Developing Chemistry, Character and a Winning Attitude in Youth Football Step-By-Step

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Developing Chemistry, Character and a Winning Attitude in Youth Football Step-by-Step

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Author: Dave Cisar

Developing Chemistry, Character and a Winning Attitude in Youth Football

Step-by-Step

By: Dave Cisar

Table of Contents Copyright Information: 2 Table of Contents: 4 Acknowledgement: 5 Chapter 1- Why Do You Coach? Why Character Development: 6-10 Program Differentiator: 11-14 Chapter 2- Earning the Right to Be Heard Developing Trust: 15-19 Effective Communication Techniques: 20 Chapter 3- Getting Players to Self Motivate Praise: 21-23 Punishment: 23-25 Self Motivation: 25-26 The Mini Team Concept: 26-27 Bringing Your Team Together: 27-30 Chapter 4- Developing Trust Developing Trust in Your Players: 31-35 Chapter 5- Developing Winning Attitudes Developing the Confidence: 36-38 Competition: 38-45 Words as Weapons: 45-47 The Success Environment: 47-48 Team Building: 48-50 Chapter 6- The Academic Program Academics: 51-53 Chapter 7- The Foundations Program The Foundation Program Process: 54-55 Whale Done: 55-57 The Awards: 57-60 Perseverance: 61-63 Selflessness: 64-66 Goal Setting: 67-70 Being Coachable: 70-72 Compassion: 73-75 Positive Attitude: 76-78 Depth: 79-81 Finish: 82-84 Humility: 85-87 100% Effort: 88-90 Grace: 91-93 Emotional Control: 94-96 Teamwork: 97-99 Consistency: 100-102 Honesty: 103-105 Sportsmanship: 106-108 Thankfulness: 109- 111 Taking it Forward: 112-113 Player Contract: 114 Author Page: 115 Additional Materials 115-117

Building Character and a Winning Attitude Step-by-Step

Acknowledgments

We developed this approach through many years of research and trial and error. Many thanks to those who helped us on our journey including Tim Peterson, Stacy Bell, Jay Smith, Kevin Justice, Tom Osborne, Turner Gill, Ken Niumatalolo, Marine Lieutenant Colonel David DiEungenio, Tony Holland, Jeff Miret, Ron Jennings, the Spirit of Faith Warriors and my wonderful and supportive wife Tina. Many thanks to many of our players parents who were patient with us in those early years when we were still stumbling around and trying to figure this all out. All glory to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Imparting these tools to youth coaches nationwide is my passion and mission. Many people thing sports teach character, they are wrong, look at Tiger Woods, Lawrence Taylor or Pete Rose. Motivated character driven coaches impart character, develop team chemistry to bring teams together and build a sense of purpose and confidence in their players. Sports in of themselves do not. It’s up to us as coach leaders to determine if we are willing to impart those life lessons or not. It’s up to us to determine if we are going to bring teams together and motivate them or not, the ball is in our court.

Dave Cisar

Chapter 1

Why Do You Coach?

Many youth football coaches decide to coach for a myriad of reasons, some just love the game, maybe their son is playing, and sometimes they just want the kids to have a great experience. Others coach because they like competition or sometimes it’s because no one else would take the job. It doesn’t matter how you get there, it matters what you do once you are there.

We all like to win, most coaches that are involved in youth football are former athletes, and love competition. When we compete, we play to win. But what makes a winning team? Is it athletes and x’s and o’s? It is motivation and effort? It is practice organization and priorities? Is it great special teams and defense? Is it team “chemistry”? If your whole motivation is developing a winning team - what happens if they don’t win? Have you failed?

Now don’t put me in that box of coaches who think in youth football you should play everyone the exact same amount of time, hand out participation trophies, not keep score and hold hands with the opposition drinking juice boxes and singing Kumbaya after each game. I think you can play everyone (different amounts), have fun, teach great fundamentals, be great sports AND win; these are not mutually exclusive goals. I know that coaching is important, it is the difference maker in youth football. While x’s and o’s are important it’s what’s under the helmet that determines if a team is going to excel of not. The byproduct of doing all of those things well are teams that play well enough to deserve to win most games.

When You Don’t Win

But what happens when that perfect storm hits? What happens the year your top Quarterback tears up his knee in game 1, your second team Quarterback breaks his arm riding his skateboard before game 2, your top lineman has to move before game 3, your stud linebacker gets set aside for grade issues before game 3, your top Running Back (who is also your best Corner) tells you before game 4 that he can’t play anymore because his dad has been transferred to a prison that is 300 miles away and the only day he can visit is also the same day you play your games? This all happens to a team who was designated to play in the “B” League and sent all it’s best players to the “A” team only to find out there weren’t enough teams to form a “B” league and you would be

forced along with just 1 other “B” team to play in a 12 team “A” league. You have just 19 players with just 1 “striped” player and will face a number of teams with 25-40 players, 6-8 stripers and 3-4 players over 200 lbs. Since you fielded what you thought was a “B” team your team of 13-14 year olds also includes a set of 78 lb twins playing their first year and last year of football and could easily be confused for kids you see in those late night commercials for “Feeding the Children.” It happens, it happened to me and it could happen to you. I might add the entire coaching staff of this team quit 2 days before their first game, more on that team later. How do you bring together a team of misfits or better yet, what can you do to keep them together, have a decent football experience and make it to the end of the season when it is doubtful they will win many games? You do it through developing team chemistry, character and a winning attitude.

