Originally posted April 27, 2009
You read that right, but if you'd like to make sure, go ahead and read that title a couple more times.
I just had a discussion with a high school football coach of a local program who has completely failed to understand the reason and purpose for middle school and junior high football. Seriously, he's lost his damn mind.
His premise, which is one I've never endorsed, by the way, is that he "needs" (His word, and one that indicates how effective a coach he must be.) the middle schools to run his system so that he can stay competitive.
Go back and read that again, too.
I'm going to shred that argument piece by piece. I encourage you to print this blog out and take it to the next meeting you have with your coaching organization where they try to tell you that you must run what the high school runs.
The following is a word-for-word depiction of his side of our conversation and my accompanying replies, to the best of my memory. I don't think he is going to put me on his Christmas card list.
Point one: "I need the middle school to run the same things I run..."
Counterpoint: Why does a coaching professional paid a $3,000 stipend to coach at a Class AAA school in Washington State 'need' a middle school coach to prepare players for his program? Why is said coaching 'professional' unable to adequately prepare those players himself with his eight man coaching staff, $1.4 million field, $35,000 weight room, $6,000 film study equipment, and approximately nine weeks of off-season summer and spring training time?
Why does it a fall to a middle school program with a two-man staff making $900 between them, broken sled, antiquated equipment, prohibition against scouting (because it leads to 'overcompetitiveness,' whatever the hell that is), eight week season, and almost zero support from the district to teach a system you were hired to bring to us? Aren't you supposed to be the expert on this system? Isn't that why you were hired? If not, then why were you hired?
Point Two: "...so that when they get to me they already know the system."
Counterpoint: In your previous coaching history you have never remained in any position longer than four years. Your average is three seasons. Does this not indicate that it is useless to train a group of seventh graders to run your system when odds are high that you will have moved on to a greener pasture somewhere by the time they make it to the varsity level? Furthermore, I refer you to my previous counterpoint. If you're such a damn expert on the system, why the hell do you need someone else to teach it for you?
Additionally, this middle school feeds three high schools, one of which is in another district. What makes you think you're even going to get enough athletes from this program to your high school to make this a worthwhile pursuit? According to the research at JACK REED'S WEBSITE as well as the NYSCA statistics, fewer than 24% of youth football players go on to play high school football. What do you get by dividing 24% by three, and is it worth damaging the success of the middle school program?
Point Three: "At this level that's the only way I can stay competitive."
Counterpoint: No, as a matter of fact it's not. Tomales High School in Northern California has no feeder program and remains competitive-- and more so-- every year. Puyallup High in Washington has six feeder schools, only one of which runs the same system they run (and not because it is required). They consistently finish in the top 25 in Washington AAAA rankings. For every school you point to that is successful with this method, I can point to one that is just as successful without it, and probably two that are not successful with it.
Furthermore, at what point did anyone start to care about your ability to remain competitive? You are not the one on the field, and this game doesn't belong to you. It belongs to the players.
Point Four: "Middle school football doesn't really count, anyway."
Counterpoint: It counts to the middle school players who sweat and bleed to be successful. It counts to the parents who pay the bills so their sons can compete safely and successfully. It counts to the teachers who come to me looking for ways to use my sports programs to motivate students who are struggling academically. It counts to the administration that tries every year to justify keeping a program with sliding numbers due to lack of success.
In short, the only person that really thinks it doesn't count is you, and the only reason you feel that way is that you're not associated with the middle school in any capacity other than demanding that they do your job for you.
Point Five: "It's only there to develop players for high school game."
Counterpoint: That's an interesting and totally false point that indicates a complete lack of understanding of the role of athletics in the scholastic environment. Athletics has a clearly-defined purpose in school. It helps to teach life-lessons that can't be worked into the curriculum any other way. At the middle school level it also serves as a hook to assist struggling or de-motivated students who need something to cling to in order to keep the grades and learn the behaviors and social interactions that will allow them to be successful in life.
Preparing players to play football at the high school level is only an insignificant by-product of a successful middle school program. Ideally a middle school program should prepare student-athletes for life at the high school level.
Point Six: "Besides, you should run my stuff because it works!"
