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Post by bobgoodman on Apr 24, 2024 8:01:06 GMT -6
Storage for everything is also underrated. Football has a lot of gear, needs to be stored properly in the offseason. So, in building storage and on field storage. And secure with access you can trust! I asked for a chute at a club where I was coaching, and the president said they used to have one but it disappeared. Since they had their own storage locker, I can only imagine this meant an inside job or that someone had accessed it after hours and neglected to put it away.
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Post by bobgoodman on Apr 18, 2024 8:15:32 GMT -6
Unless you are paying for Zoom they have a 45 min max meeting time. Google Meet has a 1 hour limit if more than 2 are connected. But there's a loophole: If the original organizer signs off and then gets back in, no more time limit regardless of how many are connected. Frames are more or less missing when someone receives a video stream and shares it in the meeting.
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Post by bobgoodman on Apr 14, 2024 8:26:06 GMT -6
There are various ways you could couch it, depending on the job: - instruction
- work with children or adolescents
- organization
- supervision of subordinates
- planning
- presentation
- travel and working at remote sites
- research
- data gathering and organizing
- outdoor work
- real-time communication
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Post by bobgoodman on Apr 9, 2024 5:41:20 GMT -6
how do you call with or without a split end in your play call? It's not in the play call, but is in the play book. Before they huddle, you'd already have the correct players on the field. The pulling guard would be on the left. The left end is split. Yes. As I wrote, the default "call" for everything would be a null tag, i.e. silence. So yes, there's a "normal" formation for which no words need be spoken. Wing T, slightly "flavored". Most of the teams in our program, and in our league, start using man in motion around 9U. I want to use rocket (with the HB) and jet (with the WB) with a motion start. Mostly our teams have used WB motion for belly sweep and counters. Some motion the WB to be like a HB for buck sweep series the opposite way. When we've had more passing -- and many teams in our league base out of shotgun or pistol at all ages -- motion can be to change receiver strength. I don't expect to use motion for all those purposes, but just to say it's feasible with kids that age. My experience in coaching some places has been that some defenses do, some don't. However, in this league they mostly do. There've been times where we've been unbalanced on offense by mistake, when the ends get the formation call wrong. (We've been using a 3 digit system, the first indicating the formation.) It usually wasn't a pass play, but if we wound up in "end over", there's no eligible receiver numbering, it's all by position, so tackle eligible plays are possible. With the number of officials we have, an ineligible receiver downfield call (because both nominal ends lined up on the same side) is almost impossible to draw. However, given our running success on many of those accidental unbalanced line plays, I've wanted to put in unbalanced on purpose -- but guard over, rather than end over, to take advantage of the positioning of the pulling specialist and have a possibly better blocker on the edge. Everything is an opportunity for mistakes. In sidesaddle T, the jet/fly is supposed to be a high speed reach-take exchange, where I coached the WB to "steal" the ball from the QB. I also coached belly to use a different, hip-to-hip handoff form from the dive handoff, which was more ball-extended.
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Post by bobgoodman on Apr 9, 2024 4:55:53 GMT -6
if you go to and watch somebody else's game, is that scouting? how would they enforce that? Based on complaints. When I started with this league, it was that no electronics would be allowed to record other teams, so technically you couldn't exchange HUDL clips. Then they saw me with a clipboard taking notes on other teams' warmups, and they extended the ban to all scouting. I think the idea is that they want everyone's coaching staff to concentrate on teaching their own team, and not to sacrifice anyone to reporting on others.
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Post by bobgoodman on Apr 8, 2024 14:40:21 GMT -6
You want too many tools. Everyone keeps telling you this. pick a few tools and do it. And then see how it works. You can add more next year- But planning for all of this in year one of your first ever attempt at doing this is just stubborn to the detriment of the children Trust me, I think every coach here “gets it”. We would all love to be able to have vast tools to use. I am struggling with the same thing on my quest. SOOOO MANY fun possibilities. But I know if I try and execute- we will be less successful than if I keep it much smaller I have choices to make. One of the cruel irony of those that enjoy the schematics of football is that when you have the ability to be extremely multiple, most of the time your talent doesn’t require it and when your talent is such that you want to try to use many different tools, they usually are not good enough to execute. agreed. one of the hardest things in coaching is keeping all the things you want to do in check, and paring it down to a practical, usable package that kids can remember and execute. because we ALL want the capability to be extremely multiple and do lots and lots of things. making some of those choices are like pulling teeth. Most of those choices will be a lot easier because they needn't be made all at once, but as the situation arises. Some choices will be dictated by others. So for instance if we find out neither the 1st nor 2nd string player at a position can throw the ball without hitting his own helmet, all the pass plays from that position are dropped. If a starter usually trips over himself on his first step to either the left or the right, then either the regular or the flipped version of that play is out the window. If players at a couple positions can't help but false start if the snap count goes past "go", then all the motions and motion-dependent plays are dropped. We'll start practicing the thrown snap along with the handed snap from the beginning, but the thrown snap plays don't go in until we're ready -- and if that's never, so be it. if the pulling guard is over the weight limit for ballcarriers, and doesn't look like he'll make that weight all season, all the plays for him to carry the ball are moot. And forget about putting something in because it looks good against a particular opponent -- our league bans scouting!
