How to compete with youth leagues for players

Emphasis the pride that comes when you play for your school. Normally the mentality that some players have that equates playing school ball to make oneself cool is a bad thing, but in your situation it might help.

Just keep it positive. Don't rip on town football or you'll find those same players going back to playing town football (or not playing football at all) out of sheer resentment for you.

Its not the kids that are the problem. It is their parents and the coaches. The dads want to coach and they want to win, hell, they want your job! They want your job so bad that they will bad mouth you and do everything they can to keep the better players from playing ms ball and playing youth ball with them so they can win the "championship". Your biggest problem is most likely youth ball coaches who bad mouth your coaching. Just a hunch. You need to build relationships with the kids so they chose you.

The reality is this, as a middle school staff, you all should be evaluating the kids and contacting their parents " Mrs Jones, Mr Jones, your son Avery is quite an athlete and would help our middle school team right now as a 7th grader. We practice 5 days a week and your son will get much more football experience by playing on the ms level in the varsity system." and "MR Edgelbert and Mizz Lou , your son Dilbert is a bit undersized for middle school football so perhaps it would be best if he had another year of youth football before moving to school ball. In youth football he will get the minimum plays at the very least."

Just one way of putting the spin on things. Finally, since you all went 7-0 playing for you will be attractive to the kids anyhow, especially if the youth guys struggled a bit.

Touchdownmaker makes the best point. Work with your youth programs. We just started a youth team this past year and when the middle school coaches had there meeting with the upcoming 7th graders they told the kids that are still age eligible for the youth club team that they will probably get more playing time at the youth club. In 7th grade they routinely have 100+ kids for 45 spots, and if you are not one of the top 20 athletes you get very little playing time. This is a good relationship because we get many of the kids that are decent athletes and would not be able to break the starting line-up for the MS team. They get solid coaching, improve, and get lots of playing time.

Now I also coach middle school football (8th grade)for a rival district that does not have a good working relationship with a reputable youth club team. We get only 40-50 kids out for our 7th grade team and do not make cuts. Our kids have good coaches at the 7th grade level and all improve. However, we would love to have a reputable youth club to work with and send our bottom 15-20 kids. Our wish would be they would get solid coaching and lots of playing experience for 8th grade football. Our local youth club bad mouths us, although we are successful, and has repeatedly told us they are not interested in our HS or MS staff running clinics for them. They have had losing records for all teams for the last few years and have a very poor reputation. Our HFC tries every year to run clinics for them every year and form a relationship with them.

As far as Dave is concerned MS football in PA is real football. You play by federation rules and there are no weight limits or crazy rules. I run the same offense/defense as the PROGRAM runs that I am part of. Now I have the freedom to run what I want but I run their stuff, because I am part of a PROGRAM. I deal with school rules, player eligibility, and detentions and suspensions. This all builds responsibility for the kids and a level of understanding on what it takes to play for a school team. You can fail every class and be a downright ahole in school and if your parents do not discipline you who says your youth ball coach is going to? You cannot be a discipline problem on my school team because I will tell you to give me your equipment and take a hike (which I have done 3 times over the years). We have rules about detentions (2nd one off of team) and suspensions (1 your done)as well as academic eligibility through the school.

My wish would be that every school district would have a youth club that worked with the district and ran a football program up to where the school program started.

Excellent post there Shotgun 1.....That last sentence, is the way it oughta be los

Sorry for the rant, back to the original question:

try running your ms team just like a real program:
year round touch football and strength and conditioning- kids will choose to be involved, they are in school and will hear about it every day.
tee shirts, video highlights and things like that so it becomes 'show and tell" in the school.

