E R I K
S A U N D E R S
The Youth Football Coaches Handbook
A step by step interactive guide for coaches
THANKS TO You for reading this material, I hope it serves you well. All the players, All the parents, All the coaches. My wife Carolyn. I’ll be home right after practice. My children Erika, Henry, Elizabeth, Jack, Jennifer and “?” you are the light of my life.
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About The Author Erik Saunders has been coaching football for twenty seasons and is currently operating the Football Academy in Charlotte, North Carolina. Erik provides training to hundreds of youth athletes each year through his Academy and volunteer efforts. Erik is an active author. His articles and instructional videos are viewed over 100,000 times per year. Erik is also a professional sales trainer and speaker with expertise in customer service and sales industry. The Youth Football Coaches Handbook is a step by step guide to coaching youth football. The book covers all aspects of being involved in youth football from communicating with parents and installing offensive plays all the way to the post season banquet.
Erik Saunders http://www.youthfootballhandbook.com
______________ ★ LINKS
The Football Academy: http://www.unioncountysports.com My Blog: http://youthfootballhandbook.blogspot.com/ College Preparatory Services: http://www.usafootballacademy.com Email: coach@youthfootballhandbook.com
Table of Contents Written FOREWORD Youth Football – Paying My Dues Disclaimer – About the Author The Future – One Day or Sixty Years THE SECRETS TO SUCCEEDING AS A YOUTH FOOTBALL COACH Proverbs 11:3 Getting Religion Off we go into the wild blue yonder Sales Career Launched - It slices… It Dices Finally - The secrets to succeeding as a youth football coach Discipline Organization - down to the minute Teach Children Like Children Training Assistant Coaches & Parents Like Players Desire To Do the Right Thing
Video Instruction Visit http://www.youthfootballhandbook.com/hand book/yfchandbook_home.html PRESEASON Roster Management Communicating Via Email Google Docs Team Website Player – Parent Surveys Choosing an Offense Creating Playbooks Defensive Scheme
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Getting Parents and Coaches Involved
EVALUATING PLAYERS Physical Attributes Mental Attributes What does the player want to do Toughness Emotions Experience PRACTICE Planning practice Tips for running practice Getting kids there on time - rewards pick a play Teaching techniques Drills Why are we doing this? Ending practice During the season - adjustments, moving players, new plays GAME M ANAGEMENT Preparation - cards, wrist cards, fanny packs Getting There - Carpool - how long before Pre-game Routine - warm up, plays, reads, hitting, scouting Choosing Captains Pregame Speech - Pep talk Game Themes - Christmas, Fight, Scavenger Hunt, GI Joe Salute Where To Stand on the Sidelines - what to look for Play Calling - Charting Half-Time Adjustments Referees Winning Big, Losing Big - What to do Post Game Speech - what did we learn - where will go
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DURING THE SEASON Scouting Other Teams Changing Player Assignments New Plays Keep it Fresh - Fun - but don't get away from the basics
M AKING IT FUN Team Website Newsletter Pictures Football Cards Highlight Videos Banquets
Resources OFFENSIVE PLAYBOOK DEFENSIVE PLAYBOOK SPECIAL TEAMS TEMPLATES DEPTH CHART PRACTICE PLANNER GAME M ANAGEMENT SHEET PLAY CHARTING SHEET DRILLS POWERP OINT CARDS
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Foreword
Dear Coaches, Thank you for purchasing my book and I hope you’ll find the content and resources to be a valuable tool. As I have looked around the Internet for the past 10 years, I have seen more and more material popping up regarding coaching youth football. There are so many great coaches out there putting material on the Internet that I struggled with the idea of writing another youth football book. Ultimately, I decided that I had something different to offer that was different from other coaches on the Internet. The difference between my approach is my method of preparing for every aspect of a youth football season. I have also learned to integrate my
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computer skills, along with my communication techniques to greatly benefit my coaching style. While I will be covering every aspect of coaching youth football in this book, to include the basics of instructing technique, drills, game planning, playbooks and game management, I feel the biggest asset I have to offer is educating coaches on methods to increase efficiencies and training. One of the biggest hurdles that youth football coaches face is the sheer bulk of training items to be covered and the restrictions in practice time. There are literally hundreds of tasks to be covered before the first game of the season, therefore coaches must pick and choose which things to teach and which things to leave out. This book will provide a step-by-step list of things to do, starting before the season begins and take you all the way through to the end of season banquet. 8
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In The Beginning
“There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth...not going all the way, and not starting.�
- Gautama Siddharta
To give a little background on myself, as of this writing, I am 40 years old. I've been coaching football since 1989, where I started as an assistant coach for a high school in Anchorage, Alaska. I spent the first 10 years of my coaching career working as a volunteer in high school and middle school football programs. I had served four years in the United States Air Force and they had relocated me to Northwest Florida in 1991.
