Your Newsletter

MAIN ARTICLE

Starting the New Football Season Right

Its that time of year again, time for the start of another exciting season of youth football. Whether this is your first season of coaching or you have been doing this for a couple of decades, this an exciting, yet scary time of year. With the start of the season comes new challenges and the unexpected. Every coach will have players whom he/she has never worked with.

This can be very exciting cause before the season starts every team has a winning record, everyone is undefeated, so every team is preparing to go all the way and win that league championship. This can be scary too because you don't know how good your team is until you play that first game, then you will know if you did your job right. Or will you??

Too many youth coaches judge whether they are good coaches by whether they win every game or not. But lets face the facts, you as the coach can't score a single point, or make a single tackle, only your young players can do so.

So this season we have a few ways for youth coaches to judge whether they had a successful season as a youth coach.

How to REALLY measure success at the youth level:

Are your PLAYERS having FUN?
Do your player's parents have a positive outlook about the way the season is going?
Are your players learning the fundamentals?
Are your players improving from week to week.
Are your PLAYERS having FUN?
Are your coaching skills improving, do you learn something from each game?
Are your players teaching you something about working with youths?
Do you try to teach the young players about life not just football, teaching them to do the right thing on and off the field.
Your PLAYERS are succeeding in the class room and on the field.
Are your PLAYERS having FUN?

How do you accomplish these measures of success? It may be simpler than you think. If you start the season off with a positive outlook and you are having fun and enjoying what your doing, then this positive outlook will spread throughout your players and their parents.

Tips for succeeding:

As said before "have fun"
Talk to your the players parents as often as you can, if only briefly to get their opinions on things (you don't have to agree with them, just listening will let them know you care).
At the beginning of the season, before the first practice, or the first game, gather all of the parents and let them know what you intend to accomplish throughout the season, so they have an idea of what you are doing and why?
Do the same with your PLAYERS.
At the end of each PRACTICE gather all of your players and talk about the negatives of the practice, and talk about the positives, let the players know what went wrong, but also what went right and emphasis the positive.
HAVE fun, if your not having fun, no one else will.
Practice the fundamentals early and often.
Don't lose sight of having fun, don't focus on winning, focus on getting better and playing to maximum potential, winning will fall in place

If you remember nothing else from this article, remember that youth football is about having fun and when everyone has fun, the season was a success.

SPECIAL OFFERS

Youth Coaching Starter Kit

by: www.youth-football-plays.com

We are proud to offer you as subscribers to our newsletter a discount on the very popular STARTER kit offer by www.youth-football-plays.com

Youth Football Skills and Drills (DVD)

by: http://www.amazon.com

Coach Vern Friedli presents a comprehensive program designed to benefit anyone involved in youth football. The DVD is designed to develop the essential fundamentals that young players need to be successful

Fundamentals of Youth Football (DVD)

by: http://www.amazon.com

This comprehensive DVD provides detailed step-by-step instruction of the most vital offensive and defensive fundamental football skills. Demonstrated are proper techniques for stances, body positioning, movement, blocking, hand-offs, receiving, quarterback skills, defensive footwork, tackling, and more!

FEATURED PLAYBOOK

Every month we review a product or playbook for youth coaching and since its the beginning of football season we have reviewed the Beginner Youth Football Playbook (e-book) offered at: www.youth-football-plays.com

Beginner Youth Football Playbook

Low Price: $18.95

(Less than $1 per PLAY)

This playbook is designed for the beginner coach or even and experienced coach, but a young inexperienced team. This playbook utilizes the following formations:

I Formation
Wing Formation
Pro Formation
Tandem Formation

It includes 5 plays from each formation for a total of 20 plays. This playbook also includes a complete passing tree (diagram of all pass routes) and detailed blocking schemes for each play. The playbook is very well organized and very easy to use.

It utilizes a variety of plays:

basic DIVES and POWER plays
basic outside POWER plays and sweeps
basic passing plays
and much more...

Screenshot of ONE sample play:

COACHING TIPS

Keep Your Kids Hydrated

Sadly every season the youth football community has at least 1 heat stroke fatality across the nation. Below are some helpful tips to make sure you keep your players as healthy and safe as possible.

Drink before you feel thirsty.
Consume at least 16 oz of fluid per hour of exercise
If you want to know how much you are dehydrating, weigh yourself before and after exercise; the difference in weight is the amount of water you have lost. Take this water weight as a % of your body weight. You want to keep that number as low as you can.
Drink a sports drink which contains both carbohydrate and sodium. Together they carry the fluid through your system faster, so you re-hydrate faster.
Avoid taking just water - it dilutes the electrolyte levels in your body which can prevent the absorption of fluids stopping you do from re-hydrating as well.
Avoid high calorie drinks like sodas if you want to re-hydrate because they do not absorb as fast as drinks with lower particle density. You want to get the fluid absorption as fast as you can.

Water Basics - Water makes up about 60% of a young male's weight, and 50% of a female's. Two thirds of the water is held in our blood cells.. Hydration plays an vital role in regulating body temperature, energy metabolism and cardiovascular stress and plays a significant role in maintaining athletic performance levels.

Dehydration can be fatal if an athlete loses more than 9-12% of body weight through water loss. That means a 10 year old weighing 70 pounds would have to loose 7 pounds through water loss to suffer dehydration.

The Thirst Mechanism - In general we sweat out proportionately more water than minerals compared to the fluids in our body - we lose water at a faster rate. The concentration of sodium in sweat is about one third that of blood plasma. So as we sweat, the concentration of minerals in blood plasma may actually increase, which trigger's the body's thirst mechanism as it tries to maintain mineral balance. This thirst trigger mechanism is too slow and inefficient for hydration purposes and performance - by the time the body registers that it needs water for maintaining mineral balance, dehydration has already set in and performance will be declining.

Hydrate with more than just water - just drinking plain water when extremely dehydrated could tip the body the other way - if we were to quickly dilute the concentration of minerals in the vascular compartment of the body, we would excrete more water to maintain it, even if we were already dehydrated. So hydration has to be accompanied by the right blend of minerals - primarily sodium and chloride.