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Post by bobgoodman on Apr 8, 2024 14:18:08 GMT -6
Doesn't seem like that many tools to me.
Formation with or without a split end -- depending on who's in, and mostly to adjust to who's on the roster. Line balanced or unbalanced; unbalanced is with the pulling guard over and the split end on the long side. And then these can be normal (strong right) or flipped (everyone mirrored left-right). So it's 6 formations, but most of the players just have to know who they're next to. Only one guard will be a puller -- the same one, wherever he's lined up.
3 motions -- 2 for the wingback, 1 for the halfback. Of course these are mirrored too, so you might count them as 6.
2 snaps -- handed or thrown (blind). Snap can be on "set", "go", or a number.
1 form of handoff. That's significant, because in a somewhat similar offense years ago I taught 3 different handoff forms.
4 pass routes, but no position will need to know more than 2.
Blocking is where I'll splurge, with several forms: hands, shoulder, and side of body for crab blocking. I might teach a cut below the waist too.
One form for overhand passes, and another for pitch and shovel.
And then blocking steps, for which I'll have a few forms, depending what they can handle.
Mixing and matching may make it seem like a lot of tools. Defense is where I expect to have more individual tools.
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Post by bobgoodman on Apr 8, 2024 8:59:56 GMT -6
fb games shouldn't have bb scores. I wouldn't mind having basketball scores if the other team has baseball scores.
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Post by bobgoodman on Apr 8, 2024 8:50:20 GMT -6
hard to answer that. first of all, i know nothing about youth football, and i never coached 10 year olds. second, i don't know your offense, formations, etc... figuring out good ways to simplify it would require some familiarity. what could work in one system might not help in another system. looks like you already figured out one way to shorten it. i would say, keep thinking of other possible ways. one of the problems i see might be eliminated simply because of my unfamiliarity with youth football. do you send the plays in? does the qb have to call it? or is the coach in the huddle at this level to call the play? having a qb that can handle repeating that call at that age, and kids that could take the play in to relay the play call without screwing it up would be pretty unusual, i would think. it needs to be something they can easily remember and repeat. our jh kids at any school i coached at could not have done that. not sure our hs kids could have. i would think - formation, (tag if needed), play (tag if needed), snap count. and the formation and play tags would not be all that frequent. so usually, the call would be formation, play, snap count. unless you just planned on using a particular formation or play tag a lot for that particular opponent that week, to take advantage of something they do. and that may be what you're doing. again, those are things i don't know. and, just my opinion - if you have all that in your offense, it sounds to me like way too much offense for that age. i would suggest throwing a lot of it out. again, that's just me. i operate on the kiss principle. also, keep this in mind- my earlier reply was mostly just me being a smartass and poking fun at myself, because i'm retired and bored. you may have a lot better suggestions in all the other replies, but i couldn't stay awake reading thru all of them. but you almost never go wrong going the simple route. regardless of the level you're coaching He’s just gonna argue with you and do it his way. Doesn’t really matter that your points are good. No, I'm looking for informed advice. I've never had a team where the play calls were done modular style -- except partly modular if you go by the digits of a 3-digit play call. But I've often thought they should have been modular, especially if we were flipping formation left and right. The pro is that modular allows the players to easily extract what they need for their assignment, and allows a complete range of the possible combinations. The con is that many of the possible combinations would never be used. But I'm thinking we'd want to use more combinations than you might think. For instance, I'd like to use motion away from the play as a diversion a lot. (For instance, rocket motion away from belly -- sacrifice the lead blocker for misdirection.) And since the default for most of the tags would be null, only a few possible play combinations would be lengthy.
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Post by bobgoodman on Apr 7, 2024 9:35:59 GMT -6
Picking the longest I could construct for this system: Flip, guards over, and ends over are formation calls: Flip: Mirror the formation left-right. Everyone flips. The opposite of "flip" is no tag. Guards over: The pulling guard (there's only one, keeps 2-point stance) plays inside the other guard on the same side. No tag means the line's balanced. No "tackles over" tag. Ends over: The tight and split ends trade. I just thought "over" could be said a little faster than "trade" in a signal call even though it's an extra syllable.
Rocket is a motion call. It sends the tailback into rocket motion to the strong side. There'll be "fly" and "blimp" calls for the wingback. Maybe "glider" for the quarterback. The "r" and "l" in the words mean "right" and "left" respectively, but just the opposite if "flip" is on. We expect to flip only a minority of the time.
Direct tells the center to snap between the quarterback's legs.
