Poor rural schools

I've coached in a place like this.  School had enrollment of about 400, but usually struggled badly with numbers.  We also played against some similar schools:

The main reasons they struggled were:

1.  Hard to get and keep good coaches.  If they were lucky, they had a HC who knew what he was doing and he was on his own.  Then all the small town politics were even more intense there because of how isolated the place was.

2.  Basketball program hoarded all the athletes.  The basketball coaches there were often fairly successful, which gave them credibility when they'd tell kids to focus on basketball and that they'd suffer gruesome injuries playing football.  As a result, a lot of the best athletes in a very limited talent pool wouldn't touch a football field.

3.  Isolated geography.  Usually, small schools like this would have already been consolidated into larger schools if the geography allowed it.  As it was, these small schools were in extremely rural areas and transportation to and from weights and practice was a major problem when kids lived an hour away from the school.  10-15 kids could make it work for basketball, but you need a lot more for football.  The time commitment all that extra travel added also made it more stressful on kids who lived further away.

4.  Poverty.  Rural poor is desperate poor.  A lot of kids had to work to support their families or they'd miss weights and workouts to do odd jobs so their family didn't get evicted.  Maybe they were tied up doing farm work, or rebuilding an engine, or doing random odd jobs.  They just had bigger things to worry about than 80% attendance at workouts or whatever.

5.  Culture of failure.  All of that had combined to create a mindset in the community and in the kids that they were supposed to suck, could never be any better, and that the things that kept them bad (kids missing tons of practice, kids skipping the offseason but still playing because they were the best athletes and the team needed them due to low numbers) was acceptable.

6.  Little-to-no feeder system.  A lot of kids would never play football until they got to HS and it would take them at least a year to acclimate to the contact and learn the basic techniques of blocking, tackling, etc.  The feeder school usually was lucky to get 15 kids on the team and if there was a youth program, it was usually terrible and poorly run/coached, which turned kids off to football.

As for your questions...

Fundraising in places like that can be brutal.  At the school I was at, the school board had decided that homecoming and other big fundraising events couldn't be used and everybody was way underfunded, so you had a very poor population group that was constantly getting hit up for money by kids in every club or activity because they all needed cash.  People only had so much to give.  Lift-a-thons didn't make much.  Pizza sales lost money.  Etc.

The only things we found that worked were little events like selling banners for the stadium, car washes, selling team merchandise, selling season tickets, renting a dunk tank for the 4th of July celebration downtown, and raffles.  The best fundraisers for things like that were when the coaches would take it upon themselves to go and do some type of extra work (like working concessions at an SEC school's basketball games over an hour away) and then donate that to the kids.  It was just tough.

Attracting assistants is damn near impossible in places like that, especially with admin under increased scrutiny to deliver test scores.  Odds are that if the school was supportive of football in the first place, they'd already have better numbers and records.  There are few jobs to go around and, IME, those places usually give those jobs to people based almost purely on nepotism and/or testing needs.  Coaching is an afterthought so you're left trying to recruit whatever you can recruit from the staff or community to help you out.  You're lucky if you can find 1 or 2 guys, and if you can get a good coach in the building he's likely to bolt in a year or two for a better job elsewhere.

Getting a lifting class in places like that can be like pulling teeth because the school has a very limited budget and a lot of courses that need to be taught.  Even if you can get the class, it can be difficult to get kids in there or get control of it--often they'll hand that to a PE teacher who may or may not know or care about lifting.    If you can get it, great... but don't hold your breath.  You're likely to have to do all your lifting after school, and certain days (Fridays and, for us, Wednesdays due to mid-week church) can be hard to get kids out.  Do it 2-4 days per week year-round and keep it consistent, calling kids' homes when they start missing weights just to check on where they were (because, in our state, i can't be "mandatory").  Try to make it fun for them when they are there.

All of that stuff goes hand in hand with getting up the numbers.  Some stuff we did...

We challenged our kids to recruit their friends.  They'll always be your best recruiters.  Our QB was pretty good and agreed to play basketball if some of the basketball players would come out for football, which helped greatly.

We worked very hard to build relationships with kids in the school--especially at the feeder school--and sell them on coming out by talking up how much fun it was going to be.  I don't care if he was dorky, fat, or unathletic looking... if he was a boy we hit him up to play and made sure he knew we were cool to work with.

Keep practices and weight sessions as brief, organized, and positive as possible.  Yelling at kids through marathon practices while you channel your inner Bear Bryant is not going to help get and keep kids out.

Block and Tackle and hsrose- I was going to say the same-are you coaching here? Numbers for football are hurting in all the small, rural schools. Many, including us, are trying to merge FB programs. That would help us tremendously. Fundraisers are tough just like you guys said. BB concentration is another area tough to battle.

most of the kids who work, are selling, runners, sucking ( i wont finish that)...in bad company. But flipping burgers, going by a schedule? That aint happening.

Some good stuff guys.Please keep it coming! I realize that a lot of these programs have a lot of challenges. I've just never been a big believer in that you can't be successful at a program. There are certain exceptions (Admin, conference), but I don't feel like socioeconomics is a reason. Certainly it creates difficulties, but not an acceptable excuse.

I think you still try and get HUDL but stick with a basic package. Don’t worry about sideline, assist, and all that stuff.

2 things. Blockandtackle-Practice plans became more of a tentative outline than a script. This has been absolutely true. At the more affluent, big school I was at for 20 years-we stuck to the script much more.