Character Teams Excel

If you have coached for more than 10 years, think back to your best season. In most cases it wasn’t the year you had that magic mix of athletic players, it was the year you took some average kids or even weaker players and molded them into something special. Some people refer to this as a team with “chemistry”; great teams have “it”. They play together, they never give up, they are selfless, they effort, they overcome great obstacles, they are coachable, they do the details, they are disciplined, they are confident and they are encouraging.

How many times have you seen absolutely amazing looking big athletic teams fail? You see it all the time in youth football, every week in leagues all over the US. In fact in 2007 I watched an entire season of DVDs from my friend Kevin Justice’s Pop Warner team from Jupiter, Florida. They went 11-1 and in all but 2 of those games I’m sure Kevin could have easily taken the other team and beaten his own team with them by big scores. The difference was “it.” Kevin’s teams had “it” and the teams he was playing didn’t.

Championship teams are also built on the foundation blocks of great character. How many championship teams have you seen that couldn’t come back once they fell behind by a score or two? How many championship teams have you seen where the players were arguing amongst themselves or lost control during a game? How many championship teams have you seen that were undisciplined in their responsibilities?

What about confidence, how many championship teams do you know that come into games quaking in their cleats? Do championship teams have kids who criticize their teammates or coaches? Do championship teams have players who turn a deaf ear to their coaches? Not in any of the leagues I’ve had teams. In 2009 and 2010 I went to the AYF and Pop Warner National Championships in Orlando, an entire week of seeing the best of thousands of teams from all over the US. In the 30 games I watched, the 60 teams I saw didn’t do any of the things one would associate with low character.

Championship teams believe in their coaches and in each other. They don’t give up the first time the other team takes a lead. When players believe in their coaches and each other, they have “bought in.” When players buy in, they trust and believe in the coaches and each other. Teams that have “bought in” can accomplish great things. All the great coaching “turn around” experts are known for being able to develop a trust bond between the players and coaches and the players with each other. Just think about yourself, are you going to follow someone you don’t trust? Are you going to follow someone who doesn’t inspire you? Your players are the same way, you earn trust over time and this manuel will give you some tools to help build that trust bond between you and your players and the players and each other.

Character development and a winning attitude is a necessity if you want a championship level team or even if you have a weak team you are just trying to keep together. Remember the end product isn’t just the wins and losses listed on the year end trophies, it is what these young men turn into 20 years from now. You have a role in that end product, a role much bigger than you may ever realize.

You Have a Huge Impact

Do you remember the first year you played youth football? Do you remember the anticipation and angst you felt the first week you practiced? How about your first coach? Mine was Jim Wazgis; I still remember what he looked like and the sound of his voice. I can’t remember most of my computer passwords or my gym locker combination, but I still remember my first youth football coach from over 40 years ago and I bet you do too. I imagine most of you can name every single football coach you had over the course of your entire playing “career.” Just think about it, the kids you are coaching now will remember who you are 20-30 and even 40 years from now. How many other people that you interact with today will even remember your name 20 years from now?

Because of the role you have as coach, you are in a unique position of influence in that child’s life. Football is a voluntary activity, unlike school; a player is in your “classroom” because they want to be there, not because they have to be there. For many kids they love and live to play the game, it is that important to them. Even the kids that are just there because they are trying the game on for size or just want to have fun and be around their friends are in a position where you have a huge opportunity to influence them whether you like it or not.

Character Development is Needed More Than Ever

Unfortunately kids today need character development more than ever before. Teenage pregnancy, teenage crime and teenage illiteracy rates are at all time highs. Many parents just aren’t getting the job done and that void is being filled by television, internet, music, and peer pressure. Today almost 40% of kids will be born to unwed mothers compared to just 19% in just 1980. In some minority communities over 75% of children will be born to unwed mothers. Nearly half of boys today will grow up without both biological parents. There are over 18 million fatherless children in our country and most are abandoned as infants. For those kids who are fortunate enough to have both parents at home, studies find that those parents spend 40% less time with their children than they did a generation ago.

Why is that important? Because 71% of adults in prison in 2007 were raised in single parent households. Over 72% of murders were committed by adults from single parent households. Single parent household kids make up over 91% of runaways as well as 72% of rapists. Single parent households are the single greatest predictor of income and criminality in the United States today. Single moms just don’t have the time and often do not have the skills or moral authority to help develop strong character and winning attitudes in their children. Sure there are many that do a great job under enormous odds, but the facts are real, these numbers don’t lie.

Even the parents who remain together often put work ahead of parenting or don’t bother with the age old tradition of “raising children in the way they should go.” For many of the great parents out there, they have to battle for the very soul of their children against the influences that hit our children from every side. With the technology available today, it is virtually impossible to protect our children even with the best of intentions and greatest of efforts.

Reinforces

For those kids that are being taught well at home, we are the re-enforcers. When I was a kid I often times disregarded what my parents said to me until I heard it from an “independent” source that wasn’t interested in keeping me under the confines of their “authority.” For me those were sources like my football and baseball coaches. How many times have you heard something from your parents or peers and discounted it until you heard it from another source? That can be the coach’s role also.

It doesn’t matter where you are coaching at; kids need character development and winning attitudes. I’ve coached in rich suburban areas and I’ve coached in rural areas.

I’ve coached in the inner-city across the street from the largest and most dangerous public housing unit in the city where in order to get the practice field, you had to drive past the biggest open air drug markets you’ve ever seen. Kids are kids and no matter where they live or what their family situation is, they are looking for answers and guidance.

