Play 'Em All: Allowing Kids to Play Multiple Sports

As a coach, let kids decide which sports they are going to play.
Don't make them pick.

Some coaches have rules against it. If it isn't directly stated, it is usually implied. Schedules are made so that there isn't room for anything else. You make kids choose. 

If you are like most coaches, your team isn't brimming with D1 talent that you can easily recognize in the seventh or eighth grade. A kid doesn't come into your office, or classroom, and say, "Coach, I want to dedicate myself only to (insert sport here) because I know I am that talented or dedicated that it will be my future." While some of you may have had this happen, most of us can't relate. 

The reality is that there are millions of kids who play ball who don't make it past high school.

Why make kids give up a sport sooner than they have to?

Don't!

High school and junior high especially are training grounds. It isn't until then that they can really give it an honest shot to choose one sport anyone. Just think, a kid playing youth ball that is voluntarily coached by a dad, you know, the one whose son is actually a guard, but somehow is the best QB on the team. How many times have you either seen or heard something like this happening. It's not until kids get an honest coaching shot, that they should even consider one sport over another. 

Let kids play 'em all. 

Kids should play everything. Not only does athletics build many of the character traits they will need for the rest of their lifetime, but it makes kids better athletes. A certain skill in one sport, can hone another skill in a different sport. Baseball requires that kids learn to see the ball and focus on it. Doesn't that help your wide receivers? Aren't good pitchers usually good QBs? A post player on the basketball team works one-on-one, using their hands all the time. Don't your defensive ends do this too? 

Have you ever heard a coach say, “I can't wait for my guys to come into summer camp out of shape? Lying on the couch all summer will surely give us an edge?" Of course not. Football coaches should want kids coming into camp that have been playing ball all summer, who are conditioned, and have been competing. Basketball coaches should want the same thing when the winter rolls around, right?

The only issue that could arise is other-sport practices while your sport is in season. Work this out with the coaches of the other sport. Create a cooperative system that benefits you both. It will benefit you both.

This shouldn't even apply to junior high. Let kids go to basketball practice on days when you don't have football. Let kids be kids and play them all. We have the opportunity to have summer workouts and conditioning early in the summer. The problem is that's the heart of baseball season in our area. I will hold off the beginning of my practices because I know that so many kids are playing baseball. Those that can make it, will. Those that have practices or games, they are excused as they are still in season.

Be telling a kid to pick a sport, they may be deciding between two things, or more, they already love. Let them decide when it is time to choose. In the mean time, tell them to, "Play 'Em All!"

Failing to Plan? Plan on Failing.

What do you want to accomplish as a coach?

 Seriously. 

What are your goals? If you can’t answer these questions, then it’s time to start thinking about them. 

 Defense? That’s easy. Offense? No problem. Special teams? I’m ready. Those are the easy questions that it takes a coach no time to answer. You know what you want to run on each side of the ball and how you want to run it. Yet, biggest question that you must ask yourself is... 

 What do you want to accomplish as a coach? 

 The year-in, year-out, big picture stuff is easy for our minds to define. Offense and defense are the very first things that coaches think of, and rarely change. However, it is all the small, everyday decisions that can make or break the success of your team, and your coaching career. 

 If you haven’t already done so, write out your coaching philosophy. In it include what you want to accomplish, the type of coach that you want to be, how you will interact with kids, and what impact you want to have in the game of football. Your philosophy becomes a governing body, setting the standard and expectation that your coaching career will live up to. 

You have to set goals. 

 Start out the beginning of each season developing goals that you want to accomplish. The easiest goal for all coaches is to win. From there, set single-season goals not only for your team, but for your staff and for you personally. Now that you have the ball rolling, be thinking about your future; set goals for your career. Whether it’s to become a high school head coach or coordinator, a college assistant or a middle school lifer - make a plan for your future. Your kids know the goal on offense is to get to the end zone. What is your end zone? 

 How about the small stuff? 