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When my enlistment was over, I began a career in sales, and fortunately I had great success. As my professional career flourished, the time I could devote to coaching football was diminished. Then in 2002, my wife gave birth to our son Henry and I needed to get serious about working. I landed a job with a telecommunications company a few hours down the road from where we were currently living and we began our new life. The town we relocated to was Port St. Joe Florida, which was a wonderful place to live, but very small. It also had with very few coaching opportunities. As any football coach can relate to, I started to get desperate as the season got closer. I really didn't have time to be coaching football with my new job and the high school and middle school positions were all filled up but I really couldn’t bear the thought of not being on the field. So I called 11
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the administrator of the local youth football league and asked if I could assist on one of their teams. He informed me on the phone that he had good news for me, that they did need volunteers and that they even had a head coach opening for one of their teams.
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Youth Football – Paying My Dues
"Destiny is not necessarily what we get out of life, but rather, what we give." --Cary Grant
What the man on the phone did not reveal to me until we were face to face, was that it was coaching the seven and eight-year-old team. As I sat in McDonald's drinking a cup of coffee that morning, I never would have dreamed that our conversation would change the course of my life. The man I was speaking with was Mal Parish and I'm sure a search of his name on the Internet will not reveal many results. Mal was a hero in Port St. Joe; he was adored by children and loved by their parents. When I met Mal I’m certain he was in his late 60s and he had been coaching football his 13
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whole life. He told me all about the program they had in the town and how successful it had been. He asked me to take the younger team and mentioned that perhaps a year later I could move up to an older squad when one of the coaches moved along with their son. As I sat drinking the rest of my coffee on a bright Saturday morning I couldn’t help feel a positive vibe coming from the man I was speaking with. He seemed like a guy that was just getting started on some big adventure or had a hot date later that night. Whatever he was doing, I felt compelled to join him and thus I began my career in youth football. Since that time, my wife Carolyn and I have had four children and have another on the way. I never went back to high school or middle school football as I found that I enjoyed coaching youth football and youth football seemed to enjoy me. I struggled through my 14
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first year with the little guys as I had a lot to learn about communicating with children. I also had to revamp my approach to be simpler, more fundamental and much more FUN. The following year I did end up moving up to a nine and ten year old team and we went undefeated on the season, winning the league championship. Over the next few years teams that I coached won most every game we played and I would get comments from parents (of both teams) about my approach. I had a feeling that I had found a niche in my life and it felt good to be appreciated, so I did what I had done in my business life, I started learning as much as I could. I studied all of the youth coaches I could find and there are a few out there that had some great advice. I also worked hard to understand elementary education as well. All of the learning has helped me to be a better coach and since coaching is how “I� 15
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play the game, I feel like I’m enjoying myself more than I ever. Disclaimer – About the Author
“When I went to Catholic high school in Philadelphia, we just had one coach for football and basketball. He took all of us who turned out and had us run through a forest. The ones who ran into the trees were on the football team”. -George Raveling
While much of this book will be instructional, there will be times when I feel compelled to interject experiences and stories that may pertain to what we are discussing. I’m hopeful that these efforts will serve as a way for you to be able to identify with me and my learning process and relate to your own situation. I will beg for forgiveness in advance for my writing 16
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style and give the disclaimer that I will not be waiting by the phone for the Pulitzer committee’s phone call. I can barely scratch out a birthday card to my wife without errors and thus I’m afraid that my writing will be corrected in post mortem. The Future – One Day or Sixty Years
“It’s never too late to have a happy childhood” – Tom Robbins
One of my favorite things about youth football is that I get to be around children that are excited about learning and doing new things. I enjoyed playing football as a child and it was perhaps, the most exciting years of my life. While there is not much I remember from my childhood after 30 years, I profoundly remember my coaches, my games and my 17
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teammates as if it was only yesterday. Football leaves a lasting mark and indelible memories that boys will have as an internal guiding force during their adult life. There is no denying that coaches, good or bad will be remembered by their players for the span of their lives. It is our responsibility to make those impressions as positive and meaningful as possible. Any person who accepts the role of youth coach must be aware that they will be leaving a recording of their character in a time capsule that will be opened twenty years later. Prepare to be a great coach, prepare to say the right things, study so that you will be worthy of the role. Your payment will be that you are allowed back into the clubhouse for two hours a day, three days a week during the autumn. You will be empowered to go back to your first day of school, to trick or treating on Halloween and to experience all the things that 18
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were so all encompassing back then, that we now take for granted as men. You will receive a gift that mankind has searched for during all of the days of civilization, you will have your childhood again. That’s why my friend Mal had a spring in his step when he was sixty nine and that’s why he’ll have it when he’s eighty nine.
