Off Season Teams

I know BDud has a post in his blog about it. Always wanted to try it but never was willing to put the time into it.

We do it and its worth the effort. We have roughly 160 kids in our program. Usually about 30 Seniors, 30 Jrs, 50 Sophs, and 50 Frosh. My coaching staff decides on the best 16 captain candidates, and they can be Juniors or Seniors. We notify those captain candidates, and tell them they must select a co-captain from the opposite varsity class. So if they are a Junior, they must pick a Senior to be their co-captain. We blast the 16 captains on twitter, and then tell them it is first-come, first-served on their co-captain selection. We'll do this during our Spring football week of practice.

Then during finals week, after spring football is over, we will have a "draft." Each captain and co-captain picks (1) Senior or Junior. Then each team picks (2) Sophomores. After those first 3 rounds, all Seniors/Juniors/Sophomores are fair game. After they are all gone, they then pick up to (3) freshmen on their team. They don't usually know the incoming freshmen, so picks range from "kids they've heard about" that are coming to our school, to little brothers or neighbors. I then assign the remaining freshmen to the teams.

Each team captain is responsible for daily roll. If his entire team is there, they get extra "pride points." If someone isn't there, the captain better know why. During our pre-practice dynamic, they are grouped together and each group leads one part of the warmup. At the end of every practice, we have a 10-15 minute competition. It could be anything and it could be unrelated to football completely. Anything you can think of and I'm always looking for new ideas: 4x100 relays, ro-sham-bo tourney, water balloon relay, leap frog relay, tire pulls, 3-legged race, trivia like states-capitals, dodgeball, you name it. They get 3 points for first, 2 points for 2nd, and 1 point for 3rd place each day. All teams that have at least 2 points after Thursday's practice, get to participate in the tug-o-war tourney on Friday. The Tug-O-War's are awesome. If its two-teams, we do traditional tug-o-war. If its 3-teams, we loop ropes through a tire, so that each team has a rope, and they have to pull the tire 10' in their direction. If its 4-teams, same deal, we just loop an extra rope through it.

These competitions make for a BANG at the end of practice. Everyone loves them. It builds program-morale. Seniors have to work with younger kids. It takes care of attendance. Captains have an attendance card they must turn it at the end of every week. The big thing we are trying to improve is to come up with new and creative games all the time. Some that require skill, some for speed, some for size, and some for intelligence.