20 series mostly tells the quarterback, fullback, and tailback what to do. It's an extension of the wing T 20 series. However, with "direct" the quarterback isn't going to be taking his usual steps, though the fullback does, and "rocket" is already telling the tailback what to do.
1 is where the play is going -- the point of attack. The hole numbers flip with the players left/right.
Trap tells the pulling guard what to do. In this case it's "trap the opponent past the 1 hole", which really means the guard is the outside blocker on a sweep. We'll call any pull-and-out block a "trap". If the POA is from 2 thru 8, it's telling the other linemen to block down or away from the play direction.
Pass tells ineligible receivers not to go downfield. This tag will be the way of calling play-action passes, but there'll also be a "pass" series that'll mostly be about the routes.
One is the snap count, calling out that actual word. The cadence will be, "Ready, set, go, one, two, three...." "Go" starts the motion. We can snap on anything but "ready"; if we snap on "set", the whole line will be in 2-point, otherwise the line except the pulling guard will be 3-point. If we snap on "go" of course there's no motion.
All this may be preceded by a personnel tag, though that'll be called first and in advance of the actual play call, so nobody will have to keep it in mind once the right players are on the field.
The advantage of the long play call is that the players don't have to memorize much once the play starts. They'll have blocking rules, and they should line up knowing what to do without having to remember a list of plays. The disadvantage is that whoever gets the signal and relays in the play in the huddle is going to have to remember this long list of words during that interval. Keep in mind that most play calls will be shorter, like "24 on go".
I've thought about adding an overall description at the end of the call, but I don't want to have a redundant name like that for every play.
haven't really read all the replies to the original question, but- i figure i'm probably about the same mentality now as a 10 year old, so -yes. it's too long. What's the maximum number it should ever be? I already decided to ditch "ends over" and "guard over" for just plain "over" to mean both.
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Post by bobgoodman on Mar 20, 2024 6:58:07 GMT -6
If I had freedom to conduct such things, I'd rather break at least pre-season into 2 sessions per day for two reasons: 1. Learning is better when it's separated into sessions with a time gap between them. I don't know if just a few hours is sufficient for that effect to be noticeable, but it's known to work when the interval between is a day or two. 2. When it's summer-hot, you lose concentration. Robert, It's hot in the 4th quarter of a big game. Hot is where you learn to be a man. How can you teach and mold them to concentrate on crushing a 3 technique in December if they can't concentrate in a 2 a day in August??? Hot is where you don't learn, period. You can do one of two things: You can build yourself up in endurance for heat or other adverse conditions. Or you can learn technique. You can't do both at once. I've nothing against building endurance, but I wouldn't try to do that while getting them to practice anything else.
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Post by bobgoodman on Mar 18, 2024 16:52:09 GMT -6
If I had freedom to conduct such things, I'd rather break at least pre-season into 2 sessions per day for two reasons:
1. Learning is better when it's separated into sessions with a time gap between them. I don't know if just a few hours is sufficient for that effect to be noticeable, but it's known to work when the interval between is a day or two.
2. When it's summer-hot, you lose concentration.
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Post by bobgoodman on Mar 2, 2024 11:24:17 GMT -6
I feel like you can use the lev sled for a wider variety of things...you can drive a lev sled but you can't do much other than drive a mod sled. OK, I'll bite: What else can you do with a Lev?
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Post by bobgoodman on Feb 20, 2024 12:34:37 GMT -6
I could see a high school official missing the FB in that play, given how fast those fakes hit. But, I've always wondered how Liberty Hill gets away with their quick huddle break and snap. That's certainly not by the books. You think they're the only team shading the 1-second requirement? I've seen clips of teams where it really looks like they get a rolling start.
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Post by bobgoodman on Feb 20, 2024 12:31:25 GMT -6
If you want to see CFB played by real student-athletes, go to games at your local D-III school. I somewhat regret playing D3 ball. I accumulated A LOT of debt in order to play ball, which I was glad to do at the time, but it's 20 years later and I'm still on the hook for some of it. What caused you to accumulate debt? College expenses at a school whose only benefit to you was playing football? Time you could've been working? Or some other reason? Was football with an independent amateur club not an option, or not attractive for some reason?
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Post by bobgoodman on Feb 19, 2024 7:22:36 GMT -6
I also think the world’s changed quite a bit. Tons of high school and college age kids are making bank on social media, etc.,in ways that didn’t even exist a generation ago. True, but not unprecedented. I tutored a student at The Professional Children's School, which is how I learned about it. She was a world-class violinist but needed help with AP calculus and chemistry. I don't know if the school ever has plays or concerts, but if they did it would be like varsity sports with professional players. The main difference is that most entertainment is not competitive! The PCS and the NCAA are the same age. What happened soon after the founding of the NCAA was compromise by hypocrisy. The NCAA was founded to abolish the big business aspect of intercollegiate football, and for a while it looked like they were going to accomplish that by abolishing intercollegiate football, gradually squeezing it down to nothing. But since they couldn't abolish, well...greed..., what they wound up doing instead by about 1930 was satisfying the desires of institutions that wanted spectator sports to be a big deal for them, while leaving the athletes themselves out of the cash room.
