Training

Training Camp
Spring camp is the place where your players have the opportunity to prepare for the season. The training camp thus has its own sim/stage at the beginning of the season, after signing day. Improvementwise, training camp is the sim, where your players have the best opportunity to improve.

Regular Season Training
During the regular season your players will train weekly, but due to the amount of other stuff occupying young people's minds during a school year, gains will be lower here.

Training Schedules
Training schedules are where you can create different training regimens, customized to particular positions or players. You can create as many training schedules as you want, allowing for a great deal of micromanaging if you so please.

When you take over a new team, all your players will be assigned to a default schedule. If you cannot be bothered to micromanage training, you can either change the settings on the default schedule and leave the players there, or just ignore it, and the players will use it as is. The default schedule (starting from patch 2) will be an alround schedule, that makes sure players get a decent amount of training across the board, and prevents the most prevalent negative side effects, such as regress and fatigue/whine.

After you have created a schedule, and set its settings (remember to click 'save') you can assign as many players as you want to it.

Observe that a player cannot *not* be on a schedule, so if you delete a schedule that still has players assigned, those players will be moved to a default schedule.

If a player is injured he wont train - you dont need to take him of a schedule or create a lighter schedule - the game will just let him sit out that particular training session.

Schedule Settings
A training shedule has four settings you can set.

Position Drills
This aspect focuses on the skills necessary for the players position. So even while QBs and LBs do not have use for the same skills, you can put them on the same schedule, and the game will make sure they train the relevant skills for their position.

Athletic Training
This aspect focuses on developing the athleticism of players, mainly the speed and agility ratings.

Physical Training
This aspect focuses on developing the physicial shape of the players, mainly the Strength and Stamina ratings.

Game Tape
Having players watch game tape and do mental reps on plays helps them prepare for upcoming games and develop their intelligence.

How many points should I assign?
The combined total of the 4 aspects you can assign to a schedule is 25 points. However, if you assign too little to a given aspect, your players may regress. If you get close to 25 in total, you run the risk of injuries, and depending on their personalities players may start to complain and lose morale (the effects of which may propagate and yield further negative effects). As you will see on the default schedule, the AI is running with a total of 22 points, which will largely avoid negative effects.

Training Emails
After training camp, and each week during the regular season, your coaches will get back to you (in your email) with a summary of the most notable player performances in training organized by training aspect. At the top of the email you may occasionally see a few players highlighted that have either boomed or busted recently.

What determines if a player progresses
Obviously the training schedule matters. In addition to this, there are a lot of factors, but two things are worth highlighting. The first is that personality matters a lot, and certain of the off-field player traits (listed under 'special' on the player card) can have a big impact. The second is that the players current ability in a given rating impacts how easy it is to progress. If the player is at a level where simply teaching him the basics will yield a big improvement in his performance (i.e. a newbie LB learning to tackle properly will be able to progress from 50 to 55 in tackling with relative ease). Conversely players who are already close to perfecting a given aspect of their game will have a difficult time improving more. This is especially true for the more bodily ratings (i.e. an olympic sprinter might need to train for months to shave just a couple of hundred ms of his 40time, similarly getting a WR to increase from 96 to 97 in speed is super difficult).