When you do character development in your youth football team, you are using the pulpit that coaching was intended for. Just ask anyone that has played for one of the all time greats like Tom Osborne, Lou Holtz, Bear Bryant or John Wooden, what kind of influence these men had on their lives. The problem is most of your players are never going to play college football and many of them will have their worldview formed by the time they get to high school. Like it or not, you are in a key role in the formative years of a child’s life, you can choose to embrace that role and use it for the benefit of that player and his future or not.

Other Benefits From Character Development

When you go forward with a character development program you aren’t just helping your team to get better and play better together, you are impacting that player for eternity. A nice byproduct of putting a character development program into place is you will have parents that love you. When they see you genuinely care for their son and are taking the time to invest in something that may not pay off for 20 years, they take notice. Now I’m not suggesting you do anything just to please parents, but having them on your side instead of second guessing every decision you make and criticizing you in front of your players isn’t such a bad thing.

The Emotional Bank Account

Steven Covey talks about “emotional bank accounts” in his books. Each of us in a relationship has a bank account of sorts. If an assistant coach and I have worked together for 3 years and I’ve shown him respect and given him responsibilities and help over the course of that relationship, I probably have some “money” built up in our joint account. If we were to have a disagreement over something the relationship would probably survive because the “withdrawal” on our joint account wouldn’t drain the account to nothing. With youth football parents, we don’t know each other that well and the account starts with either no balance or a very low balance. In fact the account may even start off with a negative balance if the parent has had problems with other youth coaches in the past or has an overall poor opinion of coaches based on what they’ve read in the papers or seen on television. Many of the parents are of kids that are in their first year in the program, we don’t know each other from Adam.

Early on most parents will keep you on a very short leash. Make what they perceive as a mistake early on in that relationship and you wont being seeing much grace. Why do you think the biggest parent turn out day is on the first day of practice? They want to see what

you look like, if you seem to know what you are doing and to see if it appears you care about their child. In most youth football programs over 90% of the parents will show and stay to watch the very first practice.

The second biggest day for parents is the first day of pads. Once you have a bare minimum in your relationship account the parental attendance drops off quite a bit. But that deposit is very small early on, the first sign of trouble and the account is easily wiped out. When you do a character development program, you add a nice sum to that “bank account” at every practice. When it comes time to make that first account withdrawal when you move little Johnny from the backfield to pulling guard, you are going to have a lot less pushback than if the account had the bare minimum balance.

When you commit to doing character development in most cases your player retention rates improve. Retention is everything, you can’t impact a player if he quits or doesn’t show up the following year. When players know you care, not only do they listen better, they come back. When parents are “on board” they are more apt to back you up and see youth football as a good investment of their time and money, they return year after year.

Program Differentiator

Most youth football teams compete for players. In many areas you are competing with 4-5 different organizations for players. Without players your organization dies, in fact if your organization isn’t growing it is slowly dying. In inner-city Omaha, my program competed with 4-5 other programs for kids. One program practiced directly across the street from us, another was less than 2 miles away. Our parents and players were constantly being bombarded with offers to move to greener pastures. Even in the rural area I’m in now we compete with 2 programs for players. Even if you don’t have much football competition, you are competing with SOMETHING. These are premium free time hours and discretionary dollars we’re talking about. You are competing with fall baseball, soccer, x-box, BMX biking, skateboarding, martial arts, year round basketball, the internet and doing nothing to name just a few.

If you are offering character development and another program or activity doesn’t, that gives you a huge advantage in attracting and retaining kids in your program. Parents talk and kids talk, if you are doing something different from brand x, it’s going to get around. When brand new parents call me the first thing out of their mouths is often,“Cheryl Billings, Caleb’s mom told me about what a great program you have and all the really neat character development things you all do, is there any room for my 9 year old on your teams?” We haven’t had to take out a newspaper add for players or even had to do flyers at school for years. In Omaha we often had over 200 kids on our waiting list, where I am now we often fill up in NOVEMBER of the previous year, fees paid and all. A byproduct of doing character development is that it is a program differentiator.

School Cooperation

When you do things like character development and an academic accountability and achievement program, you will see school cooperation go through the roof. In most communities practice space and game fields are at a premium. Many schools look at working with pushy youth sports programs whose only goal is to win as a chore they must burden and try to put the least amount of effort into the relationship as is humanly possible. When they view you as a true partner who cares about more than just wins, you will see the cooperation levels improve dramatically.

In Omaha they no longer allow handouts to children from youth sports programs. If you want to reach the kids you must purchase VERY expensive ads in a newspaper that goes home with the kids every Thursday. Unfortunately no one really reads the newspaper and the message never gets out. We haven’t had a problem having our flyers distributed to every male student in 11 of the 12 schools our players attend, when other organizations are denied the same privilege. The main reason - our academic and character development program. These schools have invited us to set up tables at their open houses, school carnivals and even to speak at school assemblies and hang posters. I’ve even had teachers e-mail me, telling me of kids that have just moved to the area and that the “new” kids could really benefit from our program. Yes we probably have at least 20 mini “recruiters” working classrooms for our program. You may even find many of the fees you are used to paying suddenly are lower or even waived completely.

Community Cooperation

Have you ever been turned down by the city park for a field permit or had no luck getting cooperation in getting game field or even grant money? When the community views you like every other youth sports program out there, it is difficult to get anywhere. By having an academic accountability and awards program along with a character development program like “Foundations” you separate yourself from almost all other programs. When you are doing things for your kids that impact them beyond the football field, you are going to get good publicity. When you get good publicity, the clout you get from that often times helps you get things done that others struggle with. I can’t tell you the number of times our organization got things from the city, schools and sponsors that other organizations wouldn’t dream about getting.