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Post by bobgoodman on Feb 19, 2024 7:01:42 GMT -6
Officials usually let a play go if they think the players have stopped their momentum after a shift, even if it hasn't been for an actual second. That's what the rule was designed to do.
As for the touchdown, that's to make up for the ones they probably lose due to inadvertent whistle.
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Post by bobgoodman on Feb 19, 2024 6:29:07 GMT -6
Rather than quoting so much stuff, maybe I should start the story over and explain more about the circumstances. 2023 was a tough one for us. Tim hadn't coached football since his mid-season stroke (which he suffered at an unusually young age) in 2021. However, our 2022 HC (whose ideas were more in line with mine) had retired as his son graduated into high school, and we were able to put a "Varsity" division team together using an unusually large proportion who were either rookies or hadn't played in a few years. I had wanted to be HC that year, but I'd just had an atrial ablation procedure from which recovery took a long time, so I couldn't commit to coaching until the last minute, when the team and most of the rest of the staff had been formed. Tim last said he planned to go down a couple of years in age to coach another son of his. I don't see what this has to do with any of the discussion. Are you trying to provide context you feel explains the o-fer season? No, trying to provide context for why I've made this decision now. Indeed that's what I was working on next in my top-down outline. First the plays, then the skills needed for them, then the drills to teach them, then a Gantt chart from which I'd derive a practice schedule. Over the time I've coached, only in a few seasons have I been provided with weekly practice plans, and some of those plans were "a joke". In a few cases there was a plan that was supposed to be used club-wide, but if anything that only got in our way or confused matters. When team HCs have provided plans, they've been about 50-50 as to whether they were useful or just scrap paper.
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Post by bobgoodman on Feb 18, 2024 9:13:43 GMT -6
Rather than quoting so much stuff, maybe I should start the story over and explain more about the circumstances. 2023 was a tough one for us. Tim hadn't coached football since his mid-season stroke (which he suffered at an unusually young age) in 2021. However, our 2022 HC (whose ideas were more in line with mine) had retired as his son graduated into high school, and we were able to put a "Varsity" division team together using an unusually large proportion who were either rookies or hadn't played in a few years. I had wanted to be HC that year, but I'd just had an atrial ablation procedure from which recovery took a long time, so I couldn't commit to coaching until the last minute, when the team and most of the rest of the staff had been formed.
Tim last said he planned to go down a couple of years in age to coach another son of his.
I've been frustrated over the years with practice sessions I've thought were inefficient and boring. But it seems everyone's afraid to break out of the mold of warm-up run, stretching, general agility drills, sprints, and oh, yeah, somewhere in there some football skills. Plus too much time with some things and not enough with others. So I'd like to be a HC to fix that with at least a team.
For offense systems for kids, I like both single wing and wing T. Sidesaddle T is a ready-made combination of both, but I wouldn't expect to install it here. I want to meet them at least halfway by looking mostly like the wing T program they've been, but not with the attitude of "because that's how they do it at the high school -- including shotgun packages now". So no tight line splits as in sidesaddle T, no wedge blocking, and no sidesaddle quarterback. But instead of shotgun, have some plays snapped thru the QB's legs, and pick a QB largely for his blocking ability, and either a HB or FB -- preferably the HB -- for his passing.
I wouldn't half-ass jet series the way they've been doing, and I'd add rocket as well. Either of these might wind up getting pruned away with experience, but I want to teach the kids how to hook the end. I want to teach multiple blocking tools.
On defense I want to introduce stripping the ball as an almost equal object to stopping the runner. I want to practice not only recovery, but scoop-and-score. Last season we got away from the various block-beating tools we used to teach. I want our kickoff receiving teams to actually play football instead of just being glad to recover it -- and sometimes failing at that.
A few seasons ago I saw our players start to get bored with practice halfway thru the season. I don't want to see even a hint of that again.
