Kickoff return is your first offensive play of every game. Fall camp is where you decide whether it gets coached like one.
Three clinics this week give you three ways to do that. Roger Holmes, a two-time Georgia state champion in year 29, installs his entire return in one dedicated week and never touches the assignments again. Nathan Frame teaches a frontside wall block where contact is the last one percent of the rep. Matt Wells, a former Kansas State assistant, drills the part of the block nobody reps: the moment your blocker starts to lose it.
One idea from each, in the order you’ll need them in camp. The install comes first.
Idea 1: Install It Once. Never Install It Again.
Video: Roger Holmes on Kickoff Return Philosophy
Coach Holmes has spent 30+ years building teams that finish in the Top 10 in Georgia, and his return game starts from a stance most staffs never actually commit to: “We’re looking to score every time we set up a kickoff return.” Not field position. Points.
The idea worth stealing is the commitment. Holmes carves out a week in the summer and does nothing but special teams. The return goes in with three groups, first team through third, plus a JV group. Then it stays in. The assignments don’t change from week to week, all season.
If an opponent’s coverage team shows something different, he tweaks. He doesn’t reinstall. His reason is one sentence: “We’re able to get sound and better in this as it doesn’t change.” The return your kids run in November is the one you put in now, except by then they’ve been repping it since the first day of camp.
The other half of the clip is the scouting report. Before Holmes calls a return, his special teams coordinator has to walk in with answers to a specific set of questions: return it right or left, take it to the short side or chase the wide side. He runs down the full list in the clip, and it’s the exact checklist your own coordinator should be filling out by Week 1. Watch it before you draw up a single return this camp.
Idea 2: Teach the Wall Block as 99 Percent Leverage, 1 Percent Contact
Video: Nathan Frame on the Frontside Wall Block
Coach Frame puts two blocks on his front line: a frontside wall block and a backside cutoff block. This clip is the wall, and it will change how you grade your front line, because the collision is almost an afterthought.
The rep starts with an angled stance toward the ball and a reach step. The reach step’s first job is seeing the ball off the tee, which is his built-in answer for the surprise onside kick, and it tells the blocker how to bend his drop when the kick goes somewhere he wasn’t expecting. From there the rule is absolute: eyes on your assignment the entire rep. Never flip the hips. Open up and see him all the way down.
The leverage is near number, nose to ear, elbows tight, thumbs up. Don’t let him cross your face. Invite him front door. Frame uses the same aiming point on his punt front line on purpose: one set of coaching points, carried across every unit.
Then the part you’ll steal for your camp script. The frontside blocker has to win his block by the 30, so Frame’s drill puts the scout on the sideline, the blocker at the bottom of the numbers, and hands him a landmark: their 30-yard line is the hash. Engage at the top of the numbers instead, and the back-door crease pops open. There’s a rep in the clip of a kid going early, and you can watch the crease open behind him the moment he does.
The grading is just as concrete. This is not a knockout block. Frame wants patience through the whole drop, then a decisive strike with feet running through contact. Start the block at the 10, and decisive means the defender finishes at the 15. Five yards of movement. Engage at the 10 and stay at the 10, and it photographs like a good block. Frame grades it a miss.
The game rep ties all of it together: his right center on a boundary return holds nose-to-ear leverage for, as Frame counts it, 99 percent of the rep, then strikes at the 26. And his hand-placement landmark is a two-word cue your kids will never forget once they hear it. He says it out loud on the film, more than once.
Idea 3: Rep the Moment the Block Starts to Slip
Video: Matt Wells on Retrace and Finish Drills
Coach Wells, a former Kansas State assistant, teaches special teams as a full progression, and the film in this clip comes from his Utah State units. The idea inside it is the one almost every return coach skips. Everybody drills the fit. Wells drills what happens after the fit breaks.
His retrace and finish drills start with the blocker already hooked up. Hands inside, thumbs up, in the fit. Now finish. The moment the blocker loses leverage, the drill becomes the rep: wash with him, push and pull, work the hand back inside, keep the leverage. His back line gets its own version, a receiver blocking like a left tackle getting bull rushed, a position he never plays from scrimmage. Sit down, sink, hold your ground, finish.
All of it runs pre-practice, while the linemen are still on their board work. It costs you zero practice minutes.
The progression builds from there. Four-on-four or five-on-five up front with a live returner wearing a flag, tag-off instead of tackling, and the returner required to run between the tackles so he learns to set up his blocks instead of bouncing. Wells says it straight on the film: you see some good examples, and you see some bad ones. Both are in the clip, and the bad ones teach more.
By the season, the whole return lives in three pods running at once: backside blocks in one, frontside double teams in another, and the back-end guys catching off the jugs in the third. Watch the tight end working the shimmy box in the frontside pod, Wells’s leverage-angle drill. And the catch-and-handle work never stops.
They chart and film every ball, and they open special teams meetings with one great rep and one ugly one, sometimes a funny one, so every kid knows it’s all being watched. That meeting ritual is how Wells learned to trust a defensive lineman playing fullback with a short kick in the air. The drill tape in the clip runs the entire progression, pre-practice through pods.
Install it once. Teach the wall with a landmark. Rep the block after it starts to slip. Steal one or run all three: the return you put in over the next two weeks is the one you’ll be living with in November.
Each clip sits inside a full clinic, and the return game lives in the parts that didn’t fit here.
Coach Frame’s clinic covers the backside cutoff block, double teams, returner responsibilities, and the backline blocking and finishing that spring the return once the wall is set.
Coach Wells walks his entire special teams teaching progression, including the back-end and returner work he only points at in this clip.
And Coach Holmes diagrams his sideline return against kicks to every part of the field, sets the exact distance between your returners, and teaches the slam and reverse returns he calls simple to execute but hard to cover. If kick return is on your camp calendar, this is the install material.
Link: Nathan Frame – Kickoff Return
Link: Matt Wells – Special Teams Teaching Progression: Dominating Kick-Off Returns
