I need some advice. I volunteered to coach my son's 4 year old flag football team this fall. We do 7v7 and we have 12 games every Saturday morning. My issues start with kids not showing up to practices all the time and not making it to conditioning. We practice Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday evenings and I give them Friday nights off before Saturday morning games. We stretch and do conditioning including running hills and stairs for 90 minutes on Sunday mornings.
We're currently 2-0 but my team is lacking the focus and passion to go deep into the post-season by showing up to practices late, taking to many potty breaks by the tree, or even worse, not even showing up for every practice. We spent the entire first week with basic alignments, handing the football off, and getting a toss/sweep installed for the running back. During our 2nd game we still have running backs take a hand-off and go directly backwards for a safety. Since they're still relatively young, I'm installing our spread offense over time and this week we will focus on motioning a wideout to determine if the defense is playing man or zone defense. On offense we're going to work on having the QB take his reads from a deep 5 yard vertical, 2nd read to a slot receiver 3 yard slant route, to his check-down route hitting the running back in the flat. Our QB is still predetermining his passes before reading the defense, even after 3 full weeks of practice.
I tried to get the team to have a strong mindset on practice 1 by establishing our team motto as "Do Your F****** Job" taken from Bill Belichick and that's what my assistant coaches and I tell the players whenever they talk in the huddle about what their favorite color is or what they did at Pre-K that day.
I know many of you are coaches on here that have coached youth sports. What advice do you have to get the players to focus, how to let them know this is a job, and how do you get them to develop an attitude of winning. I have a coaching meeting from 4PM-9PM on Sunday where we plan on establishing a Unity Council that should help with some of this, but looking for outside advice as well.
TIA
Phantom Husker
We're currently 2-0 but my team is lacking the focus and passion to go deep into the post-season by showing up to practices late, taking to many potty breaks by the tree, or even worse, not even showing up for every practice. We spent the entire first week with basic alignments, handing the football off, and getting a toss/sweep installed for the running back. During our 2nd game we still have running backs take a hand-off and go directly backwards for a safety. Since they're still relatively young, I'm installing our spread offense over time and this week we will focus on motioning a wideout to determine if the defense is playing man or zone defense. On offense we're going to work on having the QB take his reads from a deep 5 yard vertical, 2nd read to a slot receiver 3 yard slant route, to his check-down route hitting the running back in the flat. Our QB is still predetermining his passes before reading the defense, even after 3 full weeks of practice.
I tried to get the team to have a strong mindset on practice 1 by establishing our team motto as "Do Your F****** Job" taken from Bill Belichick and that's what my assistant coaches and I tell the players whenever they talk in the huddle about what their favorite color is or what they did at Pre-K that day.
I know many of you are coaches on here that have coached youth sports. What advice do you have to get the players to focus, how to let them know this is a job, and how do you get them to develop an attitude of winning. I have a coaching meeting from 4PM-9PM on Sunday where we plan on establishing a Unity Council that should help with some of this, but looking for outside advice as well.
TIA
Phantom Husker
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