What Most Do

Many youth programs talk a good game when it comes to character development, but when you ask them about it, they usually start to mumble or state a bunch of made up platitudes with nothing behind it. I’ve seen some phenomenal youth football organization web sites that talk about how their mission is all about developing character in their players. I often call up these organizations and compliment them on their great web site and their impressive mission, but when I ask them EXACTLY what it is they do to help develop character in their players, I get the mumbling and platitudes gibberish. After impatiently listening to the empty rhetoric, I again ask, “That all sounds great but please tell me EXACLTLY how you instill those platitudes into the hearts of your players.” Invariably I get the old “we don’t let our coaches curse or use alcohol or smoke around the kids.” Don’t get me wrong I think it is critical that the coaches have the moral authority to impact their players and kids first learn from the coach by the behavior he models. But not cursing or using alcohol or tobacco in front of your players isn’t going to give them what they need to succeed in life or win you any cooperation from the schools or community.

Grants

Grants and sponsorship money is a very competitive “business.” When you apply for a grant or ask for sponsorship money you are competing with hundreds of other organizations for those funds. The grantors and sponsors are judging you against all your competitors as to where they will get the biggest “return” on their dollars. If all you are is another youth program trying to lower the cost to your parents by hitting someone else up for those dollars, good luck with that effort. You are going to be spinning your wheels, wasting your time and getting a lot of polite nos. The last thing these sponsors and grantors need is another youth sports program with its hands out with the same old blah blah blah, we are all about the kid’s mantra. On the other hand if you can demonstrate a real life academic awards and accountability program along with a character development program with real meat to it rather than a bunch of cloudy platitudes, you have a chance.

After I put these programs to work in my Omaha program, the money started rolling in. After a news story on our academics program a complete stranger in the community came forward and gave us $50,000 to take our 3 best academic teams to Florida for an all expenses paid trip to play in a Bowl Game. Using the Foundations Data Book at www.foundationsdatabook.com we found grant applications and sources that were perfect fits for my organization and got well in excess of $150,000 in grant money for equipment, awards and field use fees. There is absolutely no chance we would have won those funds without the academic or “Foundations” program.

Coaches and Character Development

The problem isn’t that coaches are evil or lazy; most coaches think character development and academics are important. Unfortunately, many youth football coaches feel the game in and of itself teaches the kids enough about character. Certainly, players learn a little about commitment and overcoming obstacles through the game of football, but is that really enough? What if the kids don’t learn about that until the last game of the season but you play the league bully in week one? The net is players aren’t going to learn everything that they need in life through the game or the Foundations program, but they will be much better prepared than had they not gone through it at all. All players don’t have the exact mirror experiences of their teammates during the season, hence some miss out completely on some of the very important lessons the game teaches. You don’t have those kinds of issues if you work through a program like “Foundations” as a group.

Many youth coaches are fired up about doing character development after attending a conference or reading a book but then lose interest or can’t figure out how to apply the concepts to something they can put into a real plan and actions. What is your game plan for next season? Are you going to turn your good intentions into something real or put it off for yet another year? Most youth coaches only coach for 3-4 years, most of you don’t have any time to waste.

Chapter 2

Earning the Right to Be Heard

Once you decide to implement a character development plan you have to earn the right to be heard. Back in 1969 in Omaha, Nebraska in my first year of playing football, the coach talked, you listened; when the coach said jump, we asked how high? In 2011 we are living in a very different dynamic. Kids and parents question everything and I mean everything we say and do. In 2011 you have to earn the right to be heard.

Players and parents may if you are lucky give you deference because of the position you have as coach, but you will have to earn their respect. Respect and deference are two entirely different things.

In 2011 kids don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care about them as people. While the players may hear what you say because you have the title of coach, they won’t listen to you until they know that you really care, have some basic competency and have their respect. How many of you have been around teams that listened intently to what the coaching staff was saying and trying to teach? How many of you have seen or been the part of a disaster situation where the kids wouldn’t listen to any of the coaches and the parents didn’t trust the coaching staff? How did that work out for them?

Train wreck football season stories abound in youth football. Teams starting with 30 kids and ending with 13, with kids that quit coming to practice only to show up to games and getting playing time because the team is short of players. You see parents yelling at coaches and sending out the vilest of e-mails to coaches and fellow parents. Even fist fights and smear campaigns seem to be fairly common occurrences these days. Sure there are loonies in almost any organization that you will never be able to peacefully coexist with, but many of these problems go back to the first few days of practice where you these coaches failed to earn the right to be heard by both the parents and players.

How can you teach anyone anything if you are not being truly being listened to?

Developing Trust

Developing trust and developing great communication paths may be the most important aspect of bringing a team together. A clear relationship definition between you and your players must be established day one in order to have any semblance of a successful season. We like to have all the players address us as Coach-First name. It shows a respect for the position of the coach and if they forget your name, it’s ok to just say “Coach.” We ask that the dad coaches have their sons address them on the field as “Coach”. We give

the player one warning if he calls us by; hey, guy, dude, Dave etc. The second and following offenses would require the player to run. You shouldn’t hear any of those terms after the first day of practice.

