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Step 1
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 we simply had not learned all of life's lessons. If you can apply this concept to football 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 Legos are a complex situation for a 9 year old, how difficult would he find the dynamics of an offensive blocking scheme? The truth is football is very difficult to understand under the best of circumstances and so with that here comes lesson number one for new coaches.
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Step 2
Less is More - 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 team is 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 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 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, lets 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 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 be
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Step 3
Elementary School - 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 the school of your players before you 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 players behavioral issues. One recommendation for new coaches regarding teaching assignments is to color code your playbooks. I always assign a color to a position 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 ways to succeed at coaching youth football but the main way is to teach children the basics of football in a manner they can easily relate to. If you do that you'll have a successful season guaranteed.