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I'll close with a quote of my own and I hope that the information you find in this book will be a benefit to you. “There is no greater feeling than seeing our children succeed� Have a great season, Coach Saunders
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The Secret To Succeeding as a Youth Football Coach And an introduction to Coach Saunders
There are many styles of coaches on the sidelines of youth football today. There are yellers and screamers, and there are friendly, fun loving fathers. Each coach that spends any amount of time in the coaching profession finds their own method of communication that works the best for them. Regardless of your style, every football coach faces the same dilemmas. Teaching hundreds of techniques, dozens of plays and organizing all of the details to administer their team, make coaching youth football one of the most difficult youth coaching assignments.
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I recently was the guest speaker for an organization that fields football teams for players in high school that are home schooled or attend Christian schools that do not have a team of their own. The athletic director asked if I could work into my message, a scripture that they would be using for their team’s focus message that season. As I researched the scripture and related it to my own coaching and life experiences, I found that it went hand-in-hand with what I have deemed to be the most important key in succeeding at youth football. Proverbs 11:3 - the integrity of the upright shall guide them. And upon further research the proverb continues: “but the perverseness of the transgressors shall destroy them.� The team had chosen to put the first half of the message on their t-shirts and use 22
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the message as a guiding theme for the upcoming season. As I researched this proverb on the Internet, I found the following information regarding the proverb. Unfortunately the author was not named. “There is a safe way to live -- do right! And there is dangerous ways to live -- do what feels good and sounds good! By committing to do only what is right at all times, you will have a certain guide for every situation. But living your life by your own feelings and choices will often lead you to great perplexity, and it will certainly destroy you. What is integrity? It is a character trait of always doing what is right, regardless of difficulties or consequences. It is the upright who have integrity, what is perverseness? It is turning away from what is right to act contrary to law or nature. It is transgressors or sinners who are 23
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perverse, for they choose to reject more restructurings. The upright always do what is right -- they have integrity. Their confusion and life is minimal, for they have chosen to follow what is right in every choice and dilemma. They have a constant guide. Transgressors do whatever they want -- they are perverse. They have no standards or parameters for their actions, and their perversity will destroy them.�
In reading this information it led me to question how a person can conform to these standards and how does this message apply to football? I took time to reflect on my own life and how these sayings have applied to me.
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Getting Religion
Believe and yee shall be invited back for the evening service where we will be serving fried chicken, potato salad and peach cobbler‌ you do believe don’t you son?
As a young man just out of high school, I decided I would try to live on my own for a brief period of time before I went into the military. It was a span of about five months, and they were meager times to say the least. I was working as a stock clerk in a department store and I wasn't making very much money. Most of what I earned went towards a small amount of rent that I paid to my friends parents to stay in a spare bedroom and the rest went towards gasoline and food. The food part was particularly lacking and a gentleman from my work made me an offer I couldn't refuse. We were talking one day at work and he asked if I would like to come by his church and get a free 25
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dinner. I gladly accepted and went that evening. The food was good and the preaching was strong, and it wasn't very long before I was a convert. In spending a good deal of time reviewing the Bible and trying to learn its message, I was able to discover the main point of the New Testament, “Believe and you shall be saved”. Without getting too philosophical or religious, I believe many football coaches could use a come to Jesus meeting. It is the coach's job to define the “straight and narrow path” and to be completely committed to the program in which he decides upon. Coaches should have blinders so they cannot see the distractions that will pop up along the way and they also needs to be deaf to avoid listening to all the naysayers. The coach must “Believe in his own system, abilities and players” in order to succeed.