When You Blow It Own It

Players and parents are going to be watching and scrutinizing your every move, especially early on in the relationship. In order for the kids to trust you, you must be consistent; they can detect any type of hypocrisy. Kids are great BS detectors; if you aren’t legit, you can forget about them giving you respect or believing in you. Just think about yourself and your life experiences when it comes to people. Did you respect anyone more after you hearing them use bad language in front of women and children for the first time? Do you revere people that wear t-shirts with off-color pictures or remarks on them? Do you follow people who talk the talk but don’t walk the walk? What you do behind closed doors is your own business, but when you draw attention to yourself or feel the need to do these things in front of the watchful eyes of young men and the magnifying glass of attentive parents, you lose their respect.

None of us are perfect and you can count on making a few mistakes every season. When you make a mistake, OWN IT. Don’t gloss over it, admit your mistake, learn from it and make sure you don’t make the same mistake again. One thing is very evident about American society, if you admit a wrong, ask forgiveness and turn away from that said wrong we will forgive almost anything.

We All Blunder

In 2006 my team was playing a game we were doing quite well in. I had trained a backup lineman to play in the Quarterback position and had worked with him quite a little bit on running the off-tackle power play. When I sent him in to run it, I reminded him NOT to run outside the kickout block, he nodded and said ok. He proceeded to take the snap and run wide, right into the kickout blocked Defensive End, who made the tackle for a 5 yard loss on a play we needed just 1 yard for a first down. Of course had he ran to the 6 where the play was designed and how we had practiced it, we would have had a first down and then some. One of my players David K. was standing right next to me during that play; he was the next designated runner. I was disappointed in losing the ball on downs because I had 3-4 more kids I wanted to get the ball to. In disgust and a voice barely louder than a whisper I said, “That pisses me off.”

On the next play, our defense was flagged for a legit face-masking penalty. David K compounded this 15 yard penalty be saying “that pisses me off” loud enough that a referee heard it and we were flagged another 15 yards. Needless to say, I was mortified

and embarrassed because David was just copying what he had seen me do. Instead of deflecting blame, immediately after the game was over I got the team together along with the coaches and admitted my mistake. I let them know it was inexcusable, that I was sorry, that I wouldn’t make that same mistake again and that I was asking for their forgiveness. They gladly gave it and we turned the problem into a learning experience. The kids and coaches knew that when I make mistakes, I wasn’t going to sweep them under the rug or make the same mistake twice. They knew I was going to be honest even if it caused me pain. They knew that I had their back, if they made a mistake that was really my fault, I would own up to it.

Want kids to listen, respect you and buy into whatever it is you want them to do? When you blow it, own it. Admit your mistake, apologize for it and do your very best to not make the same mistake again. If you want your kids to be accountable and not be excuse makers, you need to model that behavior to them in the form of your own actions.

Pre Season Setting Expectations

It’s always best to get things started off on the right foot by getting your players and parents together before the very first practice to let them know what to expect from you and the season. Start the very first practice with a mandatory parent meeting, with all the players present. Lay it all out as to what they can expect from you, the team rules, and the parent and players contract. Aggressively explain what you do is not negotiable. Most everyone can deal with a situation if the proper expectation has been set and communicated properly, people hate surprises. Player and Parent contracts are something I require of everyone, they are a tool that can help you proactively head off problems before they even start. See the parent meeting section of my book for more details.

Names

Many coaches like to call kids by their last names, we started calling the kids by first name only in 2004 and I think it’s much more personal. Knowing and calling someone by their first name is important, no word is sweeter to ones mind than your own name. Just think how you might feel if you worked for someone in a small group of 25 for 3 days a week for an entire month and at the end of the month that supervisor had no clue what your name was or called you dude, buddy or kiddo. Would you trust that person? Would you really listen to them?

Names are so important University of Nebraska head coach Tom Osborne required his secretaries to know and address all players by their first name. If coach Osborne saw one of his staff at any level including janitor walk by a player without saying hello and calling that player by his first name, he would immediately “coach up” the staff member on the importance of knowing the players name and how important making that player feel at

home was to the success of the entire program. The office people at Nebraska would actually test each other using a team picture, that is how important knowing names was to them.

In business I found this to be true as well. Back in the early 90s myself and a few partners started a Contract Programming and Consulting business. Early on we specialized in very new technologies, local talent for filling these jobs simply didn’t exist. Over 90% of my first 150 employees came from outside Omaha, mostly from the East and West coasts. Many of these people were natives of India and have very difficult to pronounce names. Most in fact would shorten their given name to an Americanized version, Jutendra might be “Jay”, Sivkumar might become “Steve.” I made it my mission and the mission of my support staff to know the names of all of our employees, their given names not the shortened American version. I even knew all of the spouses names and many of the kids names as well. I promise you I don’t have a photographic memory, I still have a hard time remembering my computer passwords and locker combinations, but I did know all of my employees names and before we passed the 180 people mark in Omaha I knew all the spouses names as well.

The Value of Knowing Names

It took effort and commitment and it probably helped that I always visited the employees home for dinner once they got settled. The net was they deserved that I know their names, they had rooted up and moved to Nebraska to work for me, I owed them that courtesy at a minimum. This was a very competitive field and I only hired the best, so my employees were constantly being bombarded with job offers. In the mid 90s the turnover rate for people in our industry approached a 35% annual rate. I’m proud to say that after our first 7 years I still had 9 of the first 10 people I ever hired and am friends with several to this very date. Names are gosh darn important, if Tom Osborne and the top people in business say it is, it is.

Taping Names on Helmets

Many coaches like to put kids’ names on tape, on their helmet. If you have a team of 50 kids that you have never seen before, it’s probably a necessity. If you have a team of 25 and half the kids are back from last year, take the time to learn the 12 new players’ names early. We haven’t had kids put names on helmets since 2001. In 2006 I saw an entire team of youth players at an end of season tournament in Kansas City that still had their names taped to their helmets, a travesty. Do you think those kids felt like their coaches really cared about them when they wouldn’t even take the time to learn their names?

