dboc
Freshmen Member
Posts: 27
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Post by dboc on Sept 16, 2008 11:50:08 GMT -6
I am currently coaching at a school that because of bad weather we postponed our game from last Friday and played it last night. We also have a game this Friday. So we played a game yesterday, get 3 days of rest and play again. We are in our first year of a program that hasn't had a winning season in 10 years and are trying to build the program the right way. Not to mention, the game last night was against the #5 team in the state and Friday's game is against the #1 team. Pretty rough week. Anybody ever had to deal with something like this??? How to keep the kids motivated and into football when they've been bad for so long???
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Post by cqmiller on Sept 16, 2008 13:38:52 GMT -6
Focus on the small victories...
I was in the same boat last season and this season. My buddy and I came here last season to a school that had won 1 game in the last 3 years. They were losing 49-0, 63-7, etc... then last year we went 2-8, and should have been 4-6. We lost a couple of games by 10 or less that we shouldn't have. We still got greased by the big-boys 55-19 one game, 55-0 against the league champ, but were much more competitive than those scores indicated. Of course for our staff 2-8 is not what we want, but we have made some improvements.
The team that beat us 55-19 last year is considered the best team in our division of the central section. We played them for our first game last week and got beat 27-14. We had a pick for 6 thrown by our QB, and our Soph TB coughed one up on our own 20, which led to score. It was 0-0 with 2:48 left in the 1st half. We came away disappointed of course, but even with all the mistakes we made that cost us the game, we believe we are closing that gap between us and the "powers".
We try to keep the kids focused on earning respect every time we step out on the field. No excuses. Everyone is tired, and sore, and hurt... But if we don't work hard through it and give up, then the teams we play against won't respect us.
Never had a game canceled due to weather, but when i was in HS, there was a rule (in Utah) where if there is no school, then there are no sports. In the middle of football season every year there is a fall break where there is no school on Thu or Fri... So you play the week before on Friday, then the next Varsity game is on the following Wednesday. We played a pretty good team on that Friday game, then had to play the #1 HS team in the state that had 7 D-1 kids on it and a 1st round NFL draft pick on it. (Haloti Ngata-Ravens, McNally-Stanford, and a bunch of others).
We beat both of them. The wednesday game was just a matter of who wanted it more. No time to prep for either team, and just had to be mentally tough.
I guess finding a way to get the kids to buy into the idea that doing it the hard way, the painful way, and sacrificing some other things in their life to become a better football team is the key. Until football is more important than everything else in their life... they will continue to be the way they have been.
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