Earning Your Helmet Decal/Logo

We always figured that if you made the varsity squad, you earned your logo. JV and Frosh don't wear the logo.

If you're a JV and played in one varsity game, you earned it.

If you were varsity and moved down to JV, you still wear the logo.

We did a points system where the kids earned points for playing other sports, getting on the honor roll, showing up to weights, camps, etc. To get your stickers you had to achieve 66% of the available points. If you didn't get that % you could make the points up by running 1 40yd dash for every point you were short.

After the first year, I don't think we ever went into the 1st game without having a kid have stickers.

I was an assistant on a team several year ago on a mid sized school in Kansas, a new HC came in and wanted to do something for kids to be held accountable for summer attendance (weights and football activities). So you had to meet a certain percentage of summer activities to get a helmet decal for the season. It got most kids there in the summer. However there was a super athletic kid that decided to come out 2 weeks before football started. He was a stud...but no decals and of course neither did about 10% of the team. The AD let it ride for the season, but told the HC after the season that it is not a great look, there was a lot of grumbling in the stands that we looked like the Little Giants that could not afford to have all of our kids with decals. The AD knew the reason, but still said it was not a great look. So we did not do that again, I think the next year he got an award decal with a barbell on it for those who made it to a certain percentage in the summer.

My opinion on this has changed over the years, mainly because it's a battle I've lost on a few occasions. Ten years ago, I would've stated "absolutely, make 'em earn the logo and also make off-season participation a part of the lettering process." But, I got my butt handed to me with these types of policies and it didn't improve the program.

Currently we honor the kids' off-season participation in the off-season. Those that make 80% of lifting sessions and/or participate in another sport get a t-shirt. Those that make 100% get a nice sweatshirt. Those are dished out right before the first day of practice in August.

With numbers-participation in Football dropping almost everywhere I don't understand why coaches would do more things to drive kids away.

Then why not just show up on the first day of practice?

Giant professional football players also used to be 6'2 and 270lbs. They did offseason conditioning by selling Buicks.

We use summer conditioning as a way to determine who get their equipment first. They are allowed to miss 3 days during the summer. We have built in extra days where they can earn days incase they have to miss an extra day or two. But we start with the 12th graders who made the days get their equipment first. Then 11th and work down to the 9th graders. Then we start over with the seniors who didn't get the days and work back down.

I will say we are blessed. The coach before me kept up on the up keep of the equipment and I'm trying to do my best as well. So we don't have players get equipment that is beat up or out dated.

I wanted to do something similar, but didn't want to look like rubes having however many kids with no decals. We also changed helmet decals. We went to a FSU style spear on the sides. All varsity got this. But you had to earn the school logo on the back, ala Oregon's O. So that worked pretty good. We are not a very traditional football school and so football was not very important here. Not sure how much motivation it was, but I think it has potential, particularly as the program builds. The spears were white and blue and the logo was Red (on a white helmet) so it really stood out.

I had them earn their stripes. Stripe down middle of helmet. I had them have to make 30 workouts during summer. Our state has put a cutoff on workouts down to 25 now.