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Post by bobgoodman on Feb 17, 2024 12:26:52 GMT -6
bob...you need to simply the entire offensive plan! Not "the calls". Everyone here is telling you that this is going to be MORE LIKELY to screw things up. You are showing to be incapable of recognizing that not only is your plan not necessary, it is actually detrimental. Trying to implement a system with so much built in flexibility is not only not necessary at 10, it is not appropriate. You keep viewing and arguing things from this perspective, as someone who understands his entire comprehensive system while failing to realize that you will be the only individual with this view. Please for the sake of the kids, listen to all of the advice of individuals who have had FAR GREATER SUCCESS than you have ever been associated with. LET US HELP YOU implement an appropriate sidesaddle T offense for 10 year olds. Then you'd never guess that in almost all cases as an AC, I've been the one asking the other coaches, "Do we really need this? Especially when we need more time practicing, this, here." Seems many of them wanted to complicate things beyond what I had in mind. The biggest problem with that is half-assing things. Some things would be cool to do if enough effort be put into them, but instead they put in just enough to distract from the main thing but not enough to be fruitful. The second biggest problem is not knowing what they're doing! Anyway, BestWeb was acquired by FirstLight and stopped hosting personal Web sites. I pay for an e-mail account with them basically because I don't want to go thru the busy work of re-registering everyplace with my Gmail address. But specifically, as an example of where you think I'm the one trying to put in too much, do you not think it a good idea to have both a straight dive and a trap by the fullback, same hole? Last year HC Tim wound up doing that, but by confusion rather than design. He planned to install trap, but thought it might be beyond our players at the beginning of the season, so he called it "trap" and practiced it for a while as that, then changed it to a straight buck. He never made this clear to the ACs. Then later he decided to change it to a trap, which confused the players as to the call, so he then changed the name of the play to "guard trap", while still keeping a straight play called "trap" -- and it still wasn't clear to us he was keeping both. What I want to do is actually have the choice according to plan. Is that too much? Similarly, is it too much to have both a base blocked and a cross-blocked version of belly? I thought for a while of introducing a count system for the blocking and letting the players figure it out, but have decided for now just to do each separately by call. The tag for both the cross-blocked belly and the fullback trap would be the same: "trap". Same for having the puller kick out the strong end. Is being able to add a "wrong way" motion to some plays too much? How about having the split end on the "wrong" side, and the interior line unbalanced, to induce the defense to maladjust? Especially when the backs' mechanics and almost all of the blocking stay the same? To me these seem like cheap tricks that might have rewards -- especially if we're going to have only one pulling guard and would like to move him closer to the action? The only variation that seems like it might be heavy lifting is direct-snap versions of some of the plays, to gain the quarterback as a blocker. There was a coach named Jack who frequently paraded what he had on youth football forums, and he had not only a lot of formation variations but also direct and indirect snap versions -- which, however, had to be lined up in slightly different formations. I don't think he incorporated snapping thru the QB's legs, without which the idea wouldn't be attractive to me. But all these seem as nothing compared to the dead-end installations I've seen over the years: an ill-suited I formation add-on, "jet formation" to run only jet series (but with reach blocking left in the dust bin), and some crazy stuff I can hardly remember.
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Post by bobgoodman on Feb 17, 2024 11:29:56 GMT -6
Again, YOU YOURSELF mentioned that YOU as a coach were intimidated and incapable of grasping the passing game concepts being used by another coach. Oh, pshaw. I wasn't intimidated, I grasped the concepts just fine, and they all made sense. What I sometimes couldn't do in practice sessions was remember which calls meant which route combinations, between when they were called and when they were run. The "on" side was coded by color -- Red or bLue -- but there was an exception, and some other details I've forgotten. What I thought was wrong overall was having both twin-twins and trips setups, given that our completion percentage wasn't that high. Under previous HC Adam we had trips as our only spread package, which I thought was appropriate for how useful overall our passing attack was. My experience with kids back in the Bronx has been that trips is OK because one of the trio you don't expect to catch passes but the opponent doesn't know that, but with twins to both sides, you can't hide the non-threat easily.
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Post by bobgoodman on Feb 17, 2024 11:04:52 GMT -6
Heck, you already have a huge inconsistency in that “guard over” means something different than ends over. Even worse- you admit that YOU , and adult coach couldn’t follow the previous season’s route combos- yet don’t seem to grasp that what you are attempting to do is likely going to be much more confusing and detrimental. And your plan is to do it with 10 year olds. Actually that's part of the reason I wanted to simplify the calls, which is the reason for this system. If I got the routes mixed up occasionally, when I was in charge I want to fix it so they'd be less likely to. "Guard over" means exactly the same thing as "ends over" as far as the players are concerned. "Over" means "line up on the opposite side of center from the usual". "Guard over" has the pulling guard (we'd have only one) inside the other guard on the opposite side. "Ends over" means the tight and split end each play on the opposite side from usual, so the split and tight sides are the opposite of usual. The only inconsistency is with "coach speak", where "ends over" would mean both on the same side, while my "ends over" might be called "ends trade" in coach-speak. But I don't care about coach-speak when communicating with players. Still, I'll probably sacrifice separate tags for guard and ends, and just have a single "over" call for both together. I'd lose what I seem to recall are sometimes called the 200 and 800 formations (split on sing side), but we hardly ever used those anyway, and we haven't installed them in a few seasons now. The most common formation error over those same years has been ends lining up on the wrong side, and I think the "flip" call will be easier for them to hear than 100/900, because all positions will flip, and if a player is coming to the line in the wrong place, it'll be immediately evident from his teammates. But the main reason to flip will be not having to teach players on both sides of the line the same play.