Counterpoint: You'll pardon me if I disagree. You've run two different systems at each of your last four schools. In the last six years you have had two winning seasons (2006 and 2008) and won one playoff game (2008). And you are supposed to be the expert with your system. Why are you making so many significant and program-altering changes to the system if it's so perfect, and why have you yourself not established a track record of significant success if this program is so great?
Furthermore, your program was developed for the high school level. Your varsity is comprised of student athletes who are considered by our state to be responsible enough to drive a motorized vehicle. Some of the student-athletes I coach are not legally allowed to be left home alone by their parents yet.
Your athletes are physically in the early adulthood stage of development. They have more finely-developed motor control, more testosterone, greater muscle development, stronger bones, and greater cognitive processing facility.
By contrast, the athletes you are demanding to run the same program are in the middle stage of childhood or early adolescence at best. Some of them have not even entered their secondary growth spurt yet. An adolescent may grow between three and six inches per year. Rapid growth of this nature generally results in a corresponding lack of coordination, while at the same time their muscle tissues are just beginning to thicken to adulthood. Fine motor control in the wrists doesn't complete development until age sixteen or later. There's a lot more to running a competent system at the youth level than simply handing your playbook to the middle school coach and pretending that you've given them a successful system.
Point Seven: "A successful high school program will help those kids go to college by providing scholarships and motivation in school."
Counterpoint: In the first place, colleges generally don't care what the won/loss percentage is for the athlete's high school. They are looking at basic skill development and raw athleticism. In the second place, you are actually harming the middle school athletes with your misguided philosophy.
If--and only if-- the middle school students stay in sports then sports can be used as a motivator. However, if they quit participating in athletics then sports will provide no motivation or encouragement for them. Coaches won't be involved in their lives, and the life lessons we got into coaching to teach will not be learned. The number one thing that drives youth players out of athletics, according to the NYSCA, is "not having fun." In most cases, "not having fun" can also be translated as, "getting the ass beat out of me every week because my coach doesn't know what the hell he's doing." (In fact, among my coaching colleagues I can point to at least twenty excellent coaches who left playing or got into coaching for precisely that reason.) More kids are going to quit middle school programs this year due to incompetent coaching than for any other reason. Every kid that quits football in middle school is one less athlete on your team, and one less successful athlete in the school in general. You should be doing everything you possibly can to promote and develop the middle school program.
In short, coach, your plan actually interferes with the education of a middle school student by driving them away from one of the aspects of school that could encourage them, motivate them, and embolden them to keep their grades up and keep themselves out of trouble. By sabotaging the middle school program in an attempt to develop your high school system with some mythical, magical idea that doing so enhances your own team is nothing more than active stupidity disguised as altruism. Before you make demands on the middle schools, try doing some research and study of football at the middle school level.
You'll be surprised what you'll learn.
~D.
NOTE: Child development information taken from:
Bee, H., & Boyd, D. (2002). Lifespan development. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.
Showing posts with label Feeder programs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Feeder programs. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Taking Over a New Program
(Originally posted on January 30, 2009)
Most youth coaches coach their sons for a couple of seasons and are done with it. They move on into other things; take the promotion at work, change to a different job, whatever.
A rare few, however, can't find an antidote for the coaching bug. There are meetings where you can confess alcoholism, but so far I've yet to find a gathering of people in sweats and ball caps where you can stand up and say, "My name is Derek and I love teaching young people to tackle each other."
For those coaches, taking over a program is inevitable at some point in their careers. They'll either move from youth to a school program, (possibly vice versa), start a new organization from scratch, or otherwise find a way to bring decades of experience and study to a program that desperately needs it.
Sadly, a large number of those programs will be bad ones at the start. They'll have seemingly intractable problems. Remember, unless he's moving to a better job somewhere, most coaches don't leave willingly. If he's enjoying even modest success, the average coach would rather hang out where he is than go on a job search and move his family around.
Which means you're going to be walking into a difficult situation, and there's no easy way to untangle the Gordian Knot you're facing. The previous coach might have been beloved, especially if he left behind a good program, and you have to fill some large shoes. You can expect to hear someone use the phrase, "That's not how we did it last year," at least once per week for the first season.
This blog is specifically written with an eye towards taking over a school program that has not been more than moderately successful in recent years. You already know that you need to win the trust and respect of your players. Remember that anything you tell them they are accountable for, you have to hold them accountable for, or you'll lose their trust. There's a saying from the Armed Forces: "The enlisted man will forgive his officers any indiscretion save two: cowardice and inconsistency." It applies to football, too.