AYF National Championships

In 2010 at the AYF National Championships I was interviewing the Head Coach of an amazingly talented team from Brooklyn, New York. At the end of the interview I asked the coach for the name of his impressive 6’1” 245 lb running back. He gave me the boys nickname and had to ask one of his assistant coaches for the boys real name. Here he was in December at the end of the season and he still didn’t know the name of his star player. If he didn’t know the name of his star player, I doubt he knew the names of his minimum play players. Predictably this teams parents were not pleased with the coaching staff. After suffering the teams very first loss in the season, they were ripping him left and right as he went into the handshake line, I got to hear this all from the comfort of my seat in the grandstands sitting amongst these parents.

Just think how you might feel if you worked for someone in a small group of 25 for 3 days a week for an entire month and at the end of the month that supervisor had no clue what your name was or called you dude, buddy or kiddo. Would you trust that person? Would you really listen to them? Would you turn on them at the first sign of problems?

If there is a player you don’t know by name, have him tell you his name when you see him and repeat it back to him several times while using it in a sentence. This is an old trick I used in my business days, it works. Make sure to single the player out and use his name over and over with him until YOU know it. Everyone likes hearing their name, if you don’t know the boys name, he thinks you don’t care about him, and it’s probably true. You know the names of your stars; get to know the names of all the kids. My coaches that care know all the kids on their team by first and last name.

Getting Everyone’s Attention

Quite often kids in a group setting are difficult to settle down. This can be a huge problem, as a disruptive player not only is not listening, but he may be distracting others or creating sufficient “noise” to be a disruption to all. In order to effectively communicate, you first must have everyone’s attention. There are a number of instances during group drills where it’s probably ok for the kids to talk amongst themselves. It’s not realistic to think the kids won’t do this and you need to allow some freedom and social

interaction during practice. However, there are times you need everyone’s attention and there are times the talking gets to be a distraction.

We use a very simple technique taught to us by a Pastor and former inner city youth coach and Utah Ute’s Football great, David Cunningham. When a coach needs the groups undivided attention, he doesn’t yell above the kids, yell “be quiet”, “settle down”, etc. We yell one word, “READY”; the kids drop whatever they are doing, stare into that coaches eyes and yell back the word “FOCUS”. The kids and coaches stop moving, talking, whatever, and keep their eyes on that coach until he says to move on. Tell the kids that if they want to learn to play the game safely and effectively there are times that they have to give the coaches their undivided attention.

The Secret Signal

Use the “secret signal” approach. Tell the players that if they feel they really need to exercise, that they have been cooped up inside all day and need to get in shape to give you a “secret signal” letting you know that they WANT to run. Let the players know you are ready and willing to accommodate their wishes to run and exercise. The “secret signal” just between you and him will be if he moves or talks after you yell out your “ready” and the team responds “focus.” The “secret signal” talk needs to be communicated to your parents and players in the first minute of your first meeting.

Early on, you may have a child try to whisper to a neighbor, if he does this, make him run. If you are looking at a player and he is looking away or to the ground, make him run. The player must be silent and looking into your eyes. After the first week, everyone will be in tune with paying undivided attention to the coach who yells” READY” and rarely does anyone have to run after that. The “READY FOCUS” method for us has been the single best way for us to get and keep the players attention. Not enforcing it is a real waste of time and practice killer.

Wasting 14 Hours of Time

Just think about it, if you waste two minutes trying to get kids to quiet down ten times during practice, that’s 20 minutes of practice time you’ve wasted and over 14 hours over the course of the season. I have also used the silence and glare method as well. If we see someone whispering, we don’t try and talk over them, but stop talking and stare at them until we have their attention. This works well, but the running punishment and READY FOCUS method has been the most effective at all age levels.

Chapter 3

Getting Players to Self Motivate

As coaches we don’t motivate players, we get players to motivate themselves. Rah rah speeches only motivate for a snap or two, what we want are kids that are internally motivated. To get there it takes some time and a variety of techniques.

Praise can be your biggest tool in developing self motivation. Praise should be public and heard often, especially for new and weak players. The kids often need a little bit of confidence to get them to stick it out or even to competently complete drills. Early on, find the most insignificant things to praise kids about. If it’s just lining up right for warm ups, doing the high knee warm-up well, or even getting into an acceptable stance, profusely praise the kids. For weaker kids, you may have to find something real obscure, like the fact they are sharing their water with someone else, or hustled to the team area after break. Kids all respond differently and the best way to see what works for a particular player is to start off with praise. Praise needs to be immediate, specific and loud enough so the player and his PEERS hear it.

Every coach has his own personality, but if you see a kid that is struggling and he does something well, get kind of loud with praise. Many kids respond to that and make strides you would never have imagined. We all have had scores of these kinds of kid’s progress from benchwarmers, to starters and even a few to stars. For some players it’s a steady slow progression to competency that you can see and predict, for others it’s an overnight turnaround that sometimes happens mid or late season. Many of our coaches refer to this as a “light bulb going on” in a formerly weak player’s mind that suddenly transforms him into a football player. Sometimes you really don’t know why it suddenly happened; maybe the player finally started to have fun or realized the contact wasn’t going to kill him.

I See You

Another simple way to establishing a positive environment is to catch your players doing something positive and use a key phrase to let everyone know your approval. University of Nebraska Head Coach Bo Pelini and his staff use the phrase. “I see you Players Name.” If they catch a player doing something right they bellow out loudly; “I see you Barry Turner.”

