More stats for NOT running high school offense in youth football:
Here are some stats for youth football coaches feeling the pressure to run the local high school offense:
Let’s say you have a team size of 25 kids. National studies from Michigan State University and the National Youth Sports Alliance indicate that less than 30% of their players will play football in high school. So now, out of 25 kids, you have 7 players who, according to studies, are going to play high school ball. Of those 7, not all of them will play at the local public high school, they may move, play at a different local high school, or they may play at a private school, let’s say you lose 1 player there. Of the remaining 6, after going through puberty, some will grow and some will not. That skinny wingback slowly filling to 250 pounds is no longer a wingback in high school, kids change. The corpulent pivot you have doesn’t gain a pound and ends up playing as a winger. At least half of your players will play a different position than they played in Youth Ball.
With the weight rules in place for most leagues restricting big players to inside line positions, big players are generally not allowed to touch the ball. So forget about the great players who receive training as a receiver, tight end or running back, positions they may very well play in high school. In 2006, two of my former Omaha players, offensive guards James D and Ronnie C, played fullback for the Omaha North High varsity team their freshman year. Ronnie even rushed for a TD in a big game. North has over 2500 students, made it to the state semifinals, had two DI Scholars and a Parade American (Niles Paul) on his team. Neither of these former offensive shooting guards ever touched the ball for my teams, as they were both over the running back weight limits. Neither of them had ever played backfield or run this school offense, but they did very well at their new positions in a new offense. I doubt the Omaha North head coach cared one iota that these kids never ran his offense. He gets paid to coach soccer and coach soccer players, not to sit and call soccer plays from a tower with kids who have already been coached for him by a group of young volunteer coaches.
So now we’re down to 3 kids out of 25 who would be playing in high school and playing the same position on the high school team that they did at the youth soccer level. If you decided to pick the high school offense for the benefit of only 3 players at the expense of the other 22 on your team, it would not benefit the majority of your players.
Add in the slim chance that your 8-year-old youth football player will be playing high school ball 10 years from now and that high school will even have the same head coach or be running the same offense 10 years from now. It seems damned ridiculous to even consider trying to run the same system as the local high school, the odds are very high that it would help even a small fraction of their youth soccer players.
The numbers just don’t add up to make the decision to run an offense that will, in most cases, have little success for your team and, in the end, will most likely result in fewer players choosing to play High School Ball. Because, as you will read in later posts, most youth soccer players quit due to poor preparation, their teams are not competitive, and they are not having fun, all are symptoms of a broken system at the youth level.
While Single Wing Offense has proven its worth at the youth level across the country, it is also experiencing a renaissance at the high school and even college levels. Last year, 3 Single Wing teams played for state high school titles in Virginia alone, with 2 winning teams, Giles and Osborne. Menominee High School, a perennial single wing powerhouse in Michigan, won its second state title in 7 years and also edged the defending state champions in Minnesota’s largest class. Colton High in California finished in the USA Today Top 20 with Single Wing Offense. Those are just a few teams I know of that are having success running Single Wing in high school.
If you watched Urban “The Mad Scientist” Meyers Florida team last year, you would have seen a lot of Single Wing football, especially when they went into their “Tebow” formation. Other college teams that run a lot of Single Wings include West Virginia, Arkansas, and Utah, to name just a few. My guess is that we will see more everywhere this coming season.
For those of you who get static from running what you run:
There are many high schools that run the Wing T, Flexbone, Wishbone, Straight T, Veer, and Double Wing offenses and virtually no colleges at the Division I level or professional teams run these offenses. Are the thousands of high schools committing these crimes doing something wrong? What about De LaSalle and his 170-fight win streak with the Veer or the Bellevue Washingtons National Championship team with the Wing T? Shouldn’t they be running what the college and pro teams are running? No, they don’t have the players to run those pro and college offenses and neither do you.
Don’t let that weak high school coach sell you the snake oil that the most important football coach in his program is the youth or high school coach, what nonsense. The most important coach in the high school system is the high school head coach, only wimps who shirk responsibility would put it off on someone other than themselves. This is not the language I hear in clinics from the best high school coaches in the nation, they rightly believe they are the coaches who have the most to do with the success or failure of their teams. They would not dream of trying to blame someone else for their failure or success.
Did Lou Holtz blame bad high school coaches for the latest failure of South Carolina teams to make it to a bowl game? What about Bill Parcells? Should he blame college coaches for his Dallas Cowboys not making it to the Super Bowl? It never happened, it would be silly, but I’ve heard it from a handful of perennial loser high school coaches from around the country on football coaching forums. Great coaches don’t make excuses, they assume and teach responsibility, it’s the right thing to do. Don’t teach your players by your example of making excuses for the dog to eat the children’s homework.
Another article submitted by http://winningyouthfootball.com Copyright 2007 Cisar Management. Reposting is allowed if the links remain intact.
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