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Post by bobgoodman on Feb 16, 2024 13:17:52 GMT -6
Most of the coaches I've coached under have given the kids more complicated tools than they've needed. Wasted effort like that happens most seasons, in addition to running drills that don't develop the skills they need. Some have even put in plays that are either illegal generally, or not allowed in that division, because they don't do the research and don't tell anyone else. I even had a HC put in one of those plays after I told him it was illegal, because he didn't trust my knowledge; fortunately these days most of the coaches around me now do trust me on those points.
So then why is it that I am the only one who's told here, "That's beyond the kids," or, "That'll never work"? I know some kids are just into memorizing things arbitrarily in whole chunks without the pieces making sense; those are the kids who are always the example to justify the look-say method of reading rather than phonics. But phonics make sense for most kids who are not hearing-impaired. You're right, there will be kids who'll be confused by my method; meanwhile other kids will be confused by other methods. No method will ever work for all of them -- but no method has to! If I have different kids tackling with different form, I'm not going to tell some of them their way is wrong. I'll work on bad form, but not try to fix different form.
We already have cases in our club where the word is sent from on high to do things one way, and it's a perfectly fine way if executed perfectly, but meanwhile we do it that way only when the observer from on high is there, because we have our own methods that we know work and may be more forgiving of sloppiness. And we snicker because we know the way they told us the previous year was different from the way they're saying now.
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Post by bobgoodman on Feb 15, 2024 19:59:15 GMT -6
Please don't misunderstand me. I am not saying that since you came up with it, it is not good. I am saying that since you came up with it, you will undoubtedly underestimate the difficult others may have relating to the information and processing it. You just had several grown men who have dedicated large portions of their lives to football tell you- Eh, this seems too verbose. If you choose to continue down this path with 10 year olds, I just don't see it working out. Then probably I should've worded the question differently. Instead of presenting the longest possible string of words our play call could be and asking whether that would be too much, I should've just asked, "How many words in a play call is the most you think the average 10 YO can remember?" Because my aim is to implement a modular play call system, and it's just a matter of advice as to what's the maximum number of tags that could be expected to put on a play, so I can determine just how long to attempt. I'm not scuttling the idea of a modular play call system, since others have done it, just determining its limit. I'm not taking "0" for an answer!
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Post by bobgoodman on Feb 15, 2024 15:23:48 GMT -6
bobgoodman As someone who has taught over 10,000 students ages 6-12 and coached athletes ages 6-Div 1AA NCAA football, I think you are on the wrong track. It makes sense to YOU..because you are the one who came up with it. This is almost invariably always going to be true. Trust me on this. What will ultimately happen is the kids and coaches will struggle, and you will stand there exasperated and say "what the heck is wrong with you people, this is so simple". Ask yourself this-- what are you truly trying to accomplish? Are you looking for the kids to have success? If so, the playbook mentioned above is the way to go. What you seem to want to do from the outside looking in, is to "prove" your idea, as opposed to helping the kids have a successful football season. If I thought those goals were incompatible, I wouldn't do it. But I never had the mindset my father had which was that if I came up with it, it couldn't be good! In 2015, my 6th year with that club (and 8th year overall coaching) I installed an offense with a system I had to reconstruct because I could hardly find any materials on it: the sidesaddle T. My other coach seemed to like it, the kids seemed to like it as much as anything else they'd been doing, and we had a winning regular season record. Not only that, but thru correspondence online I spurred a small revival of sidesaddle T by youth and adult amateur coaches. The next year I was asked to become a head coach but turned it down because I anticipated the likelihood of moving to NJ, which it turned out I did. When I resumed coaching in 2017 it was as the new guy here, and I've been in that pigeonhole since. Also, all I meant to discuss with this is devising a way the plays are called. There's already a discussion in the all-ages "offense" section here about wing T play naming/numbering, and it's not like anyone there's saying everyone's going to struggle with whatever changes people come up with.
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Post by bobgoodman on Feb 15, 2024 9:23:31 GMT -6
Your system is good. Well thought out. Logical. Adaptable. Modular. It is going to be a DISASTER. You aren't just wanting to run that long play in the OP, you are wanting to be able to run that play with 400 different combinations. And then have 20 other plays that have 400 combinations. Actually, do the math, it is probably way more than that. It is indeed a lot of potential combinations, but my confidence is that those combinations don't need to be practiced. In wrestling, do you you coach every possible sequence of moves all the way from escape to pin? At most you might coach some 2-move combinations. Otherwise you just teach the moves and have the wrestlers employ them as advisable at the moment. In soccer, does a player have to practice separately dribbling from point A to point B, point C to point D, and point E to F? No, it's the same skill in all situations. If a player knows how to make an angle block, does he have to learn how to do it in every situation? No, he's just supposed to apply that skill to the particular assignment. So in this modular system, why would you need to practice plays separately with the wingback at positions 1, 2, and 3 in fly motion, if in most cases it's just to distract the defense and nobody else's execution has to change? Why would you need to practice separately the play with the tight end on this side vs. that side, if nothing else changes? If "trap" just means to go to the first opponent beyond the hole number, why should it matter which player shows up there? The action is the same. If "direct" means throw the snap thru the QB's legs instead of coming up into your own crotch, why would the rest of the line action have to change? So these combinations don't need their own practice. The only tag that really needs the plays to be practiced separately is "flip", because left and right are reversed. So yeah, 400 combinations would be easy. I don't anticipate that'd be the hard part. The only part I anticipate being hard, and the only part I was asking about here was, after the huddle broke, the players being able to remember the part of the play call relevant to them in case there were a lot of tags on one. All the rest is just football.