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Off We Go… into the wild blue yonder
“The devil is in the details, and everything we do in the military is a detail” Hyman George Rickover My next stop after this brief period of time was an enlistment with the United States Air Force. I have chosen to include an excerpt from a book called “The Sales University” I wrote several years ago to summarize my take away from my military training. “Study the big problems all the time, but never skip a small task, for one of the simplest duties may hold the key to the biggest problem” - John T. Faris
Christmas of 1987 was my first away from the comforts of home. I had enlisted in the 27
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Air Force one week earlier and over the course of a week I had been sent to Texas, had my head shaved and was sleep deprived for most of 7 days. My wardrobe had changed to put more of an accent on the color green, which is always fabulous around Christmas. Unfortunately for our flight, our drill instructor was embroiled in a bitter divorce and had moved into our barracks. He had made it his personal mission in life to turn us into the best flight the USAF had ever seen. The key to being the best flight centered around one word, “demerit�. Demerits were charged for any infraction of the rules or standards set forth in our trusty Air Force manual. There were rules such as no talking while dining and addressing higher-ranking individuals appropriately. There were also some special rules regarding how one should present 28
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ones personal affects during inspection. It was this particular segment of the manual that our zealous instructor chose for us to celebrate the Yule tide season with. It seemed that there was only one way to present government issued undergarments to an instructor, and that was an exact 6 inch square of perfectly starched “tighty whities”. If you are not familiar with the term just know that it stands for guys underpants. We were awakened at five o’clock in the morning and it wasn’t Santa and his reindeer prancing around our barracks, it was jolly old Sarge throwing our clothes all over the place and screaming out orders of at Ten-hut! We listened as he explained how we would fold the underwear, iron the underwear, starch the underwear and position it in the perfect place in our chest. We tried all morning to 29
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please old Sarge with our little white squares, but it was useless. We just didn’t seem to possess the talent for proper underpant presentation. I actually started to fashion a snowflake model out my Fruit of the Loom and see if he would sign off on that, but the guys in the unit beat me to the floor before I could get into to show him. Things got much worse in the afternoon and Sarge was threatening to send us all home to our mommas. Due to our inability to make the perfect six-inch square with appropriate starching and positioning in said chest, we were deprived of our Christmas dinner. This was not a good thing and I do believe there were some tears shed by some of our men. I personally did not shed any tears as I was raised in a marine household and was sort of enjoying the exercise. Well, just as the sun went 30
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down on the Christmas of 1987 and it seemed that all was lost; we finally experienced the miracle of Christmas. Joe Aragouses from Boston did it. He had achieved cottony perfection (queue the heavenly background music). Oh how we all celebrated our discovery. It was so beautiful, so simple, yet it took so long to figure out. Apparently folding those things is pretty darn hard. Truth be known, Sarge started drinking around 5 o’clock and just got tired of messing around with us, so he told Joe his underwear was good enough. Then he told the rest of us to get ours out of the big pile he had been throwing them in all day and make them like Joe’s and go to bed. We did it and there was much joy in Whoville that night. When I graduated from training, I walked up to Sarge and asked him why he made us do that with our 31
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underwear all day and he said. “Get out of my face you little scum sucking dirt ball before I throw your slimy butt back to day one”. That was good enough for me and I was off the Illinois to freeze my chops off for the next few months. I eventually went on to Alaska for three years where I worked on fifteen million dollar F-15 aircraft as a hydraulic and engine mechanic. Any mistakes in my job there could have cost the government millions of dollars and/or much worse, loss of life. I worked the midnight shift most of the three years and that was from four in the afternoon until four in the morning. There were often times, hundreds of aircraft parts sitting on the frozen flight line in the total darkness of the Alaskan winter. Just me and my flashlight and a technical manual to get it all back together. Then I’d put some twenty 32
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four year old officer in the airplane in the morning and send him off into the wild blue yonder. What happens if I don’t get it just right? I think you know what happens. Sarge didn’t care if we even wore underwear never mind if we folded it correctly. He knew that some of us would need to be able to pay very close attention to details or the mission could fail. Someone could get hurt and he knew that once you’ve commit an error like that you couldn’t take it back. He took care of us in the sense that he prepared us to avoid the troubles that arise from complacency. Some of those planes never did come back and sometimes it was the error of the person on the ground as much as it was the person in the air. I was fortunate to never have any incidents during my tour, but I also paid close attention to detail. I still iron 33
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my clothes to standard and if I’m making the bed, there’ll be hospital corners. It’s imbedded in me, and it was the best Christmas present I ever got.
I managed my four years and was honorably discharged in the summer of 1991.
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Sales Career launched – it slices… it dices…
“What do Lou Holtz and a professional salesperson have in common? They’re the same guy!”
Upon my discharge I immediately began work as an air-conditioning mechanic and pizza delivery boy as I tried to make my way. Unfortunately, as I was climbing a ladder one day, there was an accident and I fell 15 feet onto a concrete floor. That concluded my career as a mechanic and began my career in sales. Breaking my arm turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me and as luck would have it I turned out to be a fairly good salesperson. I started off the same way most salespeople start off, just trying to tell people what I had and hoped they 35
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would buy. But I soon learned that sales, like any other profession was going to require me to become an expert if I wanted to make a good living. Specifically, I needed to be prepared for every situation that could possibly arise on a sales call. This required me to have my presentation, completely memorized and be able to say any part at any time. The reason I needed my presentation to be memorized was not so that I could sound good while I was speaking but more importantly so that I could concentrate on my customers and see if they were buying what I was selling. Not getting a sale (which happened more often than not in the early days) had to be my fault, and there had to be a lesson learned on each failure. Using this philosophy and committing to learn from the greatest sales people in the world enabled me to rise to the top in the profession of sales. I quickly became a sales manager and realized that my new customers were my sales people. I had to sell 36
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them on the idea of learning and working hard to maximize their own opportunities. I had solid success in business and it has continued until this day. Truth be known, my success can be traced back to a few fundamental principles that were instilled early in my adult life.
