Kleckler (17:44)
You know, I think younger coaches always want to do the flashy drills and the equipment and all those different types of things. I’m a linebacker coach by trade. I kind of have some drills and some different things I’ve done for 19 years that sometimes people could say, well, those things are stale, all that. But we’ve had really good linebacker play here my time at Lindsay and everywhere else I’ve been.
I think there’s something too where you can say the name of a drill and your players can immediately get lined up in the drill and start executing the drill pretty quick and you don’t need a lot of time. And then when you only have a 10 minute indie session during the season, you can get two or three drills done where if you’re doing different drills every single week and you have to explain them and all that, what have you really done to do that?
Just really big on repetition and being consistent and so your players know what the expectations are. And there’s a lot of times I will pause the tape and I will ask the player, what drill do we do to work on this fundamental right here? And see if they know the answer so they can see the big picture of, this is why coach has me do this drill every single Tuesday or every single Wednesday. So I just try to be consistent kind of with the same individual and the same things we work on.
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, maybe one day it’s more tackling, one day it’s more block destruction, pass coverage, all those different types of things, and you break it down by the day and stay consistent. again, just I think that the energy and how you practice and all that can break up the monotony of things, right? And they know what the expectations are, and they know what the required output is to be successful on a Saturday within your position.
You can transition some of those things into group work too. And you work on run fits with the secondary and you can go on and on about how you build those different types of things. And I’m sorry to give a lot of defensive examples, but I’m a defensive guy. So I’m focusing on that stuff a lot of times.
Keith Grabowski (19:45)
No, it’s good.
Yeah, I Coach. We really appreciate the insights today. And it’s clear that when Lindsay Wilson’s success isn’t an accident, you guys have built it through intentional practice, constant refinement. I want to congratulate you and your staff and your team again on a great season and for continuing to set the standard for efficiency and preparation. best of luck to you and the team the rest of the way.
Phil Kleckler (20:12)
Appreciate it. Thanks for having me on, Keith.