Hits and Misses

Pads popped for the first time last night, and a few of our guys were wide-eyed.

Half the boys have played tackle football before. The other half just strapped on for the first time, so a little uncertainty and a bit of timidity weren't entirely unexpected.

We did have two guys get a little teary. One hurt his arm on a facemask. Another couldn't really tell me what hurt, but it must have been something. Getting 'dinged up' is a normal part of the game. We are trying to introduce hitting in a slow and somewhat measured way - but with 38 kids and all levels of ability, there are occasionally spots where things happen.

The 'splatter' tackle drill that we did over the tackling dummies was designed to get kids over the fear of falling, or taking themselves and others to the ground. It provides a soft, safe landing space for both players. For the version of the Oklahoma drill we did, we limited the space and speed between the collisions to three yards acceleration from a prone position. This is the gridiron equivalent of a fender bender - potentially painful, but generally unlikely to be too big a problem.

Football is a violent game. Sometimes it is difficult to think of 4th graders as violent, but the game encourages a certain amount of blunt trauma. Helmets and pads protect our boys for the most part. But another surprising source of protection, fully on display last night, is actually the player's attitude about hitting and being hit.

I probably can't explain this very well, so let me pour out a stream of consciousness, and see if you can tell what I mean.

I noticed two new players last night - they'd never played tackle before - that seemed to enjoy the hitting. They were hit, and they made hits. They didn't win every battle, but they won a few. One is a decent-sized guy that may be a good interior lineman. The other is kind of small, with some nice speed. But last night I got to see the way they attacked and faced attack. I appreciated their body lean, their posture, their head position - you could probably call it body language.

I watched another really good experienced player, big, fast, and strong, just light up a kid on the splatter tackle. This player knows what he's doing, and he likes to hit. When we got to the Oklahoma drill, he missed a player that he should have tackled. He knew it, I knew it - he tried to blast that kid.

We talked a little, and I gave him a bigger challenge against an even smaller, quicker kid, to see if he'd learned his lesson. I bet myself big money that he had, and now I'm richer, because he stepped up. He went into the tackle a little more cautiously, not terribly worried about making a crushing hit - but determined to make the play. The attitude he used I would describe as 'smart first, aggressive second' instead of the other way around - but aggression will always be a part of his game, and he finished his tackle by driving a really good player three yards back.

And some of you that watched may have noticed the battles royal that we staged at the end, between matchups that we all wanted to see. Peyton and Brayden had a classic, on the first night of pads. 61 pounds vs 65 pounds, and either one of those kids will happily take on any size kid on our team or in our league. They have ferocious attitudes about how they will play the game, and kids that they go against will often outweigh them by 30 pounds or more. Trust me, it won't matter.

And then there were the eight or ten brand new guys that hesitated going into tackles, or carrying the ball.

Understand that these are clearly very smart young guys, applying ration and reason to a physics problem, i.e., if I slam into that guy, it may hurt. Unfortunately, football can be a little cruel, and despite their best intellectual efforts, the slamming happens anyway. But now they themselves are slammed, instead of being the one doing the slamming. And very often this type of wreck will happen just as the slammee exhibits a state of semi-rigid tension. This is a perfectly understandable physical reaction to the feeling of alarm that precedes an accident. Unfortunately, it is sort of like becoming the anvil to another kid's hammer.

Been there, done that. No shame in it, and it is a part of the process. Sadly I was 11 when I learned these hard lessons, and 12 before I understood enough to do a little teaching myself. It takes time, and we saw the evidence last night.

Different kids will accelerate through these first few weeks of pads at different paces. I've already seen two new kids light the hitting light bulb. Others, MANY others, will 'get it' before the end of the first game.

And as pleased as I am with all our hitters' attitudes, the other coaches and I are really excited to help a whole lot of other guys get there.

1 Down, 45 to Go

We had a great start tonight. We have a lot to do, and a lot to learn, but I was generally very pleased with the first practice. Administratively, I did forget to hand out Dick's sporting good store coupons from the league. I have a few, and I will get more in a couple of weeks.

