Revisiting How Kids Learn, Play and Enjoy Football
One does not need to strap on a helmet and shoulder pads to learn and enjoy the game of football. There are many innovative ways to get involved learning and playing the game. Over the next several weeks Youth Evolution Sports will explore the different ways to introduce, teach and play the game of football in a kid-friendly fashion that is contemporary, safe, and most importantly fun. This week we look at a new and innovative way to get kids involved in tackle football.
TACKLING YOUTH FOOTBALL
Unlike soccer, youth football suffers perceptual problems that discourage a majority of parents from ever considering registering their child to play. Mothers especially, and many fathers as well, see football as too rough, too aggressive, and too likely to result in a serious injury. In addition, many kids are turned away before they even start because youth football programs discriminate by imposing weight limits that either prevent a child from playing specific positions or disqualify the child from playing altogether.
When it comes to learning the game, practices provide no training in the fundamentals, and kids become frustrated when they fail to improve.
Even worse is the physical and brutal treatment many coaches place on their athletes, which at times borders on abuse. As former NFL quarterback Boomer Esiason remembers, “One of the greatest errors in coaching I ever witnessed was when I was nine years old. Our coach had us run thirty yards with another player on our back. That was our conditioning. I understand that you want to hammer home the important points of being physical and tough, but at nine years old it’s just not about that. It made me want to quit the game, I almost did.”
It is not uncommon to see coaches lining young kids up ten yards apart from their first time in pads and telling them to run at each other and ht their teammates as hard as possible. In the coaches’ minds this distinguishes who is tough enough to play, with no consideration for the fundamentals. Coaches like this d not spend any time teaching technique or introducing the elements of tackling; its line them up and make them hit.
Jerry Horowitz, a successful Bronx high school coach for the past thirty years with several New York City and New York State championships to his credit, compared this practice to “taking a kid who has never learned how to swim and teaching him how to dive first. Can you imagine standing on top of a high board, unable to swim, and being told to jump in the pool? You would think the person telling you to do so was crazy. But that’s what we do to kids in tackle football, and then we expect them to stick with the game.”
These are all examples of why things have to change. And they will.
THE MODEL FOR CHANGE
Football’s established traditions provide an important background to the problems we continue to confront, including these:
- The art of preparing for a fall season of games
- The essence of controlled violence through the act of using one’s body or equipment to stop or move past an opponent.
- The emphasis on touchdowns, first downs, elaborate schemes and game planning.
What Football Practice Should Look Like
To get a picture of a typical day at a program like Youth Evolution Sports program, imagine as many as 144 kids, some who have never played before and others with more experience, meeting on one playing field to learn all the fundamental skills of every position. The sport could be baseball, lacrosse, soccer, softball, or volleyball, but in this case it’s youth football. Kids are organized into six groups or teams of twenty-four, with each team equally matched in size and weight. Four instructors are assigned to each group, and each instructor is responsible for six participants divided into pairs by size and ability.
Once kids are assigned to a team, the so-called season begins. It is to a traditionally defined season of games, practices, playoffs, and championships. Instead, the season consists of two ninety-minute sessions per week for six to eight weeks. Learning occurs through drills reinforced with individual and group competitions that allow each participant to gauge his progress. Not a single traditional game is played, yet the kids have fun improving while playing equally and more often than they would in any other traditional sports program.
At a time when field space is sparse and too many hours are wasted driving from one fame and practice to another, this structure allows an entire league to conduct a full season on one playing field, taking up a total of only three hours per week.
Our success will be achieved by incorporating solutions to issues kids express as major concerns and are the reasons why they never tried, had given up, or were never interested in the game. These concerns are the building blocks that formed the key elements of the Youth Evolution Sports program.
