Offense Archives:

Many youth coaches watch football on Saturdays and salivate at the thoughts of running a fast pace no-huddle offense with their youth teams. Most are trying to do it to gain a competitive advantage. No matter your goals for running fast pace no-huddle, you aren’t going to have much success with it without completely changing [...]

Pop Warner Takes First Step  Pop Warner, one of the nations largest and most influential youth football leagues mandated new practice rules this month. Pop Warner football has announced that coaches will be required to make at least two-thirds of their practice time non-contact, and during the one-third of the time with contact, there will [...]

Many first or second year youth football coaches make a big mistake with their teams by trying to marry offenses together that are like oil and water. These well meaning guys see something on television or get excited about what someone says on a football forum post and all of a sudden they have fallen [...]

Triple Option and Coaching Youth Football How beautiful is it to see a well executing triple option team? If you are like me, it is like poetry in motion. I’m a big fan of Navy and Georgia Tech, just because of the way they run the triple so well. As a Nebraska native and fan, [...]

How Important Are Turnovers in Youth Football? In the 2011 Super Bowl, the Pittsburgh Steelers probably lost the game due to turnovers. In the history of the Super Bowl the team that has won the turnover battle has won 33 and lost 3 of those games. Important in the NFL? Yes  But how important are [...]

Learning From the Best  One of the things that I try to do is learn from other successful coaches, there is no shame in copying the best and that goes for yours truly. When I went to the AYF and Pop Warner National Championships in December I got to meet Joe Cianflone, the head coach [...]

Helping Your Running Backs to Make Cuts When Coaching Youth Football There are a few simple drills you can add to your practice plans to help your running backs make more effective cuts. While some of your very athletic players with excellent body control already instinctively make effective cuts, you will need to teach the [...]

What to Say to the Local High School Coach, Pressuring You to Run His System? I love going to places where football is important. The Bay Area has good football and there are plenty of good youth football coaches I’ve met over the years from that area. My wife and I had the good fortune [...]

Pass Catching Tips from Raymond Berry Last month someone sent me the Raymond Berry pass receiving videos as a gift. While I’m always skeptical of how much us youth football coaches can apply from a video meant to train High School, College and even Pro players, there were a few pointers that made quite of [...]

In youth football, it’s important to think through your constraints before you choose an offensive or defensive scheme.  That is the case for small High Schools as well. I recently conversed with a head coach from a very small High School that only had about 30 players in their entire program. He was milling over [...]