I was very happy with the lesson plan that Coach Lee put together, and the pace at which he drove the practice. He's the hardest working guy out there. I was also very pleased to see Coach Bill and Coach Scott jump right in and help. The coaching they gave was correct, appropriate, and delivered with really nice temperament and instruction style. They are both going to fit in very well. And having six coaches this year will really help with this many players.

I'm working hard to get to know each of the boys. I tried to learn each name and pronunciation tonight. Might take a couple of practices, but we'll all get there. And I really want to meet each and every parent, and get to know you better. One of the most fun things for me over years of coaching has been getting to know and become friends with so many parents. But it was a little intimidating to look over at the sideline and see just how many names I will need to learn. Coach Bill said I should have encouraged more errand-running during practice. I think he was kidding.

Tomorrow night our practice will focus on position names, alignment, formations, hole numbering, and stances in our offense. Lee and I are making a best guess as we split the boys into line and backs groups, and it will change over time as we get to know them better. Last year we moved one player from guard to fullback, and another player from halfback to guard, both about ten days before the first game. Both players had great seasons, so don't worry too much if you think there is a misplacement tomorrow night. We'll figure it out eventually.

Parts of our Offense at a High Level

Some of our offense will be run from the flex formation. I thought you might like to see some highlights from Georgia Tech University, where they run it very well.

UGA fans, please forgive the ending. But the football stuff is cool. We're going to have a lot of fun.

Equipment

To play tackle football in FCCJC, you need tackle football equipment.

Most players rent their shoulder pads and helmets from the league. I recommend that approach as being no more expensive and generally safer than buying that equipment. A single pair of youth-sized shoulder pads can range from $50 to $150. If your son grows - and all his coaches hope that he will - he will probably need a new set for every season of youth football. And he will probably outgrow his helmet from year to year too, necessitating another $60 to $150.

Shoulder pad and helmet rental for the season at FCCJC is $60. Buying the cheapest helmet and shoulder pads you can get, and replacing them even every two years, which may not be possible, would save you only $20 over four years versus renting. That is a bad risk, both financially and protection-wise.

You will need to purchase a mouth guard, football cleats, football pants with appropriate padding, and an athletic supporter.

The league requires a molded, colored mouthpiece - it can't be clear. I recommend the kind that has a plastic loop that goes around the face mask with the mouthpiece running back through, rather than the one with the disconnect-able attachment. If the attachment is disconnected this year, even if the mouthpiece is in the mouth, we get a penalty.

I recommend football cleats instead of soccer shoes or tennis shoes - though all three are legal. Football cleats usually have more traction than soccer shoes and always have more traction than tennis shoes. Being fast or strong really doesn't matter if your feet slip.

There are two types of pants. Lots of kids have the traditional kind that hold a set of seven snap in / slide in pads (pads are about $15 a pack at Dick's Sporting Goods). Color doesn't matter for practice. Here's a link to those pants. Some kids (or moms) seem to favor the pants with the built in pads. They're more expensive but less trouble I guess. Here's a link to a sample of those. For games our players will need black football pants, no stripes. My son has black for both games and practice - that way in a pinch he could wear either one, and sometimes one pair is actually clean.

My oldest son plays for the high school team, and he uses a 'girdle' under his pants rather than the snap in hip and tail-bone pads. That is a matter of personal preference, but all the pants must ultimately have the two thigh pads, two knee pads, two hip pads, and the tail-bone pad.

I highly recommend some type of athletic supporter and cup. Something like this is what many kids use, but this would work too. Some of the cups are 'soft', and seem like a cut-down knee pad. But other kids want the harder plastic cups. I never liked those very much because you could get what was called a 'cup ringer' - you'll just have to use your imagination for that. But that's all they had back in my day.

Whether or not you have a "practice jersey" is up to you. Some players get a nice mesh jersey for the hot days. But it is perfectly OK to wear some previous year's game jersey, or your dad's T-shirt, or even your mom's sorority sweatshirt on a cold day. When I was in the fifth grade I may have been the only Chi Omega playing tackle football. Whatever fits over the shoulder pads will work just fine.