 There is no such thing as small stuff in football. Many times, it’s how you, your staff, and your team do the small stuff that garner the biggest wins. Don’t overlook anything. Some things you can plan for. Some things you can’t. For the things you can plan for, then do. For the other things, let your philosophy drive how you will handle the situation. 

 Tardiness? Discipline? Meals? Transportation? Practice schedule? Off-season work? Coach development? Locker room set-up? Team building? 

 Some of these questions you may have an answer to because you've been around for a while. If you are a rookie testing the shark-infested water that is coaching, then these questions give you some things to think about. 

 Keep the big picture in view, but it’s the small things that can make or break your future . 

Seek out other coaches and see what has worked for them and what was a train-wreck. What were their goals starting out? What were some of their biggest problems, their greatest failures and successes? What were the little things focused on that gave them success? Coaches never stop coaching, so they will want to share this with you. 

 Start making a plan now. If you fail to do so, well, then be prepared to be stuck on the sidelines watching someone else have the success you didn't plan for.

Coach Your Coaches

Remember how unsure of yourself you felt in your first year of coaching? Even after years of coaching, you may still feel uncertainty at times. A good coach not only works through that uncertainty, but helps take it away from his staff as well.

Coaches, you must coach your coaches. 

The best way for you to feel at ease is to know that everyone around you 1) has an assignment, and 2) knows how to execute that assignment.

Practice isn't only for your players' improvement, but for your staffs' as well. When you are working on kickoff, make sure your guys, or special teams guy, know what they are looking for. Offensively and defensively, give everyone an assignment. Your defensive coordinator, when not on defense, may have the best eye to see what the opposition is doing defensively, so make sure that he has a job.

When you are going over scripted plays, two-minute drills, or what have you the day before a game, put the headsets on and practice communicating. Go over your substitution strategy.

I have four guys that assist me. I call the plays on offense and relay them to a coach that gives them to QB, as we are a huddle offense. I am aligned behind our offense  about 15 yards to get a player view of the defense. My play relay coach is close to the line. My o-line coach is at the LOS as well so he can see alignment, pullers and the like. My DC is behind the defense 10-15 yards so he can get a good look at what they are trying to do. Finally, I have a coach in the pressbox who is keying on certain players/plays. It works for us. Everyone has a job. If we are confident in what we are doing, the DC may move from diagnosing the defense to subbing players in. Then we flip jobs on defense. But that's the thing - everyone has to have a job.

Coach up your coaches. Don't ever assume they know something, but don't treat them like they don't know anything. Trust your guys and give them insight into what you are looking for in certain situations.

A staff, just like your team, must work as one, or the task becomes infinitely more difficult.

Be a coaches coach.

4-4? 5-3? Does It Really Matter?

What system do you run? Does it matter really? Honestly, it shouldn't matter which offense or defense you run because it's all about how you run it.

Many coaches are a single-system coach. They have and will only run one type of offense and one type of defense and won't change. Unless you are looking to try something new, or it's just not working for you, then stick with what works.

But what if you aren't sure what defense works, or you know that you will face a bevy of offenses on your schedule? Let's take a look at the standard youth defenses, the 4-4 and the 5-3.

The 5-3 is a perfect defense to face against a run-first, pound the box offense. As long as you have a tough nose guard, the 5-3 is the go-to shutdown run defense. You have the flexibility to shade your outside line backers outside of your ends for secondary run-support, or keep them inside the end to blitz the middle. A spread team that utilizes multiple receivers will often attempt to spread the defense out, then attack the middle where the single backer lies.

With four down linemen, the 4-4 gives you an opportunity to get another skill player on the field, compared to a fifth lineman. The 4-4 can be used to cover any offense, but allows better coverage against balanced pass/run, and spread teams, which grow more and more every day.

Both defenses require good pass coverage by your corners since you only have a single high safety. However, the 4-4 allows for flexing a linebacker into halves coverage, while you are more limited (based on on-the-field personnel) when running the 5-3.

The advantage has to go to the 4-4, simply because you can create more movement with it. Ultimately, you need to have a base defense that you can create different looks out of. That's why I like the 4-4. It allows you to drop a linebacker as a deep defender, and the ability to walk a backer up to the line to form your 5-3.