To begin with, I would look up the students that played football last season as sophomores and juniors, and I would also put some focus on the junior highs that feed into your program (or on the youth programs that feed into your junior high program).
One situation that drives me insane is youth programs and junior highs competing for the same players. I don't think that many football players have the physical ability to play for two teams at once, and most school coaches seem to have it in for the youth programs. I've been told twice by high school programs that they aren't interested in letting me coach any of their freshmen. Personally, I think this is a little dumb. At large high schools, some of those freshmen that could start for the youth program (or at least be guaranteed a certain number of plays because of the Minimum Play Rules) spend entire seasons sitting on the bench. Many of them quit after that one year, and never really get better at football. (It may or may not be relevant, but both school programs had losing traditions.)
If you're the school coach, consider what is best for the player, not your program. More often than not, if you encourage a younger player to play for his youth program, he's going to have more success, stay in football longer, and may even turn into a good player for you down the stretch. If you've taken the time to respectfully work with the local youth programs as I mentioned in a previous blog, you should have no problem with the idea of letting another coach develop your younger talent.
When it comes to the lower levels, junior highs if you're a high school coach and youth programs if you're a middle school coach, I would be campaigning harder than Hillary to make sure that every player who even walks past a football at Wal-Mart comes out for the new team. (In fact, that's a good recruiting tool, especially for youth football. Ask the manager of the local sporting goods and department stores if you can hang a flier on their rack of footballs advertising your program. Also put up fliers in the local gyms, on bulletin boards at grocery stores and coffee shops, and the like. You can also make sandwich boards like real estate agents use for open houses quite cheaply. Get permission to put them up in front of community events, like town meetings, high school plays, farmer's markets, and things like that. Be creative. Radio stations and cable access channels are required to offer Public Service Announcement time-- go to the stations and ask if you can put together a thirty second commercial for your program. Make sure there is a sign for your program on each of the main roads into your town. Stuff post office boxes with mailers. There are dozens, if not hundreds of things you can do, most quite cheaply or even free with a little work.)
A rare few, however, can't find an antidote for the coaching bug. There are meetings where you can confess alcoholism, but so far I've yet to find a gathering of people in sweats and ball caps where you can stand up and say, "My name is Derek and I love teaching young people to tackle each other."
For those coaches, taking over a program is inevitable at some point in their careers. They'll either move from youth to a school program, (possibly vice versa), start a new organization from scratch, or otherwise find a way to bring decades of experience and study to a program that desperately needs it.
Sadly, a large number of those programs will be bad ones at the start. They'll have seemingly intractable problems. Remember, unless he's moving to a better job somewhere, most coaches don't leave willingly. If he's enjoying even modest success, the average coach would rather hang out where he is than go on a job search and move his family around.
Which means you're going to be walking into a difficult situation, and there's no easy way to untangle the Gordian Knot you're facing. The previous coach might have been beloved, especially if he left behind a good program, and you have to fill some large shoes. You can expect to hear someone use the phrase, "That's not how we did it last year," at least once per week for the first season.
This blog is specifically written with an eye towards taking over a school program that has not been more than moderately successful in recent years. You already know that you need to win the trust and respect of your players. Remember that anything you tell them they are accountable for, you have to hold them accountable for, or you'll lose their trust. There's a saying from the Armed Forces: "The enlisted man will forgive his officers any indiscretion save two: cowardice and inconsistency." It applies to football, too.
To begin with, I would look up the students that played football last season as sophomores and juniors, and I would also put some focus on the junior highs that feed into your program (or on the youth programs that feed into your junior high program).
One situation that drives me insane is youth programs and junior highs competing for the same players. I don't think that many football players have the physical ability to play for two teams at once, and most school coaches seem to have it in for the youth programs. I've been told twice by high school programs that they aren't interested in letting me coach any of their freshmen. Personally, I think this is a little dumb. At large high schools, some of those freshmen that could start for the youth program (or at least be guaranteed a certain number of plays because of the Minimum Play Rules) spend entire seasons sitting on the bench. Many of them quit after that one year, and never really get better at football. (It may or may not be relevant, but both school programs had losing traditions.)
