For those who haven’t had a chance to follow them, Bellevue is a high school located in a suburb of Seattle. They achieved national prominence in 2004 by being the first football team to defeat De La Salle High School since 1992 and snapping the Spartans’ 151-game, thirteen-year winning streak.
So why would I hate this program? Bellevue is a model of success. They play inspired football. The offensive system they use is the Wing-T, and they are good. I happened to be at the game where they defeated De La Salle. Bellevue scored on their first play from scrimmage and hung thirty-nine points on De La Salle without ever throwing a single pass. It was impossible, even from our vantage point in the stands and superior angle, to find the football during a play, often for as long as two full seconds. Defensively, Bellevue’s 4-3 swarmed, gang tackled, pressured, and played sound fundamental football. The players and coaches were, and are, respectful and courteous to their opponents and to their fans. They’re a model of how a good high school program should look.
Why would I hate them so much if they are a living embodiment of everything I hold dear in football? The answer is actually pretty simple. I hate them because too many programs and administrations are making the mistake of thinking that because Bellevue does something, they need to do it in order to be successful.
I’m actually speaking of one specific thing. In Bellevue, the local youth program runs the same offensive system and terminology as the high school. The middle school runs the same system and terminology as the high school. It’s not quite to the level of Odessa-Permian in Texas, where male babies in the hospital are given a fabric football with their future number on it, but it’s close.
And, at the risk of sounding contrarian, it is not how you build a successful program.
Bellevue’s head coach is a very smart man named Butch Goncharoff. Coach Goncharoff did not simply wander into Bellevue and demand that the local youth organizations run his system. He was smart enough to realize that unless he demonstrated success with it, there was no reason that they would want to run his program.
Coach Goncharoff started as a youth coach, and he was absolutely not running the same system as the local high school. For five seasons he coached his system, gradually moving up the food chain until he reached the high school level.
First he showed that it was possible to win with his system, and now he has a comprehensive feeder program in place that gives him experienced players every year. The athletes in the Bellevue program run the same system from age eight to age eighteen, and they are only going to get better. Don’t look for anyone to knock them off any time soon.
Let’s contrast this with the attempts by a local school district I know of to follow in the Bellevue footsteps. Like Bellevue, they, too, mandate that the middle schools in the district run the same programs as the high schools they feed. Unfortunately, unlike Bellevue, they don’t have a track record of proven success to point to. In fact, the two high schools in the district were a combined 7-13 this last season. One of them has won an astounding four games in two seasons.
Possibly worst of all, the high school coaches did not come up through the system, they were hired from outside it. This means that the hapless middle school coach that has been there coaching his program with some success since 2000 can suddenly have his system yanked out from under him when a new high school coach is hired that wants to do something different.
Let's think about that. Imagine that you are the head coach at one of the middle schools. Imagine that you have put thousands of hours of research and development time into the creation of your own program. This is not an unlikely scenario by any means. The best youth coaches I know of put in about three to five hundred hours during the season, and about two thousand hours of study and development time during the off-season. Imagine that you have enjoyed some modest success with the system you have developed. (Actually, the odds are that the success you have enjoyed is probably more than modest if you are putting that kind of effort into your personal education and development.)
Now, standing in front of you is a high school coach that has had back-to-back 2-8 seasons. Only twice in the last two years has his offense scored more than three touchdowns in a game. He was shut out three times in the last season alone. He is going to tell you what offense and defense to run. He will probably never step on your practice field, yet he will mandate to you the systems that you will teach to your players. He will disregard your own personal research, experience, and study in favor of his own. Worst of all, you will probably not even be successful with the systems he wants you to run!
After all, he is not even successful, and he is supposed to be the “expert” in the system, hired by the district at the high school level and paid to teach his program to high school players.
This is the fundamental flaw that comes from misunderstanding and misapplying the methods used by Bellevue High School to build their program.
The short-sightedness of high school coaches never fails to amaze me. They think nothing of forcing a lower level coach to run a program completely unsuited to his personnel if it makes it slightly easier for them. They never seem to understand that an unsuccessful junior high coach in their feeder program is not going to send them players of any caliber. They are perfectly content to watch the junior high go 0-8 as long as they use the same terminology, and they just don’t seem to understand that youth football players that play for losing football teams do not usually go on to play successful high school football!
Youth football players are human. In a society that is desperately trying to drag kids away from video games and off the Internet, hamstringing their coaches, putting any stumbling block at all in their potential success is one more brick for that player to lay on the foundation of quitting. Why on earth would a freshman football player that lost every game as a sixth grader, lost every game as a seventh grader, and lost every game but one as an eighth grader want to continue playing football?