It all comes down to knowing your kids. If you only have 5-6 lineman or linemen who can't contain an edge, then the 5-3 isn't for you. On the flip-side, the 4-4 requires some additional athletes who can move in space.

I love the 4-4 because I can be multiple and give the offense fits. Think about your o-line having to figure out who they are blocking on a play when the defense keeps changing. If you have a banger at one of the inside backers, you can blitz him to give that 5-3 edge up from, while not sacrificing anything on the back end. Give different looks, but coach your kids up to keep the same assignments. Make it simple to make it multiple. Only change gap assignments with your inside defenders, and counter any gap-attacks by the offense with blitzes.

Whichever D you go with, make sure you rep it out, and that kids know their responsibilities. Create a defensive identity, stem from it to keep the offense guessing, and then go hard.

Essential "P"hilosphy

If you don't have one, then you need one. If you haven't thought it out, then it's something that you need to. Your coaching philosophy - it's what should guide you along your coaching career.

Whether you have one written out and saved away deep in a computer folder, or you have never given your personal philosophy a thought, let me help you shape it.

Coaching is a balancing act. Sometime we have to play the good guy and the bad guy. Both are necessary. Ultimately, however, you have to decide if you are the good guy or the bad guy in your coaching identity. A good guy can't be negative with his guys all of the time, while a bad guy can't be positive all of the time. You are what you are, and will you will be what you decide to be. The choice you make will determine your coaching course. 

I am a good guy. I don't try to hide that. I am a players first, hyper-positive coach, who will rarely yell, yet have found success. I pride myself in having great relationships with former players years after they leave my practice field. To me, this game is more than just a game. It's a life-lesson, and when I have kids who tell me they loved playing the game with me as their coach it makes every why-in-the-world-do-I-coach-football kind of day worth it. If a coach tells you they haven't had those days, they either are lying or have just started.

From that experience, I believe that there are three essentials that need to be added; three things that you need to be.

Be Positive. Be Proactive. Be Proud.

Be Positive.

Simple. Say positive things. Do positive things.

When you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you take the stance that everything is wrong in the world except you, then, yeah, everything looks that way. We can't perpetually see things this way. It's bad for football. It's bad for your health. If all you do is tell a player what they are doing wrong, that's a self-esteem killer. While it may build you up, it breaks them down.

To be positive, you have to work to find good things sometimes. And that's great because it means you are looking, that you are analyzing. Football can be messy and ugly. It's easy to jump a kid because he missed a block. It's easy to make him feel like the worst football player ever. But can you make him feel like the best player ever. Can you take a negative, and build it into a positive. He may have missed the block, but he fires off the line. Then coach him up. Don't just jump bad habits or plays. See the positives, pull them out, and then correct the negatives. That's why we are in this, right? It's called coaching, not showing kids up.

Let kids know when they are doing well. It will save everyone grief down the road because they will be more receptive to what you are saying to them, and they won't develop some complex, constantly worrying if they are good enough. They are.

Be Proactive.

When calling a good football game, you have to be one play (if not more) ahead of the guy on the other sideline. Try taking this approach with your players like you do your practices. 

To prevent fumbles, you work on exchanges and ball-carrying drills. To prevent false starts, you rep plays out and constantly remind your guys. To prevent fatigue in the fourth quarter, you do wind sprints and run hills and do grass drills and run laps and more wind sprints and on and on and on. If you do it in practice, try it with your players.

This will be harder to do with players, but can be done. Do you love wasting practice time running the whole team because the locker room is a mess? No one does. This is an example of where we can be proactive. Make yourself present in the locker room. Let the kids see you in there. Other than covering your tail if something like a hazing incident occurs (which they do), you can get to know your kids - their personalities, sense of humor, even what they look like without a helmet on. By being proactive and settling clear guidelines which you and your staff oversee, you can keep small problems from becoming big distractions.

Be Proud.

Here is a redundant, philosophical phrase: I take pride in being proud.