DEVELOPING INDIVIDUALISM
Youth Evolution Sports promotes the individualism of every child involved. Rather than make an immediate judgment based on a particular child’s size/weight or ability and pigeonhole the child in a particular position, Youth Evolution Sports requires that every child learn every position. Once the child has had a chance to do this, he makes a decision about which position to pursue rather than having this decision dictated by a coach.
You can have kids who weigh as much as three hundred pounds participating with kids as little as seventy-five pounds. This structure is such that they never come into contact with each other, but they both learn how to play the quarterback, wide receiver, and running back positions as well as center, tackle, and linebacker. We allow kids the opportunity to experience and learn all aspect of the game before we ask them to decide what positions they feel most comfortable with as they progress to the next level.
PRODUCING A SUCCESSFUL JOURNEY
Youth Evolution Sports promotes the entire journey of the sports experience, allowing more kids the opportunity to learn and progress through the sport. More emphasis is placed on proper preparation than on wins and losses. Youth Evolution Sports emphasizes fundamental skills preparation, which engages every participant by applying contemporary twists to drills that appeal and capture each participant’s attention.
For example, in the process of teaching every position, we break down each skill and reinforce what was just learned. We do this is a game by awarding points to every participant and allowing each one the opportunity to understand how to apply the newly learned skill.
In our programs we recognize every accomplishment by every individual. Results are not based solely on an arbitrary final team score. All competitions are designed to allow each participant to gauge his own progress.
ELIMINATING INTIMIDATION
Too often in sports the more mature and bigger kids are allowed to dominate the program, leaving kids who have yet to blossom discouraged and uninterested in pursuing a sport. The Youth Evolution Sports structure eliminates all types of participants’ intimidation by introducing every part of the game gradually and providing a comfort level for every participant.
Youth leagues tend to begin a season by taking all interested kids and testing their skills without actually teaching those skills first. The results are often a disaster.
When a child shows up to register for a baseball league, she is immediately asked to field a ground ball to test her skill level. Has it ever occurred to the adults running this program that maybe no one ever demonstrated or taught that skill to this child? The answer is usually no, which results in that child being judged immediately as having little or no potential.
I would argue that the fact the child showed up to register shows an interest, which is the first sign of potential. Anyone who is eager to learn can prosper from good instruction, but many sports programs ignore this basic concept, probably due to their lack of understanding child development.
In youth football there have been far too many cases of intimidation. Coaches tell kids to hit each other before teaching them anything. In Youth Evolution Sports programs we eliminate this phenomenon of bypassing the fundamentals and instead teach progression of every skill necessary to play. When we teach blocking and tackling, for example, we take every kid, experienced or not, and line them up six inches apart. Then, after they have executed each phase consistently and accurately, we slowly move them farther and farther apart until they are performing the skills at full speed. This is a prescribed formula of crawling, walking, jogging, and running through each fundamental skill. By taking a gradual approach we produce safer results along with the development of fundamentally sound players over a relatively short period of time.
ENGAGING EVERYONE
By breaking down organized instruction into small parts we have been able to produce better coaches throughout our programs. A majority of college and professional football teams run their practice sessions exactly this way.
“Teaching the game’s techniques and fundamentals remains one of the most rewarding parts of coaching,” explained Pete Carroll, University of Southern California head coach and former head coach of the NFL’s New York Jets and New England Patriots. “The system of breaking down our practices into short segments in order to drill each player in the fundamentals is essential to effective teaching. It keeps the players on the field for a set but short period of time in which we can achieve maximum results. And it provides coaching staffs with a structure that produces faster learning.”
A key to this success and something that improves a coach’s ability to teach effectively and equally to the entire team is the proper setup and organization of each segment. In a Youth Evolution Sports program we take as many as twenty-four kids on a team and teach all of them the same position during ninety-minute sessions. The secret is pairing up the participants during each practice by equal size and ability and then dividing them into three different groups on the field. This allows for easier observation and hands-on corrections throughout each drill. Rather than game-planning formations, we stress proper drill setup. The result is more than 140 kids on one football field learning and interacting at the same time, with no one standing around for the entire ninety minutes.