I’ll tell you, because I was that player once: he doesn’t. You will lose that player to soccer, band, drama club, or “hanging out” just as surely as if you personally cut him from the team.
Logically, it doesn’t even make sense to force a middle school program to run a high school system. High school programs are not designed with middle schools in mind, they are designed with high school athletes in mind. Why is this so difficult for the high school coaches to catch on to? This isn’t rocket science. Half of the middle school team hasn’t even hit puberty yet.
Probably the stupidest aspect of this situation is explained by the player study performed by Jack Reed in 2001. In the article on his web site at http://www.johntreed.com, Coach Reed tracked his 1995 youth football team and discovered that fewer than twenty percent of them went on to play high school football. Now, you can call this statistically insignificant because it is only one team out of thousands, but what verification is there that forcing a youth program to run a high school offense will make them more successful when they get to high school?
It is perfectly possible to take junior varsity players that have never once in their lives taken a three-point-stance and teach them to play successful, even triumphant, football. I know this for a fact because I have done it. I have taken my freshmen with flag-football experience and faced off against programs with established tackle feeder programs going down to age six—and defeated them. Why does this happen? Because I do not depend on another coach to teach my program. I teach my program. I teach safe and sound fundamental football.
Why me? Because it is my program. I am responsible for its success. The levels below me are not responsible for my wins and losses. It makes as much sense to demand that they run my program as it makes for the local junior college to order the high schools in their area to run whatever systems they approve. Actually, that makes more sense; fewer than twenty percent of youth football players may play in high school, but almost all junior college players played high school ball.
There is a horrible down side to the feeder-program mentality as well. In 1999 I was an active duty member of the United States Coast Guard stationed in Kodiak, Alaska. I was fortunate to work for a fantastic supervisor named Del who gave me time to coach football and rekindle my love of being on grass with young people.
In 2002 I ran into Del again after I was stationed in Petaluma, CA. Del had moved to a radio navigation site in Wyoming and brought his young son with him.
Del’s son was a hockey player in Alaska. If you haven’t had a chance to meet some youth hockey players, take my word for it: they are tough, very tough. More than that, Del’s son was also an Alaskan state record holder in the 100-meter hurdles.
Can anyone say, “broken field runner?” I’ll admit that my mouth started watering at the prospect of a young athlete with that kind of speed, toughness, and natural elusiveness carrying the football in my Double Wing offense.
So what happened to him? When I spoke with Del, he told me that his son had never played high school football. Why? Because the high school coach in that area told him to his face, “You can come out for football, but you’ll never play. My players have been in my program since they were eight years old. I don’t have time to teach you to play football!”
Del’s son walked away from the sport. Frankly, I’m disgusted with that coach, and ashamed to consider him a part of my peer base. Unfortunately, that is the sort of mentality that arises when you put too much emphasis on the presence of a feeder program for your high school. What are you supposed to do with transfer students? In 2005 the Tomales High School Football team had a player who was an exchange student from France! Not only had he not played football before, he hadn’t even seen an entire football game before he played in one!
Of course, if the only players we really care about are the ones that play in our programs from the moment they first put on a pair of cleats, then I suppose it’s not really a big deal that our young Frenchman was able to play football, now is it?
I don’t deny that having a good feeder program is a boon to a high school football team. All football experience is good for young athletes, and all football experienced athletes will improve a high school program. However, before you start talking about the responsibilities of the youth program to your high school system, you first need to understand your responsibilities to the youth program.
Bellevue High School is a fine example of a football program, but a disingenuous understanding of their program philosophy and errors in its application are throwing thousands of youth football programs under the bus every season. A high school coach has no right to order anyone not on his practice field to do anything. An unsuccessful high school coach has even less right.
Success is not always defined by wins and losses, but when you approach a feeder program to ask them to run your system, unless you have something to show, don’t be surprised if they respectfully decline. The youth football coach is not a supplicant to or lackey of the high school coach. The youth football coach, and this means the junior high or middle school coach as well, is the colleague of the high school coach. He should be treated as such.
And that means understanding that his program means his system. Let him run it.
~D.
Author: Impact! Coaching Successful Youth Football
Volume One: The Program
Volume Two: Coaching Special Teams (Now Available!)
Volume Three: Coaching Defense (July 2011)
Volume Four: Coaching Offense (May 2012)
Available from Authorhouse Publishing
www.FBforYouth.com
"If we can help just one coach,
then we've helped twenty kids!"
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