In youth football sometimes we do things for the long term benefit of the team that may have minimal short term benefits.

One of these things may be the trick plays we add to our football playbook near the end of every season. We will often put in a trick play or two in the last third of the season just to keep the kids interest levels high and to use as carrots for meeting certain football practice goals. We all know the kids get into a groove as the season progresses, which is good, but it can also get monotonous and crush a bit of the enthusiasm we like our teams to have. Adding a trick play in at this point in the season, whether it works or not, or even if you just run it once, is probably the wise thing to do.

You may have seen a “trick” play on the entry highlights of your DVDs that is not in the playbook part of the book. At the clinics I do, I always play a highlight reel before we start and during breaks. That play always seems to get even veteran coaches giggling and pointing.

Here is how we run that goofy football play that the kids love and beg for, the "flap-jack pass". It is a play we borrowed from Jeff Bayeral from the Menominee High School Frosh team:

Lining up in our traditional double tight set we snap to the fullback for what appears to be another fullback wedge play, our blocking back at the snap turns his back to the line of scrimmage and as the fullback passes the blocking back on his way to the line, the fullback hands the ball off to the blocking back. The fullback continues on a fake and plunges into the line. The blocking back once he gets control of the ball stays with his back to the line of scrimmage and just flings the football with 2 bands blindly over his back, end over end and with a fairly high arc. The receiver is a waiting left end that has run about an 8 yard slant. Since the “pass” is blind it needs to have a bit of an arc on it so the left end can run under it, as the pass is rarely right on target. The offensive line just forms a wedge but does not take the wedge downfield. We run this in goal line situations where the other team is expecting a wedge type play and the safety is playing up.

In 2006 we ran this play 4 times and completed 3, they were all extra point plays in games we had well in hand. The kids and parents were all smiles. Most trick plays have lost their uniqueness, they have been done and redone. The flap jack pass is one I really doubt ANYONE in your league will have seen before and unless they are playing your team, will not see again. Here is another youth football teams version of the play: flap jack pass. I have yet to figure out how to upload my own clips to youtube, sorry guys, our kids look better, you will just have to take my word for it if you don't have my DVDs yet.

While I’m not a huge fan of trick plays in youth football, this one served it’s purpose for our team. We do have 2 trick kickoff returns we will run to get a quick turnaround in games, the entire momentum of games often changes with big special teams plays right after scores. While we have trailed in just 6 games in the last 6 years and have not got to use these returns often, of the 12 or so times we have run these returns in the last 6 years, we scored on 5 of them.

This has been another post into Dave Cisar's Winning Youth Football Site Copyright 2007 Cisar Management Services Reprint is allowed if the resource box and links are kept intact.

For more cool youth football plays click here: Football Plays

Dave Cisar- Dave has developed a detailed systematic approach to developing youth players and teams that has enabled his personal teams to win 97% of their games in 5 Different Leagues at all levels and age groups while retaining 90% of his kids.

Playing in Space is the key term.

We aren't talking about playing football on the moon, zero gravity would make us all have to rethink the game quite a bit. "In Space" means playing with distance between your players and the other team. If your team is bigger and more athletic and can handle the other teams players one on one, you want space, it is your friend. However, if you don't have bigger and better athletes than the other team, space is your enemy.

Playing "In space" means just what it says, putting your players with space in-between them and the opposition. If your team is made up of faster, bigger and more athletic kids, they will dominate in one on one match-ups. That’s why you see teams with lots of big fast receivers do very well in the “spread” offenses where they isolate weaker defenders out very wide versus these dominant receivers, of course you have to have a QB that can throw it in these cases. If that stud receiver can just get the ball “in space” he will have a chance to score in most cases.

On the other hand, most youth football teams do not have the player truly dominates the league. Most of us are blessed with just an average group of kids and some of us will have that odd grouping of kids that is just smaller and less athletic than the teams we face. In these cases you want to have as little space as possible between your kids and the opposition.

Just think about your tackling drills, when you have a tackling drill run in close quarters, lets say a 1 yard square box, most of your even non-athletic kids can often make the tackle. But turn that tackling drill into an open field tackling drill of a 20 yard by 20 yard square, how many of your less athletic kids can now make a tackle in that drill? The same is true for blocking; very athletic kids can make blocks “in space” less athletic kids can’t.

Less athletic teams nearly always perform better if they tighten their line splits down, double team block and pull to have overwhelming numbers at the point of attack. Less athletic teams need to run traps and other close quarter running plays like the wedge in order to keep more athletic teams at bay. The less athletic teams need to run lots of misdirection to keep the defense moving away from the play, while they run it between the tackles. The spinner series in kryptonite to the supermen on these squads. There are just some plays that make NO SENSE against teams like this, sweeps, drop back passes, deep reverses, these will be negative yardage plays.