All of the time I was in sales I continued coaching football at one level or another. Of course, the better I got at business the less time I had for football and eventually I worked my way down to youth football after several years at the high school and middle school level. It was getting down to the youngest possible age of youth football that helped me to really become
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Nine members of my youth teams are shown here when they were in the 9-10 age group and then again after winning their 8th grade regional championship in baseball. These boys started with me when they were 7 years old‌ they sure grow up fast!
a good football coach. There was no great athlete and the players needed to be taught every possible thing about football. They literally had no clue 38
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where to start. I can remember getting frustrated as I tried to line up the offensive line and as I would get one kid down in his stance two or three others would stand up to see what was going on. Every sarcastic remark I uttered was executed better than any regular command I would give and the words that I had used to get high school athletes to understand, had been rendered meaningless with this group. I managed a 4-3 record with my little guys but by the end of the season I had completely revamped my whole approach to coaching football and I would go on to several amazing seasons in the immediate years to follow.
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Finally – The Secret to Succeeding as a Youth Football Coach!
”And now for a man who needs no introduction… but he’ll give you one anyways”
What I had learned about coaching that never became clear until I was forced to instruct every facet of the game in twenty days or less was the following things. Discipline is the fundamental component that enables football teams to succeed. Organization and detailed planning down to the minute must be used in every phase of the season. You have to teach children like children and use every trick in the book to get them to learn. Assistant coaches and parents must be trained (and coached) the same as their children. You must have a greater desire to do the “right thing” than to just win games.
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Discipline – is the fundamental component that enables a team to succeed.
Football is a game that cannot succeed without discipline! An undisciplined victory is a loss if you are passionate about coaching youth football and teaching children. Discipline is the key to coaches putting the hours of preparation necessary to succeed. Discipline is the key to players following instructions even when they do not want to. Discipline is the key to parents supporting the program as opposed to chipping away at it with malcontent. In the purest sense of the word Discipline means – “training that corrects, molds, or perfects the mental faculties or moral character”. Think how this applies to football coaching. If you look back on an evenly contested game with two teams with similar talent 41
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and try to place your finger on where the game was won or lost, you will usually find one of two things that turned the tide in the final moments of the game. 1. A team’s player made a mental error, turn over or was physically exhausted and was unable to execute to make a play. 2. A team’s player made a great heads up play, broke a tackle or had more will power and strength to overcome their opponent in the final moments of the game.
Discipline is the key to success… not in blowout wins or lopsided defeats; it is the key to success in the closest of calls. It will determine what we do when times are tough, decisions are not clear, when we do not want to do the right thing. Discipline is the message of youth football that must be delivered, it must be accepted and there is no other acceptable avenue that can be taken if you want to succeed as a football coach at any 42
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level. The truth is that if you measure your success in win and losses then discipline is not nearly as important, but what will you have given a group of young boys if you have a losing season and you have predicated your success on winning? You will have shown them one of the fundamental struggles of mankind. “I must achieve a specific result to feel as though I have accomplished something�. That the act of learning, working together and developing ourselves for future endeavors is not first and foremost. So many people in life are trying for a result and feeling unfulfilled, that it is a terrible shame to think how many will die and never understand that that they could have been charting their growth and enjoying the process of life and learning along the way. In football there is also a commitment to your team as well and thus each player’s commitment is to improve during the season. To be accountable for their small piece of 43
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responsibility and to withstand the physical and mental pain that puts the voice in their head to quit. This responsibility takes will power and determination, something very few children posses in this day and age. Who will be their mentor in this process, who will be a role model so that they can look back on to have a point of reference? It is our responsibility as football coaches to be this person and if you have accepted the position you would like to feel the joy of victory and the emotions of gratitude from your teams, you will need to be a leader that embraces discipline and focuses on the development of each player on your team.
