Post by 19delta on Oct 9, 2010 18:42:49 GMT -6
Winding up my first year as a youth coach after spending the last 10 years coaching high school ball. Here's some of my thoughts:
1) If you are taking over a bad program, the first thing you need to do is find a way to be competitive. For us, that meant running the ball, controlling the clock, limiting the other team's possessions, and not taking risks on defense. There is a WORLD of difference between losing a game 14-6 in which you are in it until the end and a game in which you are getting blown out 36-0 in a game where the defense scores 2-3 TDs on your offense by running back interceptions or fumbles for TDs or has 3-4 extra possessions a half because your QB throws a bunch of clock-stopping incompletions.
2) Lots of junior high kids really don't know anything about the game of football because they don't watch a lot of football. This season, when I used terms like "force player" or "pull", or "backside contain", kids often looked at me like I had a pecker growing out of my forehead. Coming from the high school ranks, I assumed that kids would know certain things when they really didn't.
3) There are a lot of really unathletic and out-of-shape middle school kids. Wow...we had about half of our kids who couldn't even get into and hold a 3-point stance for more than a second or so. We are going to implement a 2-day a week offseason training program that is going to focus on knee and hip mobility in an attempt to loosen these boys up.
4) Youth parents aren't all that different than high school parents. We had a big win against a rival school that the school hasn't beat since Christ was a corporal. The final score was 14-8 and it went down to the very last snap. Anyway, despite the huge win, I had two parents call me and complain that their boys didn't get enough playing time. If these two boys would have played more snaps than they did, we would not have won the game. I KNOW, that had we played those two boys more, we would have lost but there wouldn't have been a squeek out of the parents. Just reinforces my long-held belief that a parent's first priority will ALWAYS be to what mom or dad thinks is best for the kid and not what is best for the team as a whole
5) Along the same lines as #4, I have learned to be brutally honest with parents when they ask me why their boy isn't playing more. When I have gotten those phone calls, I have told parents the truth...the boy can't get into a stance, he's too slow, he can't remember his plays, he isn't aggressive in tackling drills and doesn't like contact, or he doesn't hustle and work hard in practice. The way I look at it, parents should be careful about asking those questions...they need to understand that they might not like the answers they get.
5) In youth ball, less is more. We had a 1-hour walkthrough practice on Monday (games are Tuesday nights) a 90-minute practice on Wednesday, and a 90-minute practice on Thursday. Anything past that, the kids start to wander and we got diminishing returns. Really helped me design efficient practice schedules because I knew we couldn't be wasting time with filler drills. Everything we did in practice had a purpose and built upon the next segment.
6) Along with #5, this goes for offense and defense, as well. Our playbooks were pretty thin, but the kids knew what they were supposed to do. If we would have tried to do more than we did or switched things up every week, the kids would have been really confused.
Just some of my observations. I definitely have a newfound respect for what it is you guys do.
1) If you are taking over a bad program, the first thing you need to do is find a way to be competitive. For us, that meant running the ball, controlling the clock, limiting the other team's possessions, and not taking risks on defense. There is a WORLD of difference between losing a game 14-6 in which you are in it until the end and a game in which you are getting blown out 36-0 in a game where the defense scores 2-3 TDs on your offense by running back interceptions or fumbles for TDs or has 3-4 extra possessions a half because your QB throws a bunch of clock-stopping incompletions.
2) Lots of junior high kids really don't know anything about the game of football because they don't watch a lot of football. This season, when I used terms like "force player" or "pull", or "backside contain", kids often looked at me like I had a pecker growing out of my forehead. Coming from the high school ranks, I assumed that kids would know certain things when they really didn't.
3) There are a lot of really unathletic and out-of-shape middle school kids. Wow...we had about half of our kids who couldn't even get into and hold a 3-point stance for more than a second or so. We are going to implement a 2-day a week offseason training program that is going to focus on knee and hip mobility in an attempt to loosen these boys up.
4) Youth parents aren't all that different than high school parents. We had a big win against a rival school that the school hasn't beat since Christ was a corporal. The final score was 14-8 and it went down to the very last snap. Anyway, despite the huge win, I had two parents call me and complain that their boys didn't get enough playing time. If these two boys would have played more snaps than they did, we would not have won the game. I KNOW, that had we played those two boys more, we would have lost but there wouldn't have been a squeek out of the parents. Just reinforces my long-held belief that a parent's first priority will ALWAYS be to what mom or dad thinks is best for the kid and not what is best for the team as a whole
5) Along the same lines as #4, I have learned to be brutally honest with parents when they ask me why their boy isn't playing more. When I have gotten those phone calls, I have told parents the truth...the boy can't get into a stance, he's too slow, he can't remember his plays, he isn't aggressive in tackling drills and doesn't like contact, or he doesn't hustle and work hard in practice. The way I look at it, parents should be careful about asking those questions...they need to understand that they might not like the answers they get.
5) In youth ball, less is more. We had a 1-hour walkthrough practice on Monday (games are Tuesday nights) a 90-minute practice on Wednesday, and a 90-minute practice on Thursday. Anything past that, the kids start to wander and we got diminishing returns. Really helped me design efficient practice schedules because I knew we couldn't be wasting time with filler drills. Everything we did in practice had a purpose and built upon the next segment.
6) Along with #5, this goes for offense and defense, as well. Our playbooks were pretty thin, but the kids knew what they were supposed to do. If we would have tried to do more than we did or switched things up every week, the kids would have been really confused.
Just some of my observations. I definitely have a newfound respect for what it is you guys do.
