Game Management Archives:

While much of the football you watch on TV on Saturdays and Sundays don’t apply to the youth game, some strategy approaches may. I watched a real ugly game last season where the main feature of the game were the 35 mph winds. These winds were very consistent and heavily influenced the play mix of both teams. [...]

Prepping Your Youth Football Team for Distractions When you’ve coached youth football for over 20 years and done over 150 coaching clinics like I have, you’ve experienced some wild things and seemingly heard it all. How about losing a game because of a siren or horn? Yes, SOME youth football venues you play at have [...]

Advice For WINNING That Big Youth Football Game A good number of you are still playing games and for many of you, you are heading into that championship game. For some of you, it’s a big deal, you are trying to make it to the next level and maybe a trip to Orlando or Las [...]

This week we played a team that wasn’t very good. We are 5-0 and every game we’ve had has been in mercy rule. If we ran our base stuff with our first team O and D- we name the score, probably in the first half. This is what I did for that game: To help our [...]

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 [...]

How do you avoid meltdowns when you are coaching youth football? First of all, you have to prepare for possible meltdown situations, they can and do happen, not only in youth football, but at all levels of the game. Last year in the Capital One Bowl we saw a prime example of a classic meltdown [...]

Letting the Other Team Score- Not Just for NFL Coaches Yes, you heard that correctly, letting the other team score on purpose to try and win a game. It not only happens in the Super Bowl, it happens when you are coaching youth football too. If you watched the Super Bowl this year between the [...]

What can a youth football coach take away from the National Championship game? When you are coaching youth football you have to be careful about what you learn from watching College Football. We don’t have the practice time or talent that the College teams have, if we did then my advice would be make sure [...]

Offensive Pace as a Weapon in Youth Football In today’s topsy-turvey world of college football, we see teams like Oregon and Oklahoma State running plays at breakneck speed to effectively wear down a defense, but can it work in youth football? With less practice time and less mature players is the risk reward equation leaning [...]

Little things separate youth football teams that finish 12-0 and those that finish 10-2, that also applies to football at other levels of play. Often times these little blunders are on special teams and are very preventable if you know what to look for. Last weekend one of these preventable mistakes happened during the Denver [...]