In 2009 Nebraska completed one of the most amazing turnarounds in NCAA football history. In 2007 NU had finished 5-7, only its second losing season in 46 years. The previous losing season was with the same coaching staff. In 2007 the once proud NU

blackshirt defense was ranked 115th in the nation, better than just 4 teams. This defense had set all time records for points scored, records that were over 100 years old. In 2008 Pelini’s first year the defense went from 115th to 55th, in 2010 they were ranked FIRST in the nation in scoring defense and the team went on to win 10 games and just missed winning the Big 12 Title on a freak last second play. Just think how awful the defenders thought about themselves when Pelini arrived versus where they were just two short years later. “I see you” is something we incorporated in our program in 2009, the players fall all over themselves to here us bellow out their name in front of everyone.

When They Don’t Do It Right

Like praise, punishment works different for different kids. Often times when a player makes a mistake we get right on it and remind the player we caught him doing something wrong. We do need to correct incorrect actions, but when we frame it in a negative all the time players start to tune you out. When all they hear is the negative they will either have a meltdown are start to ignore you.

When a player makes a mistake, sometimes the best method to correct that mistake is to start off with something positive like “Tommy, you lined up perfectly, real nice stance but how are we going to block that outside linebacker on this play? Can you show me how you are going to do it next time?” Start with some praise and let him show you how he is going to do better on the next rep.

Another effective method is to start out with a positive and then ask the player where they think they made an error. Instead of shutting down and tuning you out, the player is going to learn from the experience and be able to put his mistake behind him and keep his head in the game. Most of the time they can tell you where they messed up, if they get it wrong you can correct them. How many times have you seen a player just shut down and play worse after getting his butt chewed? It happens a lot. When you use these types of methods, kids usually respond well to them.

Sandwich Method

The sandwich method is something I learned long ago from Ken Blanchard’s book “The One Minute Manager.” In this book Blanchard suggests all negative communication should be sandwiched between two positive comments. For a player that blocked out rather than down on an assignment your comment might be something like; “Tommy way to come off the ball, but you needed to block the down rather than out. You can do it, keep playing hard.” When you frame a negative inside of two positives the player is more apt to change his behavior and keep on listening to you. Remember it is YOUR job to improve the coachability of your players, it is something that can be developed over time.

It is difficult, don’t kid yourself it isn’t intuitive to coach in this fashion. You must be committed to coaching this way and practice it just like any other skill. A great way to practice it is to imagine all the negative things your kids did this last season and frame each negative inside two positives. You can write it down if you need to, heck I’ve seen coaches have these sayings on a sheet on their clipboard to help remind them. When you do your coaches clinics for your team, this is an exercise your coaches can practice on each other. If you are committed to doing this as a team have coaches help each other by holding each other accountable to the practice. For me I have to meditate and pray over that before each practice, it doesn’t come easy. But over time it will get easier and easier to do until it is second nature.

If you are really tight for time you might just think about rephrasing your comment. If you see a player efforting poorly you might use a phrase like; “You’re better than that Jason”, he knows he has done something wrong, and that you’ve seen it. Maybe when a player drops a ball something like; “You’re way too good to take your eyes off the ball like that, Josiah” Instead of getting down on him with a negative, you are letting him know he is capable of a much higher standard.

Punishment

Punishment is using a negative consequence or threat of a negative consequence to control your team. Punishment has its place, however often times it is overused. Teams can respond well to punishment or the threat of punishment in the short term and if you are around. Unfortunately you aren’t always going to be around and kids start to grow immune to punishment or threats of punishment over time. You have to use any use of punishment very wisely. However, when it comes to poor listening, insubordination or poor sportsmanship we immediately go to punishment. We put a cone about 10 yards from any drill we are doing, then tell the player to do an all out sprint to the cone and back. When a disobedient player is taking 2-5 minutes out of practice to run a lap, he is missing 2-5 minutes of valuable instruction time. Most football movements in a real game last for 3-6 seconds, the amount of time it takes most players to run 10 yards and back, hence placing the cone at 10 yards.

If a player continues to make a mental error, have him work on it with a remedial coach, or have him watch a player doing the task correctly. If the problem is just a lack of effort or concentration on the player’s part, either send him running, or have him sit the drill or activity out, whatever you feel is most effective punishment for that specific player. If you have time to talk to him, remind him of something he does well and that you know he can do better. We do not punish players for physical errors like dropping a pass or fumbling the ball. Try to use the ratio of 3 praises for any public negative comment, you may have to get a little creative, but when you combine praise and punishment in the same segment, you will get much more out of your players.

Parent Help

If a player has an active parent, has quite a bit of potential and the problem persists, ask for the parents help. Talk to the parent about the player’s potential and what he needs to do to realize it or “earn” more playing time. Let them know that unless the player makes some changes, his potential will not be met and his progress will be limited. Before you do this, have that same talk with the player.

Complete Meltdowns

Some players may have a complete meltdown in practice; we all see it from time to time. Keep in mind; you do not know what happened to the player that day. We once had a player that got kicked out of a homeless shelter the day before and he knew he would be sleeping in his mom’s car that night, you just never know. As long as the meltdown is something out of the ordinary for that player and it’s salvageable, sometimes that new fangled time-out thing works best. Send the player off to the side away from everyone for 10-20 minutes and let him get his composure, regroup and come back to fight another day. This method also works on real hyper kids that love to play around and gladly run laps until the cows come home. Being left out of the activity is something these kinds of players just can’t stand. Every player is a little different and responds differently to praise and various punishment methods, your job as coach is to find what works best for each player.