The good news is with the Single Wing Offense, less athletic teams can compete with very athletic teams. Often called “football in a phone booth” the spinners and traps keep the very athletic teams from flowing hard to your base plays. The double team blocks, wedges and pulling give your team numbers advantages at the point of attack so even smaller or weaker linemen can have success. The tight splits, misdirection and pulling linemen help even very average backs to put up big numbers with this offense.

In 2002 we had a very average sized back named J.A. with average speed. For our age 8-10 team he weighed 81 pounds and when we ran our eval races he was about 6th out of 25 kids. J.A. was a very obedient player, he was a patient runner, he always kept his legs moving and was always looking for an opening, but nothing special. In 2002 he played Fullback for us and ran just 2 plays that year, wedge and trap. He scored 31 TDs for us on FB wedge plays alone, of course we had a very weak backfield that year and he got a lot of carries. Had we had the spinner series in he would have done even better.

As to beating bigger or more athletic teams: In 2003 my age 8-10 team from Omaha was undefeated in league and put up some very gaudy numbers. We scored at will, went 11-0 and won our league title game 46-12 after leading 46-0 in the third quarter. We went on to beat two league champions from other leagues that were age 11-12. In 2004 I started a new program in rural Nebraska in an area where the existing youth program had won something like 4-5 total games in 5 years before I got here. The first year there we had all rookie players with the exception of 2-3 bench-warming castoffs from the other team in town. We had just one player over 100lbs at age 8-10. Slowly but surely we improved each week and by seasons end we started looking pretty good. We played a very big and fast Inner-city team from Lincoln that year the Salvation Army. They had not lost a game in 3 years, we were out-manned, outsized and had less speed, but beat them in a nail biter by a single TD in route to an 11-0 season.

Our biggest win in an extreme overmatch with in 2005 verses the Omaha Select Black. That age 8-10 team chose from over 150 kids, had at least 5 kids over 150 lbs and had not lost in 3 years in Omaha's “select” league. They were a very aggressive Inner-city team with plenty of speed and confidence. I on the other hand had just the 25 country kids that showed up, not cuts or selects and plenty of younger kids on it. To make a long story short, we had this team by 4 TDS in the first half and could have named the score. Needless to say that team, their parents and our parents for that matter were shocked. The good thing is with this offense you can compete with anyone, the bad news is once you do it’s hard to get extra out of league games. Big Inner-city teams like the North Omaha Boys Club will not even play us on their home fields, it is embarrassing getting beat by much smaller and slower teams, they have turned me down twice in the last 2 years for extra games that we both had open dates at seasons end.

The Single Wing does offer some flexibility if you do have that stud player that you want to isolate “In space”. We added the mesh series in 2005 to accommodate a player we thought would make sense to put “in space”. When we went against weaker opponents the “mesh” series worked very well, no one could handle our stud. When we played against equal or lesser competition we had to move back to our tight splits base offense to move the ball consistently.

Lessons Learned From Other Sports

Some lessons learned in coaching youth football have really helped me in coaching other sports I know very little about.

In 2002 the Screaming Eagles Youth Football Program decided we would start a baseball program. The problem was I had not coached baseball before and over 90% of our kids had never put a glove on, as baseball popularity has declined dramatically in the inner-city.

Since we had been able to completely turn around our football program from the bottom of the league to the top via intensive coach training and developing a system with heavy research, I decided to do the same for baseball:

My experience with baseball was non-existent as a coach. I had played only up to my Junior year of High School and was just average on a very good day. I felt my little expertise on the subject was minimal and I had no authority or credibility to impose a new system on the entire Screaming Eagle program. The baseball “program” I was putting in place was for my personal team only.

Started the project like any other, doing research on the videos and books available to teach youth baseball coaches. I bought a tape by Marty Shupack on baseball practice organization. I went to the local indoor baseball practice facility and bought a few books and tapes that were all specifically targeted to youth coaches. I asked around and found out who the best coaches were that won consistelntly. Many of them practice at an indoor practice facility, so I went and watched a few of the top youth teams teams getting their year round instruction inside.

I then sought out advice from the best youth baseball coaches in the area. If you are going to learn from someone, why not go right to the guy that has had the most success? Here in Omaha that is a guy by the name of Bill Olsen. Coach Olsen has coached National Championship teams at the Youth Level. He is an accomplished High School coach and he was also an assistant coach on one of the USA Pan American Games and Olympic teams. Coach Olsen knows his stuff and has a passion for developing youth baseball players and he loves teaching coaches how to teach players.

I was fortunate enough to attend 4 large clinics Coach Olsen put on, and while I had played 9 years of organized competitive baseball, I found out:

1) I knew nothing about coaching baseball
2) My previous baseball coaches didn’t know anything either, I had been shortchanged as a player.

