Going from head varsity to 70lb

Sounds like a great plan...but in reality your genuine concern to try to expose the kids to all facets of the game may end up with your team getting crushed by experienced youth coaches who understand the methodology of youth football.

It seems like you are looking things from your "old eyes" and perspective. From the point of view of a Varsity H.S coach thinking how great it would be to have kids slowly develop and learn fundamentals of all positions for 5 and 6 years and how that will benefit their H.S. careers. I am not sure that results in great "right now" experiences

I remember ages ago (didn't even have a color tv) I was on a neighborhood youth soccer team before youth soccer really got big. We were "fortunate" to have a family from England in the neighborhood, and the dad had former International Playing and Coaching Experience. WE GOT CRUSHED!!!! He was busy trying to teach us the game, position, technique, fundamentals etc... and we were getting ripped every week by other 6 and 7 year olds who were just playing "bunch ball" and scoring by mass.

I would highly recommend DC's book - winning youth football. Discusses lots of issues pertaining to youth football outside x's & o's (which you have down already).

Matt

Yes, I think its very realistic and something we did at the start of every new season for the first couple weeks.....its not so much teaching every player,every position....but exposing every player to enough of the basic generic football fundamentals, so that they could "in a pinch", play most any position and do an adequate job.......we used a stations or county fair type deal,with each station covering a different basic fundamental.......whether it be ball handling/security.......stance/get offs.....tackling.....different types of blocking....basic pass routes....different football related agilities, just whatever you think is important, can be included in a station......the first couple weeks of our pre-season we practiced 4 days a week(mon-thur)2 hours a day, so the drills for each station would be changed on a daily basis to keep practice interesting for the coach's and players and teach the kids a wider variety of basic skills.....every player in our program went thru this yearly pre-season deal, reguardless of the position they wanted to try out for.....experience they had......talent level, etc.....they all learned the same basic stuff initially, before we ever split up into teams or assigned a position. The more versatile and knowledgeable a youth player is when he leaves your program, the better it will be for him, cause you don't know how a kids gonna turn out when he gets older.

Unless you were just looking for a psychologic boost, I don't see how you could've gotten a good answer without the data I asked for. Youth football teams can differ by five-fold as to the amount of pre-season practice they get, and three-fold in-season, and they can also differ severalfold as to the number of players they get. And depending on those numbers, the answer to your question can be a clear yes, a clear no, or a definite maybe.

What I got form the posts is it is realistic to teach the basic fundamantals of every position to every kids but when it comes time for competition / schemes it is best to have a kid play where they will experience the most success.

I like the skill station approach to start each practice. As skills develop for less experienced players they can be put in different/more roles.

I have no idea what type of assistnats I will have but if I have a few consistant guys I am confident that I can "coach the coaches" on basic fundamentals necessary to run a station.

Coach that's it in a nutshell. I had a ex HS coach take over our 8 yo team this year and he wanted to do the same thngs you were talking about. He even wanted the kids to rotate positions during the game constantly. Well he got a rude awakening after the first scrimmage that it wasn't such a good idea

[glow=red,2,300]"What I don't understand is why the original poster hasn't yet posted the darn numbers! This is not that complicated.[/glow]
I have no idea how many players I will have. It's February & the team being 70 lbs a very large majority will be 1st year players. They wont sign up until the summer time. So it is that complicated.

I don't understand you logic on assistant coaches either. If I have 20 kids and 10 can go w/ a qualified assistant coach and learn ball handling fundamentals and 10 can be with me learning 3 point stance and get off it decreases the student to teacher ratio maximizing learning and allows more individual attention. Players can than switch and get more out of the 30 minutes of practicing than me teaching both skills to 20 kids at one time.

Bob

Why does everything have to turn into rocket science with you?

You must be a rocket scientist.

Coach Mike

Coach that's exactly what I was thinking when I made my statement. As a HS coach I'm sure you would be able to convey the basic teaching fundamentals to your assistants.

Coach...instead of thinking about "every player every position", break into to a more manageable situation. On offense day, your skill guys learn qb, rb and maybe even some receiver skills. Your bigger kids learn line technique or fundamentals.

The same group of kids will probably be together on defense day. QB, RB etc. are probably your DB's, o-line is probably d-line. What I am getting at is that even with 2 coaches,you could handle 20-25 kids easily. If you have more coaches, you could go over the same things, just in smaller groups.

I coached youth for years, and we were very successful. About 20-25 each year on our squad with 2 coaches. Just make sure the learn how to do the basics very well and the rest is gravy.

We have here an odd situation where we need to calculate something, but the person asking hasn't supplied the data and the people trying to answer are bringing in factors that are peripheral at best to the question, which was whether, on a given team, to teach 7 YOs more than one football positions in a season, and if so, how many positions? Not whether it's a good or bad idea in gen'l, but whether this coach should attempt it this year with this team.

Given enough time and interest on the student's part, you can teach not only football, but baseball, judo, swimming, Spanish, knot tying, and the accordion. So let's look at the time and interest factors separately.

Given that the kids are interested enough to be taking up football at all, how much att'n will they devote to learning a 2nd, 3rd, etc. position? When I was coaching a bunch who were older and more sophisticated, they weren't too enthusiastic when I was rotating them all thru the role of passer when it was obvious So-And-So was their best passer. I tried to impress on them that in our offense the passing could come from many positions. But really, I didn't want So-And-So, who was a prima donna, to get the idea he had QB sewn up, and also we didn't have enough players attending practice to really divide up by position anyway.

