Assistant coaches are the lifeblood of youth judi bola programs, they can make or break a head coach. I understand how valuable they are, so I’m not bashful about recruiting them when the situation presents itself. A former University of Nebraska football player moved back to the area and into my little community. He, his wife and two children attend the same church as we do and his wife is in my wife’s Titus group. His kids go to school with my kids and low and behold he has a boy that is of youth football playing age.
This former NU great was an offensive lineman and played in the NFL for 6 years. When I e-mailed him, he quickly and readily replied and agreed to help coach next year. He had “heard” of the program and some of the success we had locally. Needless to say I was excited about the prospect of having someone of that caliber coaching with us. It will be fun learning from someone with that kind of experience under their belts.
I would encourage all you youth football coaches to recruit good assistant coaches to help you in your efforts, you can’t do it by yourself. You can’t even do it very well with 2 guys, for a 22 player team, 5 is about the right number. You should chase down guys that know football, but don’t be surprised if some of the men you coach with don’t turn out like you thought. It’s not what you know that is important, it is what your players know that counts.
There are High School coaches I know of that can talk circles about 3 techniques, Cover 3, Shotgun Zone read and know every football term and scheme forward backward and sideways. But many of these guys have 90 play play books and are going 0-10 or 1-9 every year. This amazes me, but then you go back to the adage ‘It doesn’t matter what I know, it matters what my players know”. And with youth football teams it’s important for the kids to not only know what you know, but for your knowledge to be applicable to youth football.
When coaching youth football, you have to be able to break down and progressively teach aspects of the game in a way that the kids can grasp, retain and actually do within a limited amount of practice time. The youth game is not High School, College or Pro Football, there are so many other considerations and constraints that those teams never have to deal with. While the youth game isn’t about just learning some basic plays, it also isn’t about learning how to run the zone read or the West Coast Offense either.
In my first years of coaching youth football, my former College Head Coach was coaching his grandson in our league. This former Division II Head Coach was very well respected, his teams had been very competitive and he had even been an assistant coach at the Division I Level in the old Big 8. When the coaches in our league found out he was going to be coaching against us, they immediately figured his teams would dominate the league. It turned out my former coaches team was one of the worst in the league, only winning 2-3 games and they looked pretty shabby doing it.