Now that you've done a full season with positive conditioning, I'd love to know how it all turned out. Success stories or any flaws you found.
I 100% recommend it with a few caveats:
The entire coaching staff has to buy in. We were killing it in the summer until right before school started. We lost our luster, and I could not figure out why. Then a couple of the kids on team A told me that on a day when I was practicing with team B one of my assistants threatened them with conditioning as a punishment. When they questioned her, her response was "well, he's not here today, and I get to decide." The materials from Coach Brown say plainly that even THREATENING with conditioning will derail your progress. It's absolutely true.
Have plans in place for some other form of consequences when kids violate team standards. This mistake was mine. I was so gung ho on this positive conditioning thing, that I failed to set my teams up in a fashion that allowed me to deal with a problem without punishing the rest of the team. I am not a fan of having 3 kids in a stunt group who don't get to practice because the 4th kid is suspended from the team. I am remedying that problem this year. Rather than being extra-inclusive and trying to get everyone on the comp floor, I am leaning towards competing 40-60% of the kids we take for game cheering. The rest of them will have to earn their way onto the floor by outshining their peers.
How effective is positive conditioning? Even with those two pitfalls, I could completely turn a practice around by doing a positive conditioning drill. Examples:
We were having a miserable practice one day up until I put the stunt groups in a row, and every time a group hit the stunt we were doing they did some random form of conditioning. "Nice stretch full, all four of you give me ten pushups"
Rather than saying "we're going to do the stunt sequence until everyone has hit 10 times, put a clock on them, and say "we are going to go one at a time, let's see how many we can hit in 10 minutes." They will rise to the challenge. If you keep good records, you can bring up the fact that they did 15 a week ago, and can set a team goal of 16 and watch them kill themselves to get after it.
You can use it for team building too:
We ran miles as a team. Have to run the whole thing in a pack. Provides great teaching moments that there is more to cheerleading and athletics than being a good runner. Teaches the faster kids that they may have to sacrifice their own performance for the good of the team. Teaches the slower kids they may have to push themselves on something they don't necessarily like for the good of the team.
We ran sprints holding hands. The kids figured out how to position themselves for the most efficient run
There's lots of good here, despite the mistakes myself and my coaching staff made in implementing this season.