Also, making weights important brought lots of kids together (not all yet). This is my 3rd year and we won 2 my first, 3 my 2nd and 6 this season and qualified for sectionals. Strength levels have been clearly shown (recorded on a big white board in the weight room) to have improved drastically so a direct correlation. Plus they like being stronger than everyone else. We have 3 levels for anyone to achieve. Our colors-white, blue, gold. If they get white it's a T-shirt. Blue is a long sleeved shirt and gold is a hoodie. Many are very motivated to get "free" stuff just from getting stronger.

I've taught and coached in rural areas for the majority of my career and blockandtackle nailed the struggles in his post. I'll expand a little bit:

1. It's feast or famine when it comes to multiple sport participation. Either the school has a tradition of multiple sport excellence as it's all the kids do or they specialize in one sport. Generally speaking, basketball is king in these rural areas and the kids tend to specialize. This isn't a battle one can typically win for a variety of reasons.

2. Tradition, tradition, tradition (or lack thereof..). The "glory days" guide some of these communities in athletics and it doesn't matter if those days were forty years ago. That is the standard that the coaching staff will be held to in some of these schools. Or it goes the other way: "We've never been good at football and we never will be." If you can turn the corner and win some games, you hope that it'll spark some interest and bring more kids into the program and weight room. But, it really only takes one chitty season for the tradition to go south again.

3. The farming/ranching lifestyle HAS to factor into your thought process. If a kid misses practices because there's an issue on the farm/ranch, then you'd better consider that an "emergency". Because it probably is; the family needs the hand and the kid has to be there. FFA and 4H programs are dominant in these areas as well and you just can't compete with them so you'd better work with them. Kids are going to miss practices for FFA and 4H events and you need to be kosher with that as these programs have a strong community, extracurricular and academic presence.

I am in this situation NOW. We are a very small rural school which is made up of students from two neighboring towns. Total high school enrollment...49. We play 8 man and we barely made it through the season. We had to forfeit 4 games. With injuries and people joining then quitting, I had 2 seniors, 4 juniors, 1 freshman, and 1 sophomore at the end of the season. We have no JV team and don't even have enough for a MS team.

At this point, I'm not real sure what we can do about fundraising. I did the Gatorade deal when I was the powerlifting coach at another school which had about 190 students. That school also plays 8 man, but they have much greater resources than where I'm at now. When I left that school two years ago, a business person in the town bought them almost $15,000 worth of new weight room equipment.

Hopefully, we can get a grant. We need new uniforms. Kids buy their home jerseys and it's now reached the point that we wont have enough for next season.

This was my first season as HC there. It certainly has been a challenge and my team has certainly had to overcome a lot of adversity.

Obviously, first priority is strengthening the kids that I have. Then, we have to figure out how to get more of the 25 or so boys in the school to participate.

Deciding if you're willing to live in a poor rural area or drive an hour each way is not a small consideration.

As others have said, it's not about full contact practice so much as it is lacking the numbers to even go 11 on 11 AND also having insane mismatches or incompetence on scout that make it more of a liability than a tool.

You can mitigate the lack of numbers somewhat by focusing on half-line and group periods, which is what you have to do, but you still wind up with stuff like running 7 on 7 with OL as DBs or doing an inside run drill with WRs as OL.  Not only are the players physically mismatched (and usually you're stuck relying on some who can't read a scout card or be trusted to even go the right direction), but they don't know the techniques of the scout positions they're playing and it gives a terrible practice look.

In some of the places in our state that are 6-12 or K-12, the "JV" may actually be MS kids and you might even have 8th graders starting on varsity out of necessity.  Now picture how weak the non-starters must be to not be able to beat out the 8th grade/freshman starters and picture those kids getting clobbered by your better senior players each day.

Then you get the days where you come to practice and you don't have a single QB, or you run a 4-3 defense but only have 1 LB there that day.  Then the next day you're missing 3 of the 7 healthy OL you've got.  Etc.  It gets frustrating.

Have you really been to a small school? Talking about 75 kids through 9-12, or dealt with getting supplies was like having to rob a bank? Heck, there are schools smaller than that. Not having enough paint so that had to paint every 10 yards from 20 to 20 then every 5 on in to end zone. People on here talk like here is what I do. How about you just go do it. One, don't buy because chances are you won't be there long. Pay is usually terrible. You'll piss someone of on school board, administration, town, whatever and they will be after you. You'll have 6 or 7 different preps that you have to plan for. Rather than talk about it do it. Ive had some great times and also been places that they should have burnt the place down. Go do it and get your hands dirty. Then talk about it.

I haven't. I felt like I said that in my last post. My post said rural and poor. It did not say anything about small. My original post even says 500 to 600 kids. There is only three schools in my state that plays football with an enrollment of less than 200, and one of them  is the school of the deaf. So that would make it a little difficult to "go do it". I like to try to be prepared. So when I do take that step, I want to have ideas of fundraisers for these types of areas, ways to build a staff in a rural setting, the best way to create a schedule where players will likely have to work, and recruit kids from areas like this. I apologize for asking a forum for ideas before I just "go do it". I tip my hat to coaches (I assume like yourself) that supply kids in areas like you described with an opportunity to play this great sport. It is Friday during playoff football, and we are still playing. So I'll have a great Friday, I hope you do the same!