Please Note: This schedule is designed for first year teams and coaches. It does not cover every subject. It sets a strong foundation for players to build on in their own time outside the practice. A coach’s job is not to give the players every tool they need to succeed, but rather to teach them to learn on their own.

For this schedule, we would have two practices per week and we worked backward based on the dates of when the games are active.

Week 1 – Practice A

• Welcome
• Intro of Coach, Coach’s NCL Experience
• Intro of NCL, Coach’s Goals for Team, Expectation of Players
• Intro to Resources (CryptoKait’s Blog, NCL CrowdCast Trainings)
• Intro to VMs (Kali)

Week 1 – Practice B

• Recap VM’s
• Intro to Open Source (OSINT)
  • What is Open Source?
  • Challenge Types to Look at
    • Threat Intel
    • Email Header
    • Metadata
    • Certificate Request (.csr)

Week 2 – Practice A

• Recap Open Source
• Intro to Cryptography
  • Teach Numerical
  • For Historical, assign homework: CryptoKait Blog on Crypto or Simon Singh’s The Code Book

Week 2 – Practice B

• Recap Cryptography
• Intro to Log Analysis

Week 3 – Practice A

• Recap Log Analysis
• Intro to Password Cracking Tools
  • Cain, John the Ripper, Hashcat, etc.
• Intro to Word Lists
  • Pre-Made Wordlists (rockyou)
  • Creating an Enumerated Wordlist (NCL-ABC-1234)
  • Created a Wordlist from a Database(ex. Pokemon)

Week 3 – Practice B

• Recap All – Bring Your Own Questions
• Intro to Wireshark (Network Traffic/Wireless Access Exploit)
• Intro to NCL Gymnasium

NCL Gymnasium Opens

Week 4 – Practice A

• Automated Tools Night
  • Intro Aircrack-ng
  • Intro to Dirbuster
  • Intro to Nmap
  • Intro to WordPress Scan (wpscan)

Week 4 – Practice B

• Last practice before Preseason
• Go over any questions the players have.

REST DAY – No practice the few days leading up to preseason

Week of MANDATORY PRESEASON GAMES – No Practice

Pre-Season Recaps

We recommend doing 2 sessions of recaps for 2 reasons:

1. If your students have a lot of questions, you may not be able to get to all the questions in one session.
2. Some students may not be able to make the first session, so it gives them an opportunity to asks their questions.

Weekend of INDIVIDUAL SEASON GAMES – No Practice

Postseason Prep – Can be done in 1 or 2 sessions, this is at your own discretion

• How Team Works
• How to Submit Answers (by Captain)
• Answers Spreadsheet

Weekend of TEAM GAMES

• In our experience, we did not run team game recaps since you don’t necessarily need to do a recap with people you were already working with.