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Post by bobgoodman on Feb 15, 2024 9:00:59 GMT -6
That's too long for most HS kids. Unless you put it on a wristband. Then maybe. Is it neccessary? Do you need that call in youth football where the focus should be on fun, fun, learning the game, fun, and fundamentals. I don't see how a wristband would make a difference, since translating the words into actions would follow straightforward decoding rules, no more complicated than the teams in our club have already been following. Where I used to coach back in the Bronx, they explicitly said our emphasis was on fun, and it was. Here in Newton NJ, they say it's to prepare the kids to play in high school, but they also seem more competitive than we were in the Bronx because here we have no minimum play rules. So some of the kids don't get as much play time here as they would've back there. I never liked the orientation around high school prep. We do have a large percentage of our graduates who go on to be on a team at the high school -- but I suspect many of them hardly ever come off the bench there. Some of the player population is practically guaranteed to turn over if for no other reason than they go from weight-limited to unlimited. But the orientation of the kid ball to what the freshmen-and-up teams are doing is wrong in other ways. For one thing, who's to say that by the time the kids get there, the HS hasn't changed its system? Even though they've had remarkable stability, playing wing T for years, I've seen changes. The QB action on their buck sweep series is no longer a reverse pivot -- so the youth teams changed theirs to conform. The HS now plays a lot of shotgun, which seems to make it harder to concentrate on developing the wing T playbook. But what actually tends to happen is the youth teams make a half-assed attempt to copy what we see in the HS practices. One day a year our play side guard goes thru the same steps of the deep pull, and then we never do it the rest of the year. We have reach blocking in our playbook (useful for jet series), but the reach steps our coaches have had the kids do are so puny, it's just a waste of time. So I say, don't try to be like them. I wouldn't even put in wing T per se in the younger teams if we weren't expected to; I think they'd do better and have more fun with sidesaddle T. And then as they grow up and get experience, switch to wing T with its greater line splits and so on. So in the meantime I thought the best compromise would be wing T with some plays snapped thru the QB's legs Sigourney-Keota style. And don't necessarily introduce shotgun at all. And don't assume the QB's going to be the major passer; it could be the FB or HB, with the QB more of a ballhandler and blocker. Also, make the practices more fun and useful by being more about football. Just because the high schoolers start with dynamic stretching doesn't mean the kids need stretching at all. Don't start with a warmup run that tires them out and delays the practice as we wait for the stragglers. And regardless of what the trends are now, more contact, since that's what most of the kids come for. I don't think you become a better blocker by trying to learn only one blocking form, nor a better tackler by trying to learn only one tackling form. Why shouldn't the kids learn both head-across and near-hip tackling? Why not shoulder, flipper, hands, and cross-body blocking? We'd have time for these things if we cut out the non-football-like stuff. Rope ladders, endurance, etc. they can work on in the spring, unpadded. I think we can cut down practice sessions from 5 to 4 a week pre-season and 4 to 3 in-season, and still get more done. And just because coaches don't think of special teams (kickoffs, mostly) doesn't mean we should give such practice less than its share, and therefore play both the kicking and receiving sides so conservatively that they're less fun and pass up attacking opportunities. Kickoff-receiving team play has been a joke: introducing it at the last minute pre-season, having the front line players play the ball only if it's square at them, and then just pick out an opposing player who's got a 10-15 yard run at them and try to make a little contact?! Never once in the years I've been coaching with this club (since 2017, skipping a Covid year) have any of them been coached to peel back, because that would involve turning their backs to the opponents -- the horror! Not only that, but as often as I try to move the front line back 2-3 yards, the other coaches keep moving them forward right up to the restraining line, which is like playing with your infield in in baseball. And our performance in games shows it. My motivation in making a modular play-call system is as part of a strategy to convince the president to make me a head coach this season. I don't want to "dis" my HC from last year, but as long as I keep coaching with fathers who have kids playing at various levels and are established as HC (and so will go down some levels to coach when one child graduates), I'll never be able to put my organizational ideas into play. I'd like to be able to show I've been thinking about all these details in the off season.