I am proud of my kids. We put them through things physically that would take us days to recover from. We demand the best from them every time they are on the field. We expect them to sit through a film and grease-board session for 45 minutes when we know they can't sit through 20 minutes of geometry. Football players, and other athletes, have higher expectations than students who don't participate in sports. We monitor their grades more closely, keep tabs on their in-school behavior, keep them out late on school nights and expect them to do all we ask with marginal error and ultimate success.

So when a kid hangs in there and doesn't walk away from the game, I am proud of him. Uber proud.

Too many times I have seen kids endure all of the blood, sweat, and tears and excel on the gridiron to look up and see that their parents aren't there to see them. How many of us can identify with having to take our best players home after practice because no one bothered to pick them up. I have been there and walked that. It's disappointing as a coach. It must be crushing as a player.

That's why I am proud of my kids. If they mess up, they're still trying, still fighting. I will be there for them during the wins. I will be there for them during the losses. We preach team; sometimes we preach that football is family. Family doesn't quit, doesn't abandon. Family doesn't feel ashamed; neither do I. I am proud of all of my boys. I am their number one fan. Sometimes, we are their only fan.

So while I can't make do things like creating a new offense that would spread like wildfire in the prep ranks, I can pass on some advice and some things that have helped me grow as a coach. 

If this helps, which I hope it does, let me know. 

Young coaches just starting out, write out a philosophy regarding the way you coach/want to coach. It will open your eyes to what you want to be. Even if you are the most seasoned of coaches, take a moment and evaluate your philosophy. After all, every good coach steals a play from another coach along the way.

Second Chances

There is one thing for certain in football – someone is going to make a mistake.

Fumbles. Picks. Holding calls. Missed tackles. Dropped passes. They are all part of the game. Ultimately, though you can make all the calls, signals and shifts you want, the kids are the ones executing and mistakes are going to happen.

As a coach, one thing that you need to be prepared for is how you are going to handle that mistake. Are you going to lose your cool? Fly off the handle? Berate a 12-to-15-year-old for throwing the ball inside, when he knows to throw it deep outside?

Keeping an even composure on the football field is a fine art. Especially when your defense gives up a first down with an offsides call. But how can we teach this game if we are blowing a gasket? The answer? Practice.

Yes, coaches need practice, too. Alongside all of the calls, signals, and shifts you are making, coaches need to be practicing down and distance situations, substitutions and injuries. But coaches must practice even more on talking and relating to players.

Players are going to mess up. If you don’t think so, then get ready because it’s inevitable. How we handle those flips and flops are going to determine our success, or failure, as a coach.

To gain some perspective, let’s rewind the tape to when we are living out our glory days on the field. How did we feel when we made a mistake and coach tears into us? I don’t recall thanking a coach for using choice expletives to describe and chide my fault.

Players know when they have made costly mistakes. You can read it in their body language. The head goes down, they slump and you can see it in their eyes.

It is in this moment of disappointment that we can help build young men or break them.

Don’t get me wrong, I have yelled at my share of players. I have also learned from doing that. Sometimes it was warranted. Sometimes, though, it was extreme. Results, however, are often unimproved by beating my man-chest toward a teenager.

Use this moment to teach a young man that although it may have hurt the team, that redemption is one play away.

My first year as a head coach running the spread offense, my quarterback threw five interceptions in a game. I wasn’t upset. I couldn’t be. We were outmanned in a game, no question. But I wanted my young quarterback to learn. I could have put in a backup, or changed our game plan, but I didn’t. I wanted him to get better for the next game, the next year. Five picks later he was a better player for it. Ask him, and he will tell you the same.

You see, I wasn’t throwing in the towel; I was giving him a chance to learn and an opportunity to understand that I believed in him, that I thought he could do it.

So many times, we are quick to toss players to the sideline. Yes, do this, so you can coach them. But don’t quarantine a kid to the sideline thinking it’s going to make him better. Coach him for a few plays. Let him see things from your perspective, literally, as you walk him through plays as you watch. Then, give the kid a green light to make a play. That’s why he was out there in the first place, wasn’t it?