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“The Reflex” “Repetition of the same thought or physical action develops into a habit which, repeated frequently enough, becomes an automatic reflex.” Norman Vincent Peale
Discipline is also the driving force that separates the difference between knowing how to do something and having complete control and authority on the task. Discipline forces athletes to conform to a precise method of technique and execution. If the coach is unwavering in his demands for perfection to the fundamentals, players will develop what I call “football reflexes”. If you watch the beginning of a football game you will be more likely to see teams breaking the huddle with a resounding “Break” and running to the line of scrimmage than you will be if you tune on to the latter parts of the game. It is understood that the game of football takes its toll on body and mind and as the end of 45
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the game draws near, the players focus wanes. Because every player arrives at a point of reduced focus at different levels of exertion, you can look to discipline and proper instruction to greatly improve a player’s ability to execute properly as the game wears on. If players are forced to confront that exhaustion, unfavorable circumstances (such as getting annihilated) or not getting to play their preferred position will not excuse them from excellent execution and complete focus on the tasks at hand‌. how much better off will they be in life? Establishing this philosophy requires one hundred percent commitment from the first meeting of the season and all the way through the final games of the season regardless of results. Drive players to perfection in everything and demand it from them as you continually explain that they will benefit more in practice by learning to listen to commands and execute them properly. Convince 46
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each player their role on the team is not only important, that the team cannot succeed without their fullest effort. Explain to players that the fun of football is in making one play. Football is a team sport but it is comprised of thousands of individual decisions, actions and results in every game. If a player can learn the importance of performing a technique that helps his team win one play, he will have uncovered a secret that can take him a long way in life. Success is made up of tiny victories, victories that go unnoticed and unappreciated by the rest of the world. Teach them to enjoy themselves and to have pride when they accomplish the small things regardless of the world around them and you will find a sense of enjoyment that no championship could ever bring. Maybe we should call these reflexes “Success reflexes�.
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Organization and detailed planning down to the minute must be used in every phase of the season. For all your days you must be prepared, And meet them all alike: To know when you are the anvil and bear, When you are the hammer, be prepared to strike.
To begin with the end in mind in is a concept from Steven Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” What is the end result you desire for your career? That may be tough to answer depending on how far off the end of your career maybe. What is the end result you desire for this season? To some that is an easy question to answer and to others the question itself makes no sense. “I can’t think about the end of the season; I’m to busy getting ready for practice.” You may hear this or you may think this. In the world of coaching football a season is an eternity. 48
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Saying a season to yourself as a coach can seem like talking about potholes in Alaska when you are just beginning a road trip in Florida. Just like there are thousands of miles of road between Alaska and Florida, there literally thousands of minutes of preparation, practice and game time between now and the end of the year for a coach. And just like you can get very lost between Florida and Alaska without a map and itinerary, you can get lost in your coaching as well. Unfortunately, most people never even realize they’re off course; some people never realize there is a course.
To have success as a football coach we must plan for every situation that may arise. This means that we will be responsible for teaching hundreds of techniques, assignments and alignments to our team during the course of about twenty nights. It is imperative to know everything that must be 49
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taught and installed, to be able to rate them in an order of importance. Then make a plan for the first week of practice and begin working backwards on the list of things to do. I have used a practice planner each year that automatically tracks items that have been covered and how many times I have covered each item. If I have twenty practices before the start of the season I will want to see twenty stance and starts by each position when it gets to be game time. Conversely, once I have covered my quick kick two or three times it’s as good as it’s going to be for the first game. Coaches have to make decisions regarding practice time and that is ultimately where we are most accountable to our teams and parents. If you waste practice time by failing to prepare or by not having 100% clarity in how to deliver the necessary training you are subjecting the team to an increased chance of failure and opening yourself up to some criticism 50
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that may diminish your spirit for coaching. If I feel that strongly about preparing for a practice, I’m sure you can figure out how I feel about game preparation. The difference between practice and game day is that we will have our emotions running on high. Emotions are not the best companion for decision making, especially when we do not complete confidence in our plan. A combination of high emotions, lack of preparation and wavering confidence is very easy to spot by even the most casual of football observers. Regardless of your level of experience in coaching, you can have success if you make a detailed plan to coach the basics of football, keep your play calling simple and believe in yourself and your team. We will be covering techniques for organization throughout the rest of this book so hopefully this philosophical introduction will give inspiration to be prepared.
