As more kids are playing youth football today than ever before, there are also more youth football coaches than ever before. That’s great and youth football coaching can be very rewarding. You’ll be able to truly have a positive and lasting impact on the kids you work with, teaching things like work ethic, winning and losing in grace, putting it all on the line and sportsmanship. However, many coaches are now inexperienced and fall into common traps. Here are some of the most common youth football coaching mistakes that are made and how you can avoid them.

Remember that you are a football coach and not a conditioning coach. Of course you have to condition your kids, and this is especially important in the first weeks of practice before the season starts. However, if you only focus on conditioning your kids will lose interest, become tired out and they won’t get better at playing the sport. Limit your conditioning drills to 25-30% of your total practice time or less. Fill the rest of your time with actual football drills, scrimmages and other important areas you need to cover.

Another important thing to keep in mind is that you have to consider what the age and experience level of your kids are. If you’ve been coaching varsity high school teams but are now taking on the task of coaching middle school JV squads, you’ll have to change your approach. Your kids won’t be a big, strong or fast and they won’t have developed as many skills. Therefore you must be sure to always tailor your approach to the kids you work with so you can get the most out of them without setting them up for failure.

Too many coaches don’t plan out their practices well enough. They may have a general idea of one or two things they want to do, but in between there is lots of downtime and confusion. Every practice should be planned from beginning to end, so that is packed with drills and sessions. This will keep your kids intensely focused and will make things easier on you and the rest of your staff. Once those kids are on the practice field they are yours, so be sure to use your and their time appropriately so everybody makes the most of it.

When it comes to coaching youth football, don’t forget that you’re allowed to look things up, research the topic, read books and guides and so on. There is a ton of information out there concerning youth football coaching, so if you need any help, you should absolutely seek out those sources to help you.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 at 3:52 pm and is filed under Exercise. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.