Obviously, there is a fine line you must walk between coaching a kid up, and giving away a game. It’s give and take we must learn. No one wants to lose, but I never want a boy to walk away from the game because his coach forgot he was coaching and teaching kids.

Give them a second chance – a chance to make up for a mistake. No one wants to make up for it more than them. Let them know that you believe in them. If every player who made a mistake wasn’t given a second chance, this world would be without football, Peyton included.

Give them a second chance.

After all, someone gave you one.

The Screen-Option Pass

The spread offense, especially the no huddle, has taken the football world captive. A football enthusiast is less likely to find power running offenses than the pass-happy spread.

However, the spread attack does have it's place in a power-based offense, especially the screen-option pass.

In calling it the screen-option pass, I am combining the bubble screen, with the option for the QB to give it to the RB or pass based on the number of defenders in the box.

In a typical power running offense, such as the double wing, defenses can and will load up the box to stuff the power run game. By adding the screen-option from a spread look, the offense forces the defense to adjust, while still enabling the same style of run game. It's a simple adjustment splitting tight ends and wings out. The QB can remain under center, while the fullback would need to be adjusted deeper, or run counter action, which I prefer, to allow for power/pulling guards taking on the middle backer.

If six defenders are in the box, run it. More than that, pass it. That's the option aspect. It's a pre-snap read by QB giving him the choice.

When throwing the pass, the action for the QB is to reverse out, fake handoff and throw the ball to the wing. The pass is made to the same side as the fullback is running to, putting pressure on outside backers. Backside split outs block, as well as back-side tackle. Play-side tight end cracks to outside backer, springing the wing for one on one.

This simple play doesn't alienate run-first offenses, it just creates an easy wrinkle for the defense to account for. In youth and junior football, a quick, play-action pass can be a quick-hit touchdown.

Coach Moffitt: An Introduction

Blogs and information are everywhere. The world at your fingertips. No matter what you want to find, the internet provides meta information, heck, even on football.

First, I will tell you up front that I am a small-time coach from a small-time football area. What I know and share won't change the world, yet my hope is that I can help just one coach who may be wearing the same shoes I put on every day.

I have eight years of football coaching experience under my belt, along with other years coaching basketball and track. I am the kind of guy that would rather help you with your golf swing on the course, than worry about my own. 

U.S. history opened the door for my coaching career. I wanted to teach. I didn't go to school for it though. I graduated with a communication degree and went to work for a paper as sports editor, which only stirred up coaching in me. I worked to get into education, found a teaching job and I got football as an added bonus. I was a teacher first, coach second.

That has never changed.

One year of high school varsity football was enough for me. Not seeing my wife at least three days a week during football season was not what we had forseen. A small coaching staff of 5 handling freshman, JV and varsity duties will wear you out. 

I was as green as one could be on that varsity staff. I spent that year really watching; watching what worked and what things didn't. That first year, nothing worked. Yet, I learned so much.

A junior high position head coach position came open in our system, and I leaped at the chance. It was the best coaching move I could have made. 

As junior high head coach, I took on more than I ever had. I was never an offensive guy. I played defense, and I coached defense. Then all of a sudden, I was the offensive, defensive, and special teams coordinator. I was drawing up offensive plays in my sleep, Knute Rockne-type stuff that I would implement.

That is where my journey continues. In the the trenches of junior high football, where kids are just learning the small nuances of the game and just coming into their own athletically, that's where I want to be. 

And that's why I coach junior high football. I teach kids that football is fun, the greatest sport on earth and I get to do it at the sports purest form. And that's why we coach this game. It is the greatest sport on the face of the planet, and we, my friends, are lucky enough to do be in it.

So, why keep reading this? Well, the purpose of this blog is two fold. First, I want to share my experiences with coaches just starting out, but even and old dog can learn new tricks. Second, so coaches in similar settings can come together and share thoughts, ideas, plans, schemes, tactics, drills, and anything else football related. 

I welcome you to join with me in this new adventure.