7 YOs will be much less sophisticated, so their main motivation (or that of their families) in their learning the skill of a 2nd position will be whether it will get them more playing time. That's going to depend on how many players you have.

If your number of players is low, they will mostly go both ways, so they'll be learning at least 2 positions anyways, one on offense, one on defense. With 7 YOs chances are great that there'll be either no kicking allowed at all or that the kicking game will be very attenuated by rule, so we'll leave kicking downs out of consideration. If your game is significantly competitive, count on anywhere from 15% to 40% of your players as minimum play, i.e. those whose play you'll want to minimize so as to avoid messing up the whole team. That means you may have 13 to 18 players before getting more than 11 who you'd want to play both ways, so except for the need to fill in for injuries or absences, no player would gain playing time by learning a 2nd offensive or defensive position. You'd have to have 26 to 36 players before getting to the point where you'd have a solid 22 of primarily 1-way players where learning a 2nd position on offense or defense would likely give a player extra playing time. Between 18 and 26 players, you might not automatically coach them 2-way, and therefore learning a 2nd position might improve a player's chances of gaining playing time, mostly going from defense to offense & vice versa. Given the typical numbers of players on such teams and the fact that you might treat them as instructional more than competitive to begin with, meaning you would not minimize anyone's play time, you can usually rule out extra playing time as a motivator for learning a 2nd position.

But that's OK, because to most 7 YOs, practice is just about as much fun as games. Any way you look at it, they'll be just as glad to learn a 2nd, 3rd, etc. position as their 1st.

So that leaves time as the remaining determinant. When I teach a course, the first thing I need to know is the calendar that I have to work around. That's going to determine how much can be put into the course. As I wrote above, no number of extra coaches can increase their learning beyond a certain point in a given amount of hours.

It's possible to calculate how much time learning extra positions will take as a fraction of the time needed for learning one position (or as will likely be the case, 2 positions -- one on offense, one on defense). You have to look at how much different the positions are from each other. seagull73 already was categorizing football at that level into a small number of equivalent positions. I wouldn't say it's that simple, but that's the right idea. If you were to coach someone at one position and someone at the other, how much of the skills you'd be teaching would be identical?

That's going to be influenced in part by your choice of systems, especially the offense. If I wanted to be mostly competitive and only somewhat instructional with 7 YOs I'd be tempted to just install the beast offense and never teach handoffs, pitchouts or passes of any kind. That alone would simplify things enormously. It would be easier to spread the ball around by rotating players thru the RB posititon than it would be to coach ball exchanges; if I wanted to get really radical I might put in a snap to the closest blocking back and maybe a pass of some kind. The line would block first opponent away from the POA, and blocking backs take care of any defender left in the hole, so positions on the line other than snapper would be practically interchangeable. Much of OL skill would be interchangeable with DL skill, since a lot of it is getting off fast on the snap and keeping the right body position for leverage. Everyone on defense is going to need to know how to tackle and pursue and line up appropriately against the offense, but the line needs more skill at fighting off blocks.

So the point is that teaching an extra position to the same degree of proficiency as the first will take less time, and depending on your system can be made to take much less time, than teaching the first, and if your players are going both ways anyway (meaning they're already learning 2 positions), which they probably will be, the overlap in skill with a position they're already learning will be that much the greater.

But how much time is it going to take to learn even their primary position for 7 YO beginners? Let's assume it's actually going to be 2 primary positions because they'll need to play both ways. If they haven't had at least 12 suited-up practice sessions of 90 minutes each and won't have at least 10 more, regardless of where you are in the season or pre-season, I'd say you'd be hard pressed to teach a 3rd position. If you have enough players to play them 1 way, then I'd say the minimum number of sessions could be cut down to 8 before you would consider adding a 2nd position.

The number of "extra" practice sessions required for the added positions is greater than just the extra hours you'll need to teach the extra positions, because the players will still need to keep up their skills in their original positions, so it's not like they're going to just practice their secondary positions straight thru. Once the season starts, it may be difficult to fit in practice at an extra position given the frequency at which they'll still need to practice their previous position(s). So it's not just the hours but the frequency of sessions that matter.

The calendars/schedules and total time afforded for youth football vary enormously from one organiz'n to another, which is why it's vital to get this info.

That was my take as well

Yep..that is pretty much all it really was. No need to calculate anything.

I think coachd5085 hit the nail on the head. This doesn't need to be a complex calculation. The OP simply wanted to know if it's a good idea to try to teach all the players on a young team all the positions.

IMHO, I emphatically believe that it is NOT a good idea. A lot of real young kids don't know anything about football, so they will do much better with only having to learn one position and just a few techniques. Once they become successful with that, then they will start to develop enough confidence to learn other things. I have seen dozens of coaches over the years try the "teach all the kids all the positions" strategy, and I've never seen it succeed once - what generally happens is none of the kids really master any one thing, and with a revolving door at every position, they never really gel as a team. The kids get frustrated, don't have any success and end up playing soccer the next year. I know it sounds great in theory to expose the kids to as much as possible, and I'm not saying it can't be done (and I know that a number of kids will have to know multiple positions due to the number of players you typically have on a youth roster), but I don't think it is sound strategy for the vast majority of youth coaches, especially coaches new to the youth ranks.

The more experienced and naturally talented players will have to learn 2 or 3 (or maybe even more) positions, but the weaker players should be given as little as possible so that they have the best opportunity possible to become successful at what you're asking them to do.