If you have questions about equipment or what you'll need, just drop me a note or leave a comment.

First Weeks of Practice Coming Soon

The first practice for 2009 starts on July 27. There will be a very important parent meeting starting at 5:30PM before practice on the first day as well.

The first week is NON-CONTACT and players should only wear their helmet along with athletic shorts and a t-shirt. The first two weeks will consist of Monday through Thursday practices from 6:00PM to 7:30PM. Saturday Aug 1 at 9:00AM will be set aside for a makeup should weather be a factor or players miss a practice that first week. It is important that your son make all the practices the very first week as they are required to have 6 hours of non-contact conditioning prior to full contact starting in week 2. We need all the boys to be at the same starting point going into that 2nd week and further as we make decisions on teams. Practices are tentatively set to be at OLATHE NORTHWEST High School.

"Normal" practice weeks will consist of practice on Mondays and Wednesdays from 6:00PM to 7:40PM and Fridays from 5:30 to TBD.

Win or Develop?

Youth coaches always have an interesting choice to make as they prepare their teams and players. As Americans, we're culturally driven to win in competition, and coaches do play some determining factor in those wins and losses. As parents, we're anxious to get the best possible instruction for our children, and to see them develop in the most advantageous circumstances. But if we're honest, we'd also prefer that happen in a winning environment.

Dozens of coaches and educators have blogged about the tension between these goals. Try a google search "winning vs developing", and you'll see what I mean. In soccer, where I have a long (inglorious) background, the debate rages fiercely. Coaches at the high school, college, and national level all decry the win-at-all-costs mentality of youth coaches, and the resultant scarcity of skillful players.

Then of course, those coaches turn around and try to win at all costs. They know that is their level at which development must now take a back seat to winning.

Personally I bring eighteen years of coaching youth players to the debate. That's more than some, less than others, but probably seems a lot of time to many of you. (That's because you are young, and I am old, and yes, I resent you for it.) Anyway, I don't think of myself as win-at-all-costs guy, but those of you that know me, know that I am conscious of the scoreboard, and that I am trying to win, to some degree.

In the spectrum of the win/develop debate, I happily straddle the fence. I'll shoot you a few examples, describe my position, and sum it all up with my reasoning at the end.

Consider the issue of playing time. The choices at the extremes are

• Play everyone the same amount of time (a development-oriented choice)
• Play the best players the most possible time, and lesser players the least possible time (a win-at-all-costs approach)

We split the difference. I will play developing players well over the minimum required, but quite often not as much as the top players.

Another pro-development strategy is to move kids around to play every position in a single season, or even in a single game. The other extreme is to give a kid one position for the entire season - or his whole career.

Once again, I'm down the center. Our players almost always have two to four positions at which they play. In football that's pretty easy with offense and defense, but on our team they will actually play both sides of the ball in nearly every game. In soccer I found it a little harder to have every kid play multiple roles in a particular game, though some could manage it. But most of our kids did change positions from season to season and year-to-year.

In training you can focus on skills or fundamentals (development) or you can spend time on tactics and strategy (win the game.) We, as you might expect by now, try to do both. We do let our boys know what type of defense they will be facing in the coming game, and what, if anything, we know about the other team's offense. But we also work every practice on simple, fundamental things like blocking, tackling, center/qb exchange, handoffs, pitches, etc.

Those are just a few examples, and there are probably other decisions I make that are similarly waffled. You may criticize this approach as preventing our team from winning as much as it might - you'd be right - while at the same time impeding the development of players. You might be right about that, but I don't know if anybody knows that for sure.

Nevertheless, I happily accept that criticism, because it is true. My number one focus is not winning. And my priority is certainly not to try to make some kid an NFL player either, even if I thought I could. My number one priority is that kids have fun when they play.

The eighteen years of coaching has helped me get a feel for whether or not a kid is having fun. Kids that make progress, and do things better, and accomplish things can have fun. Kids that get to play have fun. Kids that play on a team that wins have fun, no doubt. They like winning.