This is something good at that high school; college and pro teams have done for years. But at the lower levels you go to a youth practice and see most of the kids standing around while a handful of their teammates practice. Everything drags as the coach goes over the same play for forty-five minutes.
Boomer Esiason believes the Youth Evolution Sports model can and should be used in other sports. “The key to JPPD,” he said, “is that it provides the correct structure in which to learn an entire sport and properly prepares you to advance to the next level. It truly is the template to be replicated in other sports in order to maintain interest and build a broader feeder system of talent.”
ELIMINATING FIRST, SECOND, AND THIRD STRINGS
No matter what the sport, the following scene occurs all too often at youth practices: One group of kids is engaged and receiving the full attention of their coach, while the remainder of the team looks on, not engage in anything. If you are not considered a member of the “starting team”, you don’t receive equal attention in practices or games; therefore, you don’t learn, improve, or have any fun. This is always the point where kids lose interest and quit.
Youth Evolution Sports addresses this issue by eliminating first, second, and third strings. No one gets ignored, everyone plays and learns equally, and initial talent is not a factor. When a child registers to participate, no one is prejudged or asked to audition in order to be drafted by a specific team due to athletic ability. Everyone begins the program on a level playing field, and, uniquely, all players remain as equals throughout the program. For example, all participants get to progress at their own pace, learning and competing with kids who are of similar size and ability.
Because everyone learns every position, the participants usually find their own strengths and the aspects of the game in which they can excel. They therefore become empowered by the overall experience. Each player is paired up and receives hands-on instruction through a one-to-six instructor-to-participant ratio.
This method allows kids to truly learn the game in a comfortable environment that does not test their courage but advances them quickly into fundamentally sound football players. It also produces better overall coaches by eliminating the focus and responsibility on winning. At the youth level the focus should always be on teaching the game properly. Youth Evolution Sports accomplishes this in a contemporary way that addresses a broad base of kids’ needs and uses other creative alternatives that produce greater results than traditional games.
SATISFYING PARENTAL CONCERNS
Watching your child participate in youth sports can be a gut wrenching experience. Often it is the first time your child has been placed in a situation where she must perform in front of others. The experience can be stressful and uncomfortable for you and your child.
The philosophy of Youth Evolution Sports was deliberately designed to take outside influences that often disrupt a youth sports experience—such as disgruntled parents, disrupted officiating calls, and heckling from the sidelines—and prevent them from penetrating a Youth Evolution Sports structure. When developing this program, I wanted to design a template that would lead youth sports in a new and positive direction by eliminating all the negative aspects that intrude on our children’s experiences.
The mission of changing how youth sports are presented and executed became the backbone of Youth Evolution Sports. We address all parental concerns by providing every participant equal yet maximum playing and learning time. Everyone learns and performs at every position, and parents witnessed their children improving. Kids had fun, were never bored, and always felt a sense of accomplishment.
One key to eliminating negative sideline behavior is the absence of the scoreboard. In every competition we award points for both group and individual accomplishments involving execution of fundamentals. When the program eventually progresses to group competitions and participants are executing skills in game like situations, the structure consists of coaches on the field correcting and encouraging players as well as assigning points. It is impossible for anyone observing from the sidelines to disagree with calls or become upset with unequal treatment. Three sets of forty-eight kids, continuously flowing in and out of competitions every four plays, with each set of three changing positions on a rotating basis, demonstrates that everyone is playing equally and more often, and is having an opportunity to perform a number of positions. All the action is conducted under close supervision and constant instruction both on and off the field.
In our programs, parents no longer discuss final scores but rather how much their kids have learned and improved. The total focus is on preparation and finding satisfaction through planning effectively. The results are based on the achievements of individuals as well as the contributions they make to group accomplishments, reinforced by a productive accounting of their mistakes and the areas in which they need to improve.