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Teach children like children
“The dream begins with a teacher who believes in you, who tugs and pushes and leads you to the next plateau, sometimes poking you with a sharp stick called "truth."� ~ Dan Rather
Coaching youth football is a tremendously rewarding experience for those that choose to dedicate their time and energy. Unfortunately many coaches receive battlefield promotions when their child's team has no incumbent to fill the role. One of the first pieces of advice I give new youth football coaches is to forget everything you know about football and think like a kid. If you are able to remember your childhood you may recall that everything was bigger and less complicated. The reason of course is we were smaller and simply have not learned all of life’s lessons. If you can apply this concept to football 52
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there are two points that are important to consider. First, coaches are much larger to children than they are to adults. That is true from a physical sense and it is true from a mental perspective as well. As coaches we are giants to our players and the idea of lining up across from a coach is a very scary thought. Be sure to keep your instruction positive and reassure players that you are teaching them for their benefit. The second point is that if Lego construction is a complex situation for a 9 year old, how difficult would he find the dynamics of an offensive blocking scheme? The truth is that football is very difficult to understand even under the best of circumstances. And so with that here comes lesson number one for new coaches. Less Is More Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of
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genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction. ~E.F. Schumacker Have less plays, have one defense, assign kids to one or two positions and try not to move them around. One of the main reasons new coaches struggle is that they try to do more than their teams are capable of. The best approach to youth football is to do very little but do it very well. The two main components of youth football are blocking and tackling. Once you have made a list of all of the things that must be covered just to teach blocking and tackling you will find that there isn’t much time left for anything else. If you don’t believe this, find any youth coach that has been at it for a more than five years and ask what they think. I recommend about 6 plays for the average youth team with a first year coach. Every team should have the following plays in their book, Dive, Power, Sweep, Toss, Counter and 54
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Reverse. If you figure that 6 plays going left and right are actually 12 plays and that you will have 11 assignments for each of the 12 plays you have now concluded that you have 132 assignments to teach. Unfortunately, this assumes that all of the teams that you will be playing will all be configured in the same defense. Of course, you should be aware that if you plan on playing 8 football games you will see 8 different defenses. The moral of the story is that if you want a football play to succeed you will need to teach children where to go and what to do when they get there. The same is true of defense and again you will need to teach 11 players how to react to 12 basic plays (6 left and right) which equals 132 assignments. Of course getting a corner back to make the play on a sweep to the strong side takes just as much time as teaching them to pursue a sweep away and ultimately they both can win a game for you. So just to do a little math for the 55
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new coach, 132 offensive assignments plus 132 defensive assignments equals 264 tasks to teach. Assuming that you can limit some of this activity due to multiple people learning at the same time, let’s say each task will take 5 minutes. The basics would take 1320 minutes or exactly 22 hours which leads you to an interesting problem. If your season has a four week training period and you are permitted to practice 3 times per week for 2 hours per session you will have 24 hours of practice time. The point of all this math is to say keep it simple and you will have a better chance to succeed. The reason for coaching youth football is because you want to teach children football and if that is true then you will have your best chance by creating an easy to understand game plan geared towards children. Leave the flea flicker double reverse for the other team and you’ll be better off for it.
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When is the last time you visited an elementary school? Have you sat in their tiny little chairs and looked at all of the multi-colored educational material that blesses the walls? Have you seen the way they have a process for everything from walking to lunch to going to the restroom? The reason for all of these things is because children learn differently than adults. Children do better in certain environments than others. The educational process knows that the kids have 5 senses in which to learn with and they make an effort to maximize all of them. You may want to take a field trip to your player’s school before your season starts and take a look around. You’ll find a lot of good ideas for getting your game plan implemented and you will observe quite a few ways to deal with your player’s behavioral issues. One recommendation for new coaches regarding teaching assignments is to color code your playbooks. I always assign a color to a position 57
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and then I create a playbook that shows the player’s assignment in the same color as his own. For example; if we are running a simple Dive to the 2 hole I would have my right Blue Guard double team the nose tackle with my center and I would have my left Green guard go down field for a linebacker. I usually use colored tape or wrist bands in the beginning of the season to help the guys out. The colors really seem to simplify the process, especially if you have given them a color coded playbook. You will be amazed to find out how many children cannot process left and right in real time. If you can go back to school and get your thinking along their lines you will get your point across much more quickly.
There are many components to succeeding at coaching youth football but the main way is to teach children the basics of football in a manner
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they can easily relate to. That step must happen before any learning can be accomplished.
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Training Assistant Coaches and Parents
“No person will make a great business who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit.” – Andrew Carnegie”
In business, CEOs are responsible for succession planning or in other words, who is going to take my job when I retire. Head football coaches should consider this process as well. Many coaches are fathers and thus they will be moving up to the next level as their sons grows up. It can be equally fulfilling if you could help another coach to get prepared to take the reins once you have moved on. Coaching is coaching and whether that means you are working with children or helping adults, we should always be trying to make a positive impact for the people we are involved with. 60
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Many coaches struggle with the process of delegation. They are either afraid that the assistant coaches and/or parents that volunteer to help are not qualified to teach the players of the team. Or they feel that the benefits of the players receiving the instruction directly from themselves out ways to disadvantage of only having one person doing the coaching. The truth is that it is far easier to teach an adult your techniques and schemes than it is to teach a child. It is a good idea to conduct several coaches meetings and training sessions before your season begins. You should assign coaches to certain positions and make them responsible for learning the techniques and drills associated with those positions. The good news is that this is a process that you can implement immediately. The truth is all the coach has to be responsible for is the next night’s lesson plan. Take some time and assign your coaches to 61
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a position and asked that the research technique on the Internet to be ready to run that part of the practice for the next day. Be committed to training your coaches and you will find that you will have a more enjoyable time coaching football.
