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Football 101 Part 1: THAT KID

By
Darrin Sheffer

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We all have that one kid, the one who believes he knows everything about football because he watches the NFL, but he doesn't know how to put his knee pads in his game pants.  He is also the same kid that never remembers his assignments on O and D and still complains about not getting playing time.  As coaches we have all had THAT KID, and many of us have had teams full of them.  If you haven't read my post a few months ago 0-8, How A Losing Season Made Me a Better Coach part 2: Never Assume a Players Football IQ please click the link below:


I teach/coach at a school where we have a 60% Hispanic population, not a population of kids who are familiar with American Football.  I coached the freshmen level team last season, we had about 25 kids on our team, only about 6 of them had any significant football background.  So as a team, we basically needed to start at Level Zero: "Good Morning Men, this is a football...".  You might believe I'm joking, but I'm not kidding.  My players had almost 0 football IQ, we had to take time away from learning formations, plays and fundamentals on the field to teach vocabulary and basic rules.  

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As coaches we like to think of ourselves as incredibly knowledgeable in the game of football and believe that we have the best football IQ in our school.  Sometimes it's true, sometimes it isn't.  You may be the smartest X's and O's guru around, but that doesn't mean squat if you can't translate that into your players.  It's something that may coaches, including myself, have taken for granted: HS football players don't know squat about football.  It does not matter if they have played youth football for years or haven't ever strapped on a helmet.  It does not matter if they watch football all weekend or play two hand touch with their buddies all the time.  They still don't truly understand REAL football.  In some cases, especially when you have a high number of these kids it can really hurt your chances of being competitive.  So what can we coaches do about this?  

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In college if we were planning to take a Chemistry class, we needed to take a lab safety test a week before class started.  If we did not reach at least an 85% on the test we were required to take a two week night course on lab safety basics.  After the class we were to take the test again.  This process continued until everyone passed the test.  What if football coaches did something similar for our HS players?  Something like a Football 101 course where they taught the kids basic things like vocabulary, rules and team specific basics in a classroom setting?  We could even come up with a test that they need to pass before they stop taking this course.  

Would you be interested in learning more about this?  I have lots of ideas of what coaches need to teach their players.  I don't want to make one huge post so I am going to break this post up into a few parts so stay tuned for future posts.  If you have any ideas you want expressed please comment below.  

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