Erik Saunders

Youth Football - Training Assistants and Parents



Posted: Tuesday, July 21, 2009

by Erik Saunders
Union County Sports Academy

One of the keys to succeeding in youth football is to understand that assistant coaches and parents need to be trained equally as well as the players themselves. By the time a player reaches high school they usually have been playing football for several seasons and much of the process is understood at that point. In youth football, the base of understanding is almost zero and the players physical ability is very low as well.

There is no possible way for one coach (regardless of you organizational skills and knowledge) to be able to successfully teach an entire youth football team the game by themselves in the time allotted. In the business world it is said the The success of an organization depends upon the development of its people and that is extremely true when it comes to succeeding at youth football. If you could make money from ten jobs at the same time as opposed to one job which revenues would you choose? If you choose ten revenues then consider if you could have positive results from ten coaches as opposed to one coach, wouldnt you prefer those results as well. Take time to conduct training for your coaches and parents that will allow them to understand your system. Share materials that you are studying (or creating) to better yourself as a coach. The more time you spend engaging your coaches and parents, the greater your chances for success will be. There are several hundreds techniques to be taught to players and each one takes two things to be successfully taught, someone to teach and repetitions by the players. If only one coach is doing the talking there is a pretty good chance that you will see a long line of players looking off into the distance. Conversely, if you watch a group of five or six players and a coach working together, the focus level and interaction is much more engaging .

Every practice should have some segments of individual position work and each of those stations will need to have a qualified coach providing instruction. These stations are fairly easy to run and the goal of them is to ensure that player are focusing on a fundamental technique or assignment that is crucial to the success of their position. When you break down training in this manner it is fairly easy to assign ownership of these tasks to other coaches. An approach that works very well is to have a coaches meeting once per week beginning a week or two before the season starts and assign coaches and parents a specific area to responsible for. List out drills, techniques, alignments and assignments that they should be familiar with and provide them with the materials they will need to know what to do. Does this sound like a good deal of work? It is for the first and second season but after that you should have everything fairly organized and it just becomes a system.

Of course as part of my book ("The Youth Football Caoches Handbook") you are more than welcome to utilize my programs and systems as much as you would like and here is a link( www.youthfootballhandbook.com ) to an example of how that meeting might flow. Anytime you spend training coaches and parents will pay you back ten fold so don't hide your knowledge and demonstrate true leadership by enabling others to share in the experience of coaching youth football.

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