If you're the school coach, consider what is best for the player, not your program. More often than not, if you encourage a younger player to play for his youth program, he's going to have more success, stay in football longer, and may even turn into a good player for you down the stretch. If you've taken the time to respectfully work with the local youth programs as I mentioned in a previous blog, you should have no problem with the idea of letting another coach develop your younger talent.
When it comes to the lower levels, junior highs if you're a high school coach and youth programs if you're a middle school coach, I would be campaigning harder than Hillary to make sure that every player who even walks past a football at Wal-Mart comes out for the new team. (In fact, that's a good recruiting tool, especially for youth football. Ask the manager of the local sporting goods and department stores if you can hang a flier on their rack of footballs advertising your program. Also put up fliers in the local gyms, on bulletin boards at grocery stores and coffee shops, and the like. You can also make sandwich boards like real estate agents use for open houses quite cheaply. Get permission to put them up in front of community events, like town meetings, high school plays, farmer's markets, and things like that. Be creative. Radio stations and cable access channels are required to offer Public Service Announcement time-- go to the stations and ask if you can put together a thirty second commercial for your program. Make sure there is a sign for your program on each of the main roads into your town. Stuff post office boxes with mailers. There are dozens, if not hundreds of things you can do, most quite cheaply or even free with a little work.)
Your goal should be to increase your roster size by a minimum of 5%. Losing programs tend to hemmorrhage players. You need to get them back, or better yet, don't lose them in the first place.
The very instant you are given the handshake promise that you have the position, you need to schedule a meeting with the upper-classmen that played this season and will be playing for you next year. For a middle school, this means seeking out the 6th and 7th graders and getting them into a classroom with you for a few minutes. At the high school level, this means finding the sophomores and juniors that will make up your varsity team. (Do not neglect your junior varsity program! It is very tempting to rape the JV of players during a difficult season. Resist that temptation at all costs. The longer you let those JV players work together, the more success they have as a team at the JV level, the more likely it is that they will grow accustomed to that success and bring it out at the varsity level next year.)
I have some very high expectations for my players in the off-season. My football players do not just succeed, they excel. (Note that there is a difference between a goal and an expectation. A goal is something you hope your players will reach. An expectation is something you require your players to reach.) My expectations start with this:
1. GPA of 2.8, minimum. No excuses. Season GPA requirement is 2.5 to play, 2.8 to start. All other things being equal, the higher GPA wins the slot.
If you're a school coach, you might consider asking for a few minutes at the staff meeting to discuss your academic goals. I've noticed a bit of a division between academicians and athletes in schools, and it's best to nip that in the bud by reminding your colleagues that athletics teaches as much as academics, and that you are in this thing together for the good of the students.
2. At the high school level I require 75 Weight room log ins from December before you get your helmet for practice. (There are about 38 weeks from December to August, so that's less than two per week.) At the junior high/middle school level I would require about 35 log ins, or one per week.
3. You must play at least one sport other than football unless you a) Work a job more than 15 hours per week, or b) have a GPA of 3.5. (For middle schoolers this stays the same. I especially encourage wrestling, basketball, and track as sports that condition and teach toughness, footwork, and running form.)
4. High School players are required to perform ten hours of community volunteering to be done from December to opening weekend. (Talk with the local Boy Scout Troop, they have lists of stuff that needs volunteers.) Middle Schoolers are required to perform just as much, however this might involve some creativity since most of them don't drive. You might have to do more organization to get your team out as a group doing stuff like building picnic tables for the local parks, picking up trash along the roads, helping out at the senior center, and the like. (High school players have it easy-- they can always volunteer to help coach the local youth sports teams!)
5. Match up the varsity players with an incoming JV player from the local junior highs. Varsity players are required to call them a minimum of one time per week from January to the start of practice. Middle school/junior high players are required to call members of the local youth feeder program once per week. This is just a simple, five minute phone call, "Hi. How are you doing? Are your grades keeping up? Looking forward to football? How's your basketball team doing right now? Did you see that game on TV last night? I know! We better not do a sack dance like that or Coach Wade will run us until he's tired! Okay, I've got some homework to do, but I just wanted to see how you were doing. Get studying for that history test!"
