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Post by nltdiego on May 6, 2017 18:44:43 GMT -6
Any programs just do one lower level team?
Pros? Cons?
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Post by **** on May 6, 2017 21:33:19 GMT -6
More kids = more teams
Less kids = less teams
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Post by coachd5085 on May 6, 2017 21:51:17 GMT -6
Any programs just do one lower level team? Pros? Cons? I don't think message board members can really do a pro/con list for your specific situation regarding this particular question. I am not sure a general pro/con list is really applicable, because it seems to me that the ideal situation is to have as many sub varsity teams as possible assuming each team is well staffed with both quality coaches and players. The deciding variables to answer your question are going to be specific to your situation. |
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Post by 19delta on May 7, 2017 10:58:56 GMT -6
In Illinois, most 1a and 2a programs (the two smallest classes in the state) usually field two teams, a varsity program and a frosh-soph program. There usually aren't enough players to field more than that.
As school size increases, there will be more teams. There might be both a freshman and a sophomore team and a junior varsity team and a varsity team.
I attended a big high school in the Chicago suburbs. We fielded 6 full squads. There was a Freshman "A", Freshman "B", Sophomore "A", Sophomore "B", a varsity program and a junior varsity program that was made up of juniors and seniors who didn't start in the varsity game. We probably had 150 boys (9-12) playing football. IIRC, the sophomore "A" team played Friday night before the varsity. Freshman played Saturday morning. The Sophomore "B" team and the JV usually played Monday.
If you have the numbers and can get those kids games, you should field as many teams as you can.
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Post by bluboy on May 8, 2017 5:12:23 GMT -6
We are a school of about 1700(9-12).We have a varsity, junior varsity, sophomore, and freshman team. Some years the sophomore team only plays 5 games as a result of other schools in our league not fielding teams or having to cancel games as a result of numbers issues. If we did not have a sophomore team, it is possible some kids would not play in any game the entire year.
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Post by funkfriss on May 8, 2017 7:42:55 GMT -6
Any programs just do one lower level team? Pros? Cons? We do, only because our numbers dictate it. I don't know if I would say there are any Pros to it. I suppose it is easier on the coaching staff as we don't have to play on Mondays, but I would love to have more kids out so we could have that "problem.". |
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Post by carookie on May 8, 2017 8:38:52 GMT -6
I have been at multiple schools that do this, it really just depends on your numbers. I think in a perfect world, where you have 40+ kids at every grade level coming out and 30 coaches on staff then you'd rather separate them. This would better allow freshman team to focus on introductory fundamentals to the program, whereas the JV team allows non seniors who are not quite on par with the varsity team the opportunity to still get game experience.
Of course this isnt always feasible, I once coached at a school where our frosh/soph team carried 17 players; simply could not field a strictly freshman team. I also coached at a school where our freshman team had over 100 players by itself, and we had to field a 2nd freshman team, no point in doing a frosh-soph squad.
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Post by Coach Vint on May 8, 2017 9:51:02 GMT -6
As stated, it all boils down to numbers and more opportunities. We want as many kids to get game reps as we can. I was at a big school where we had a varsity team, junior varsity, sophomore team, and 3 freshmen teams. Some weeks we played a fourth freshmen game if we could find someone with a C team that wanted to play. For C and essentially D team games the coaches split the referee duties. We had to split our coaches for these games, but it worked well as kids got to play. It is hard to get 40 kids on a freshmen team meaningful reps. But if we play with a team of 22 and a team of 18, they all get to play more, and the 18 play against kids closer to their ability. Our freshmen coaches liked it because they didn't have to figure out how to get the 38th, 39th, and 40th guys in the game.
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Post by windigo on May 15, 2017 11:01:20 GMT -6
When in doubt go with 1 team. The biggest part of the lower level is to get these kids playing together as a team. We are big enough to have 3 levels but we keep ALL freshman on the freshman team no matter how good they are. Its more important that they play together for at least a season than it is to have them playing at the JV level.
If you have your most talented freshmen playing JV while the rest play C-team that will come back to bite you in the ass. In programs that did this I've seen the senior most talented players feel like outsiders because all of their friends had graduated.
That one year of boding at the freshman level as team will pay huge benefits when they are all seniors.
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klaby
Junior Member
Posts: 389
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Post by klaby on Jun 30, 2017 12:08:55 GMT -6
Pros- Your kids at least get to play
Cons- Most of your Frosh will play scared will take a few games to get in the grove.
We have this, and we don't like it, but numbers dictate so we have to use this to play. We would prefer to have frosh playing frosh and Soph play Soph....
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Post by tippecanoe41 on Jun 30, 2017 22:35:00 GMT -6
Any programs just do one lower level team? Pros? Cons? Conference we're in only Varsity and C-team--basically freshmen and sophomores and to get a junior to play on it you have to communicate with other coaches (generally guys who, to be frank, don't have much talent). I can't think of any pros of having only 2 teams instead of 3 teams. There are different cons depending on how you want to do it. We notice the problem is that we have almost enough to have 3 teams if we really stretch things, and we have to set up JV games outside the conference, but if one guy gets dinged up, then you run out of quarters for the kid to play who replaces him and have to figure out how you are going to get through a game with someone who's never actually played QB for instance. But then, really it means that we have too many on our "C-team" so we don't get as many reps for every kid as we'd like. So you are stuck with trying to stay competitive and playing the older guys on the team with more experience (so that kids don't get discouraged about losing) but still wanting to make sure that you get enough reps for freshmen that you keep them excited about football and learning like they should. And either way, with 6 ILB's in 2 ILB spots, it's hard to get enough reps to make everyone happy. This year we're really trying to have just a freshmen team (since we have a freshman class that is big enough for it) and then everyone else be on Varsity (pretty young Varsity team). We are thinking that it will help in the future because if you keep that whole freshmen class as sophomores with more experience you'll have a JV team next year full of suphomores already and start keeping numbers up higher through the program and get guys playing football as much as possible through their careers. What hurts us is like you have a sophomore kid who has to play varsity because there's an injury, let's say, and he's the best RB after the injury. He only plays RB as a sophomore because he's not quite there on being in the rotation on Varsity in his defensive spot. So he misses a year where he could have been doing quality reps at defense in games and a lot of times they don't catch up after that year of missing out on it. |
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