We have the grade eligibility in youth league here as well. They went to it a few years back. I know that some of the kids on the seventh grade team last season were going to tell their teammates from their youth teams to play school ball. We run the same offense as the HS, Wing-t, but have the freedom to put other things in. We used a few four wide plays. We also can use the defense we want, we used 5-3. I don't know about other places, but here we play with special teams and all, and the youth league they have some crazy rules for this like no rush on punts. The first week of practice we put in a punt block and one of the kids said that we couldn't block punts it was illegal. They are also made to run 5-2 defense and I think certain offenses are looked down on. They also only play 6 minute quarters, we play 8. They can also only play teams in the league and cannot travel, we had four road games and the kids got to experience different stadiums, most were the same fields the hs in the towns play on. One was their old field.

I think that some of the draw to youth ball here is the freedom that the players have. Teams are limited to 3 events a week. Sometimes they have 2 games so they can only practice 1 and the practice can only last 1 1/2 hours. There is also the my dad is the coach and I am the star thing. I think that parents should be limited in their participations sometimes. I have seen kids cry because of dad yelling at him on the field. There is also no background needed here to coach youth. All of our ms coaches played in hs and a few in college.

We did the t-shirt thing for everyone on the 7 and 8 grade team and are looking to get shirts for the seventh grade undefeated team. When I was in the seventh grade at the same school, we went undefeated and got jackets. I was really nice to get them and we were proud of them. We also got a big trophy that is still on display at the school.

I don't want to hurt the youth program in town because it is good for the most part. They could do more to improve coaching. There is a list to be a coach, and some of the people on the list are highly qualiifed to coach. Gettting a team is hard, you have to sell your soul pretty much. They have talked about sending coaches to clinics to learn how to coach, but I haven't heard anything about it. When I coached, they mentioned it and when I showed interest, nothing else was said about it.

I know that youth ball is better in other places, but here most of the coaches are just dads that have no clue for the most part. When I played in the league, we scored 1 td the entire season and got yelled at all the time. I only played 2 years then sat out a year before playing ms ball in seventh grade. Our coach was terrible, he knew nothing. One assistant was arrested on the field before one of our games. I played FB, RB, QB, SE, and C all in the same season. It was some of the worst football in my life.

If I can't get the recreation department to help out, how can I convince them that they need to better pick coaches? There are some good coaches they need to keep, but some need to be done away with.

If they only play 6 minute quarters and dont play real football or travel you have a lot to sell. Ive never heard of 6 minute quarters even for the youngest kids. You have a lot of built in advantages. While is is not unusual to have special rules for the youngest kids, by the time the kids are in the 6th grade most leagues are playing with no special rules with the exception of maybe "striped" weight interior linemen For us that weight limit was 170 pounds for 7-8th graders. Over that you play interior line.

But if they feel you are competition you have no chance of influencing how they do things. One way to possibly bridge a gap is to schedule a coaches clinic, dont bother waiting for them. Do it for your own staff and those in surrounding areas ( we do it and invite our closest competitors too).
Have the topics that you feel they need the most help with along with some topics they know absolutely nothing about like speed development.
Ask them to send you anyone that they feel they cant reach or is not a good fit for their program/collaborate to do whats best for the kids. We dont want to exclude anyone from playing if they meet the minimum criteria.
Again, get creative you are in front of these kids way more than the youth program, should be an easy sell if your teams are reasonably competitve.

BTW the local HS here has had 3 different offenses in the last 5 years. If your Varsity guys stick to the same thing, thats great, but here they have gone from Wingbone/Veer attack to Power "I" with option to midseason this year a wide open Spread attack. So that selling point isnt there for everyone. In Omaha I sent kids to 6-7 different HS teams and they did just fine, 2 accepted DI offers to play for Frank Solich at Ohio this Monday. (Jon Lechner and James Davis) another that played Pulling Guard for us will be DI next year at Fullback (Ronnie Coleman) so sometimes they dont even play the same position etc after they pass puberty. In the end the best "football players"end up playing if the Varsity coaches goal is to win games.

Here in New York City the "youth leagues" go up to 18 YO and blend into the adult minor leagues at that end. A large part of that story is that many schools either don't have football or don't have a prominent program. HS football even at the varsity level is a much smaller deal here than it is in most of the country.

Robert