I was committed not to let the same thing happen to these kids.
Coach Olsen showed us proper fundamentals, but more importantly how to break down and teach each movement. He gave us many detailed progressions to teach proper hitting, fielding, throwing and even pitching. I was amazed to see how his methods paralleled how we taught our kids how to play youth football.

I then observed several of the best “select” and rec level coaches while they were running their practices. I learned how to teach the movements and how to shave tons of time off my practices. Back in the days that I played, batting practice consisted of 1 player hitting while 11 players shagged balls in the field, how boring. Rarely were any coaching points imparted, we were supposed to be getting better by “practicing. I learned how to get much more done in far less time. I also got a chance to observe Mike Evans running some practices of his own, Mike has taken several Pacesetter "Select" teams to Youth National Championships and now coaches a Junior College team. I learned some real neat games from him that keep the kids interest, just like the fun team building and evaluation drills we do for our youth football teams.

To make a long story short, I developed a plan and implemented it based on the expertise of these men, not what I had known from my own experiences. My first team could have been described as the “Land Of Misfit Toys” from the “Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer” movie. Our first few practices most of the kids had to be shown how to put a glove on and about 1/3 of the kids didn’t even have gloves, they were HORRIBLE. I went down to the Salvation Army Store and bought some used gloves, oiled them up and had them ready for the second practice. The kids kept coming and we got better each practice as we very slowly made progress to our goal. Just as in youth football, we worked on the critical success factors, nothing else, no wasted time or movement. We used many of the tricks we use in football like progressions, “ready focus”, group instruction,fit and freeze, limited live scrimmaging, player contracts, discipline model etc etc Using Coach Olsens ideas and what I saw on the videos, we were able to get each player 16 minutes of batting practice in every 2 hour practice we had. We didn’t even hit “live” until week 3 as we did lots of “hitting” instruction and drills with no bats and no balls, then going to Tees, then to soft-toss and then to hitting the ball attached to the stiff 5' pole apparatus that hurts my wrists so much.

We didn’t “scrimmage” or do lots of live infield and outfield, we did lots of drills without balls and ball to bucket drills. We didn’t play catch, it would have been a total waste of time ( playing fetch,not catch) we worked on frozen throwing mechanic (yes, fit and freeze) drills. I just did everything 100% as Bill Olsen suggested. We went into our first game not knowing how to play the game terribly well but we were making real good progress on the fundamentals. We ended up winning that game and all 14 games we played that year, to EVERYONES surprise. Every single one of my kids was hitting the ball, even the very overweight 190 pound defensive tackle that in the first practice missed about every ball hitting from a tee! We would consistently have 1-2-3 innings etc on defense. In the next two years I stayed at this age level as this original group moved up on on to other teams. The next year my team won all 12 of our games and the following year we won all 14 again, three years as the dominant team in the league without a loss at this age group and we switched leagues one year to a Little League that consistently produced State Champions. We never played in any big tournaments as we did not have the funds unfortunately to do so and we generally took a much lower key approach to baseball as we did football. Baseball to us was just "filler" until football season came around.

The moral of the story is; priorities are important, progression teaching of the most minute fundamental detail is important for every sport, "scrimmaging” is overrated and great practice organization using time saving tricks is critical. Taking some time to learn from the experts allowed me to teach the kids properly so they could have more fun. Just like in football, the kids have more fun if they don't lose every game, in baseball they aren't having much fun either if they never get a hit or lose every game too. The sad thing was we were so much better than the other teams each of the three years I coached that we could have actually played up an age group and competed. Many of the coaches that I coached against went to the same Bill Olsen clinic I did, but I could tell during warm ups that they were not doing what Coach Olsen suggested they do in warmups, or how they held their gloves, or how their infielders got in their stance or how their hitters got into their stance. Either these coaches were asleep while Coach Olsen was speaking, or they just decided to do it their own "better" way. I decided to do it Coach Olsens way and if it didn't work then I would do more research and make changes. In my opinion these youth coaches really shortchanged their players, ours were so more fundamentally sound, it looked like we were practicing 5 days a week when in reality we were practicing far less than any team in the league and most of the other teams had kids with experience on their teams.

Go watch other teams practice in your sport, go to clinics that teach youth topics, ask a very successful coach to be your mentor, most are thrilled that someone cares enough to want to learn and thinks highly enough of them to want to learn from them. Your kids will benefit in the end, coaching is coaching no matter the sport.

For more free coaching tips and a copy of Dave's free newsletter stop here: Coaching Youth Football

This has been another post into Dave Cisar's Winning Youth Football Site Copyright 2007 Cisar Mangement Services Republishing of this article is allowed if the resource box and links are left intact.

Dave Cisar- Dave has developed a detailed systematic approach to developing youth players and teams that has enabled his personal teams to win 97% of their games in 5 Different Leagues at all levels and age groups while retaining 90% of his kids.