Involving your parents in your youth football program is a fundamental key to success. Have you ever wondered why so many players show up late for practice? The last time I checked no child has a driver’s license that plays youth football and thus they cannot be held accountable for arriving at practice after the scheduled start time. The reason players arrive late for practice is because their parents had something that was more important to do prior to the beginning of your practice. You'll never know if the thing that was more important was watching a television show, checking their e-mail or finishing up the dinner 62
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dishes. If the parents were completely engaged they would find a way to have their child arrive on time for practice. If you think about the fact that there are 25 players on the team, it's certainly possible that parents can arrange for their child to share a ride with another player. So how do you get parents engaged in your program? Try to involve your parents as much as possible. Assign them tasks during practice, ask that they be in charge of things during game day and give them a sense of ownership of a small piece of the organization. This can also greatly reduce the stress of running your football team.
Another way I engage my parents is to test them on the assignments of their child's position. I post quizzes to the Internet asking parents and players to fill out answers to questions based on our playbook and position techniques. I make a big deal in practice out players that have outscored 63
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their parents on the quizzes. If you're not technically savvy. This task can easily be accommodated during your post practice talks. Simply print out a quiz and hand out one night at practice. Advise the players and parents that there will be a quiz at the end of the week and make a bet between the players and parents as to who will do better. If the players win then they get ice cream or if the parents win the players have to clean their room or some other chore. It really doesn’t matter who wins because when you engage both players and parents in learning the game together you will find a lot more people in the parking lot ten minutes before practice starts.
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Desire to do the “Right Thing”
“Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest” Mark Twain
If you ask any teenager what they want to be when they grow up most of them will say “I want to be rich”. Many times they have a preconceived notion that their success will produce financial rewards that will outweigh the importance of what they are actually going to be doing everyday for the rest of their lives. This thinking must be instilled by society because it is very common to see this type of thinking in the world today. The fact of the matter is that it doesn’t matter how much money somebody earns, if you despise doing it, you will not do it. Youth football magnifies this errant thought process because of the emotions associated with our children 65
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combined with the work, pain and sacrifice necessary to participate at any level. Ask a coach what he wants to do this season and he will probably be talking about winning in fairly short order. I myself can’t help but look to the end of the season even as I prepare my materials for the parent’s introduction meeting and equipment handout. So here is the kicker, we have to want to teach football more than any other thing. We have to desire to improve each player regardless of how hopeless they may seem. In fact the worse your team is, the better opportunity you have to exercise your coaching expertise. One of my favorite seasons ended with a 4-4 record and no invitation to the playoffs. That particular year was 2001 and it was, as any person should remember, the year of the 9/11 attacks. I had inherited a winless team from the year before and the expectations were very low. I was new to the area and the other coaches in the league were having 66
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some fun at my expense during the draft day because I did not know any of the players. The general theme seemed to be that I would not stand a chance with the group I had assembled. What they did not know is that I was picking children based on the way they answered questions I was asking during the tryouts. I was asking questions such as; Why do you want to play football? Would you rather run the ball or tackle someone? If you were a super hero or cartoon character, who would you be? What color is an orange? (my personal favorite)
I always ask questions when I meet a player for the first time to see how quickly they will respond. I also want to see if they can process information in real time. An added benefit is that they were running around doing all of the silly
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things that happen during a tryout so I was able to see how they responded while playing. I picked the guys that could think and had general athletic ability. I knew I was going to be less talented just based on the returning player policy of the league and I needed guys that could pick up a more complex offense that could confuse the defense. I spare the details of the whole season but my level of enjoyment that year was very high. The boys did a great job learning the program and we won our first two games. Somewhere in that time frame the tragic attacks of 9/11 occurred and we all had time to sit back and evaluate what was most important to us in life. As a coach, I personally began looking at what I was doing with my life and how I was affecting children. We had a very positive season and many of the players from that team ended up playing at the college level. What matters most, a fifty dollar trophy or college education and a chance to have a more 68
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fulfilling life? Spend your days focusing on teaching kids the right way to do things and the reasons why they should personally choose to do the right thing and you will have a winning season every year that you coach.
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