6. No hazing. No bullshit. We are ALL Braves/Lions/Spartans, etc. We do not abuse the underclassmen, we lead them. If they do not respect you, that is YOUR fault, not theirs. I absolutely do not bend on this one, and my policy goes beyond zero-tolerance. My players are the elite, to be looked up to by the entire school. They are not thugs or abusers. Given the choice by school administration, I do not remove players from the team for hazing. Removing a player means that they no longer get to learn the lessons that our sport can teach. (I'm not a big fan of kicking a student out of my classes, either.) I do, however, make damn sure that they don't continue the hazing. We start with a thousand yards of bellies and a thousand yards of bear crawls at each practice for the next two weeks and a demotion to the bench.
One of the things that offends me the most about hazing is what it tells you about your team. They obviously are not pulling together and making a coherent unit. Even if the varsity is a tightly knit group, abusing the underclassmen means that a) those younger players aren't having fun playing football, and aren't as likely to play next year, b) those underclassmen are not going to "fit in" to the team when they move to varsity if they stay, and possibly worst of all, 3) those underclassmen will someday be upperclassmen who will think that hazing is normal, accepted, and enjoyable. That establishes a long-term precedent of cancer in your program. Kill it immediately before it spreads.
I would visit the junior highs at least once a month from about February until school ends to hold meetings with the incoming players. Just like the upperclassmen phone call, this is a quick little meeting for five or ten minutes to tell them about some exciting stuff they'll be doing, and to get involved in their lives. Players are more likely to want to play for a coach who takes an interest in them, remembers their names and the stuff they are involved in, and comes to see them. It's going to take time out of your day, but it's worth it. Trust me. Come to the basketball games and wrestling meets for the junior highs and cheer until you can't talk. The players will know that you support them and will want to play for you. (I once tripped over a garbage can celebrating a home run at a player's baseball game. The audience got a good laugh-- and several freshmen who had not played football that year came out the next year as sophomores. One told me it was because he thought it was cool that I got right back up and started cheering again. Maybe it wasn't the whole reason, but it certainly didn't hurt!)
If you're a middle school or junior high coach this is going to be more difficult. Obviously you can, and should, drop by the local youth practice fields every so often to say high to the players and talk to them (with permission of their coaches, of course. I never set foot on a practice field without the consent of the coach in charge.) You want to avoid disrupting elementary school classrooms, but you can still approach the teachers about meeting with their students here and there throughout the school year. Failing all else, talk to the elementary P.E. teacher. Ask for five minutes a month to talk to their students about playing for you next season.
One thing I want to caution you about when you talk to coaches of programs younger than yours. Don't say a word about what you run unless they ask. Ask them how you can help them do what they do better. Ask them to consider teaching only your blocking and tackling progression, not your schemes or playbooks. You already know the contempt I have for high school coaches that try to shove their ill-advised systems down the throats of middle school and youth teams. Those teams belong to their coaches, and they have the right to coach them with systems they have developed, even if you think they could do better with the stuff you give them.
When it comes to working with lower levels, I take a line from Terry Pratchett's Guards! Guards! "She was a kind-hearted woman out for all she could give." You need to have the same approach. I continually talk up the feeder programs. I'll give them anything I can give them, time on my fields, extra equipment, any help I can possibly spare, and even players that are not necessarily going to spend much time on my fields. Remember that your future players are on those teams, and the more successful you can make them, the more success you are going to have, because those young men are going to stay in football, keep playing, and keep expecting to have success. (You had better, by the way, meet those expectations!)
One thing you should notice is that this entire, lengthy blog hasn't really covered anything about what weights to lift, when you should start practicing, putting together a summer contact camp (You should have two: one for your team, and one for the lower levels where your players actually coach the youth/middle school teams). The whole point of this blog is to remind you that a program isn't just a bunch of called plays on game day. It's not a jersey color or a clipboard or a cool mascot name like Raptors. A program starts at the earliest age you can get a young person involved in sports, and it lasts only as long as you can keep him interested in participation. Don't ask your players to specialize in football. It's not good for them physically, can cause repetitive stress injuries, and it leads to burnout. Yeah, you might lose a good athlete to an unscrupulous basketball coach who wants him to join a year-round traveling team, but that's not going to happen very often, and odds are the respect you show the other programs will come back to you when your season begins and they're encouraging their basketball players to put on some pads. (Respect, by the way ALWAYS goes out before it comes back.)
It goes without saying that your program will, too.
~D.
Why I Hate Bellevue High School
(Originally posted on December 17th, 2007)
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!"
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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