Some in the debate claim that this desire to win comes from mom and dad, and shouldn't be the case, but I'm not going to join that refrain, because I like to win too. There is a scoreboard, and I prefer to have a bigger number on it at the end than the guy coaching the other team.

That's probably my parents' fault, so we can all blame them.

Here's the thing: If a kid feels like he contributed, and he made some progress, and he got some recognition, and his team competed, and his team even won some games - well, he probably had a pretty good time. And when the season is done, I hope he had so much fun and learned so much that he wants to play again next year.

But I'm also very conscious of this, and it weighs on me all the time. Some kids might be playing football (or soccer, or whatever) for the very last time in any particular season. Whether that is because they find a greater interest in some other activity, or they move away, or the time has simply come to hang them up, I still want them to have had a great experience.

I will never believe that focusing on development, to the exclusion of all else, can create the kind of memorable and lasting team experience that I remember from my own youth. And conversely, I've seen way too many kids be run off from win-at-all-costs teams to be comfortable as a parent with that approach.

Sometimes development-oriented coaches will make the strong case that they're doing what's best for the kid. But I'm always cynically suspicious of that, especially if that same coach is paid, as is often the case in competitive soccer. And win-at-all-costs coaches will clearly keep, cut, and use players in ways that engender no love for either the sport or the team. And I think that is tragic.

So we will firmly trod the middle ground. We'll develop players athletically and mentally because it is great fun to love and enjoy the game and your team. And we'll try to win because that's really fun too. And if we've been even remotely successful at achieving those goals, my guess is your kid can't wait to get started this July.

Recognizing Defenses, Part II

In Part I of this two-part series, I described five standard ways to categorize defenses. We call them 7 Even, 7 Odd, 8 Even, 8 Odd, and Goal Line.

All of those categories ASSUME that the defense will line up in a balanced formation. That is, we expect the defense to have the same number of defenders on each side of our center.

But what if we don't see that? What happens in the case of a 5-2 Monster, where the defense shows up as a five man line, with two central linebackers like an Oklahoma defense - but just one safety? That defense has a player called a Monster, that moves around to any spot on the field. Often times, youth defenses will use that extra player on the wider side of the field.

Here's a picture of our flex formation lined up against a 5-2 Monster:

The M player represents the Monster, this time lined up on our left side of the field. Note that there are five defenders to the left of our center, and four defenders to the right, with the nose tackle and safety lined in the middle.

Our first inclination is to call this defense an 8 Odd. And for our option plays, it still will be! Our option plays are well-suited to run against a Monster defense aligned this way, because we can run to either side with no change to blocking rules for any of our players.

For plays like sweeps, belly, powers, or trap, we will probably try to change the play at the line to run away from the Monster. That's not because we can't block him - we can and do against balanced 8 Odd alignments. We check to the other side against a Monster on those plays in order to gain a numerical blocking advantage on the short side of the field.

We change to the other side in our offense with an audible at the line after the players have set their splits. Some words mean 'right' as in 'run the right-side version of the play' while other words mean 'left'. Other words are false alarms, and we ignore them. So if the key word "Ringo" that day means "right", a Power 25 would become a Power 36, and we would run off right tackle instead of left.

Sometimes we will even call a 'check-with-me' type play in the huddle. "Ringo Lemon Power" would tell our players that our play will be either a Power 36 or Power 25, depending on whether they hear "Ringo" or "Lemon" at the line. As they go to the line, they don't know to which side we're running the play.

We will also often do this type of check-with-me in cases where the defensive formations are ordinary, but the individual defenders have unbalanced themselves along the line. For example, if we are trying to run a Midline Option, but the nose tackle is lined up in the A gap between our center and guards within an otherwise balanced defense, it is pretty simple for us to call a run to the opposite side at the line.

We started doing this last year, in the second week of the season, and I was absolutely amazed at how effective our 3rd graders were at understanding that the direction of the play would entirely depend upon what our quarterback saw and called.

Each time we did it though, it was because the coach in the huddle asked the QB to read the defense and react at the line, and our players were prepared beforehand for the 'check-with-me' audible. This year we will try to build on that, and give our quarterback the opportunity to change the side of the play at any time.