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Post by bobgoodman on Feb 14, 2024 19:04:01 GMT -6
As stated by several others, I think that might be too long of a call for most of my HS guys. We've gone pretty simple with formation names and play calls. Black Power Right. We can add a tag if we need to change something like "read" or "kick" or even "jet" to add motion. That sounds like the calls could be as long as the example I gave. I hope you understand that in the simplest cases, our calls would be, for example, "24 on go". That would be s simple base-blocked dive out of the normal (right, equivalent to "100" in the terminology I'd be abandoning) formation on the word "go" in "Ready, set, go." To make it a trap, the word "trap" would be added. To make it a snap to the fullback, "direct" would be added. To add a motion just as misdirection, we'd be snapping on a higher count (because "go" always starts the motion) with the word "fly", "blimp", or "rocket". We could flip the formation with "flip" and/or tag the formation to make it unbalanced -- except we wouldn't go "guard over" with "24 trap", becuse the pulling guard would be in the wrong place. So the string of words could be very short or long, because most combinations would be allowed. Or I could just adopt a rule capping the number of tags allowed on a play.
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Post by bobgoodman on Feb 14, 2024 18:45:15 GMT -6
Which part do you think you'd have trouble remembering between when you broke the huddle and when the play was run? If it was any of the formation call, you'd have your teammates to help you. It's unlikely they'd all forget the formation call, and because you'd be lining up in relationship to the rest of them, that would be obvious before the formation was all set -- in fact probably halfway to the line. If you were the center, quarterback, fullback, or tailback, do you think you'd forget "direct" (or think you'd forgotten it when it wasn't there)? If you were the tailback, do you think you'd forget "rocket" (or imagine you'd heard it)? If the wingback, do you think you'd forget "fly" or "blimp"? If you were on the line, do you think you'd forget "trap" or the second digit of the play number? Or that you'd forget "pass"? If you were a back, do you think you'd forget either digit of the play number? Or do you think you'd forget the snap count? How much would it ease your memorization task if the same cadence were used every time, with the fullback calling the snap based on where he saw the motion man (if any)? The fullback would still have to memorize where the motion back would have to be for that play. How much would it ease it if the "over" tags were combined into one? I guess I was thinking more about install, and the limited practice time that youth teams have. As mentioned above 2-3 word playcalls are too much for some kids in that age group, let alone this. Would I personally forget any of that? Absolutely not, but I'm not a squirrely 10 year old anymore either. My experience has been that players that old and older -- even pros -- occasionally forget the snap count or the formation, but that doesn't seem enough reason to stop using either. I don't know how many times we've had the split end on the wrong side in the past few years -- a lot, but it never affected play since they happened not to be pass plays. As to snap count, with players tha age or older we've sometimes given up snapping on "set" or even the second "go", and that does mean we benefited less from defensive encroachment, but also had fewer false starts ourselves. One thing that we did that I thought was silly was get all players set in 3-point before snapping on "set", but as another coach pointed out, we still caught some opponents off guard even with that obvious "tell". My logic is that installation won't be any harder, since each modular signal need only be learned separately. I've read of other coaches using a modular system and hardly ever practicing the "whole thing" at once. Like "on one" means the same no matter hat the play is, rocket motion means the same no matter what the play is, etc. Given the number of possible combinations, there's no way anyone could run thru them all even once, and no need in most cases, but they should easily be able to practice the individual components, since they're far fewer. So for instance, the back in rocket motion just continues in a straight line until the snap. After "go", on "one" he's in position to meet the snap as it's thrown straight back as he continues, on "two" he's in position to meet the pitchout as he continues, and on "three" or more he's going to be getting into the pass pattern or just influence the defense. So "on one" and "on two" need to be practiced with rocket motion as part of a play, but for the rest it doesn't matter. If there's no motion call, it doesn't matter whether we snap on "go" or a number, it's the same play, and most of the time we'll snap on "go". But I'm trying to get a sense of how many words can be strung together before they start slipping. It's like the mental status test called "digit span", where you see how long a string of digits someone can remember a minute after being told it; most people can remember a 7-digit phone number that long, but an area code would be too much to add.
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Post by bobgoodman on Feb 14, 2024 10:47:24 GMT -6
That's too much for me, a 37 year old. Which part do you think you'd have trouble remembering between when you broke the huddle and when the play was run? If it was any of the formation call, you'd have your teammates to help you. It's unlikely they'd all forget the formation call, and because you'd be lining up in relationship to the rest of them, that would be obvious before the formation was all set -- in fact probably halfway to the line. If you were the center, quarterback, fullback, or tailback, do you think you'd forget "direct" (or think you'd forgotten it when it wasn't there)? If you were the tailback, do you think you'd forget "rocket" (or imagine you'd heard it)? If the wingback, do you think you'd forget "fly" or "blimp"? If you were on the line, do you think you'd forget "trap" or the second digit of the play number? Or that you'd forget "pass"? If you were a back, do you think you'd forget either digit of the play number? Or do you think you'd forget the snap count? How much would it ease your memorization task if the same cadence were used every time, with the fullback calling the snap based on where he saw the motion man (if any)? The fullback would still have to memorize where the motion back would have to be for that play. How much would it ease it if the "over" tags were combined into one?
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