Unsalvageable Situations

When faced with an unsalvageable situation, address it quickly and without malice or mercy. We have had two situations in our program where a player acted in an overt unsportsmanlike fashion; hurting himself, his team and the organization. We also had another player act in an inappropriate violent way with another player of ours during practice. In those instances, we took the players equipment on the spot and sent them on

their way. I hope that he, his teammates, and the opposition learned from this player’s mistake.

While most punishment should be done as privately as possible, these types of serious situations are learning opportunities for all, and need to be addressed immediately and publicly. We usually find that our teams rarely have to punish any player after the first two weeks. Once the players test your limits and boundaries and see you are consistent and fair, they make the proper adjustments.

Leniency

We shouldn’t be enabling kids, we should be teaching and guiding them, which involves both overt praise and punishment. Our praise to punishment factor should be 3-1, 4-1, the great ones are 5-1. Remember that the Bible teaches us that if we do not reprimand our children, we “Hate them”, Proverbs 13:24. After punishing a player, always give that player a chance to “make good”. Give him another chance to line up properly later in practice (or something similar) and then praise him publicly when he does. Try and put the player in a situation where he can redeem himself that day. You can let him do the break or lead something at the end of practice.

Motivation

I’ve conducted many polls on the factors youth football teams win championships, every single one of them listed team chemistry and self motivation as the top factors all great teams have. Athletic talent always ranked in the 5-6 spot, depending on the group polled. Ask yourself this question; what is easier to influence in a significant way in a short time frame, a players self motivation, or his athleticism? Can you make every youth football player in your charge into Usain Bolt in your 14 week season? Can you make a single player into Usain Bolt in 14 weeks? Can you get some of your players to self motivate to the point they play to their full potential in 14 weeks? Can you help players self motivate to the point they are team oriented and a positive force in developing that elusive “it”, Team Chemistry in 14 weeks? Yes you can. So what you are saying is, you can’t make any of your players into Usain Bolt in 14 weeks but you can get some or even many of your kids to self motivate to the point they are playing at full potential in 14 weeks.

Priorities

So if having a team play together and play motivated is the most important thing you can do to improve your team AND it is something we can influence, why don’t more of us put time into making it happen? Most of us simply don’t make it a priority; we waste time on things we can’t influence and things that have little impact on truly making our teams great. Some times human nature dictates that we do the things we know how to do and avoid doing those we

don’t. That’s a shame, because like anything, this is something you can learn to do.

Many coaches are of the opinion that if a player isn’t motivated there isn’t anything you can do for him. We as coaches need to own the motivation process and remember that we are responsible to develop the players self motivation. Self motivated players want to do what you ask them to do, they want to excel, they want to outwork and out effort the competition.

How motivated are players that get yelled at and criticized in front of their peers? How often do you see kids shut down in those situations? I’m not suggesting we not hold kids accountable to playing to their full potential, what I am suggesting is helping them get there in a different fashion with significantly more positive control than using negative control or punishment.

Players self motivate when they feel good about themselves, when they know you care about them, when they realize the team is more important than themselves, when they feel confident in their base techniques and responsibilities and when they trust you. It’s up to you to get them to that point by doing many of the things in this manuel, they aren’t going to get that way on their own, they will have to be lead and nudged in that direction by you.

Mini Teams

It is much easier for your team to come together if you make sure all of the players are getting personal attention and encouragement at each and every practice. If all of your coaches are expected to give personal attention and encouragement to every player at every practice, kids are going to fall through the cracks.

A very easy way to solve this is to divide your team into mini teams. If you have 25 kids on your team and 5 coaches, divide your team into 5 teams of 5 players each. Have each of these mini teams align side with their group together during warm ups to make it easier for their coach to work with them. This mini-team grouping stays the same for the entire season. The coach for each mini team should make sure that during warm ups he makes eye contact with each player, talks to him using his name, asks him how he is doing and makes physical contact with the player. This doesn’t have to be anything deep, something like, “Jimmy glad to see you today, man you had a great practice yesterday hope to see the same today, or Tommy how was school today, you ready to play today?” Non verbal cues are huge here, make sure to coach your coaches to smile and be engaging. Every player NEEDS to know you want him to be there and are happy he’s there, even the troubled kids and minimum play player. Who needs football and these lessons more, the perfect kid or the troubled and weak ones?

Physical Contact

In the old days we could put our arms around kids, but not today. Unfortunately in our fallen world there are sick people that use youth sports to take advantage of defenseless children. Many kids crave your approval and touch is one way to show it. One very effective and non intrusive way to give those kids some physical contact is to do things like hand slaps, high fives or fist bumps. All your players are looking for are signs that you care about them and they are looking for consistency. Make sure your coaches do this every single day with a big smile on their faces, non-verbal cues are huge, and the kids notice these immediately. This takes less than a minute to do but means so much to the kids, you have no idea.

When I was nine my youth coach Ron Schmidt would come around to each one of us individually before the game during warm-ups. We would be standing around before warm ups, in the warm up lines, Coach Schmidt would come up with a HUGE smile on his face and say “How you doin, Cisar, how you doin? Gonna have a great game today, great game, alright, alright.” The entire time his entire focus was on me, his eyes were looking into mine and his grin stretched across his entire face. He would then give me some “skin” and allow me to give him a strong hand slap right back. I couldn’t help but respond with a big grin of my own and feel an adrenaline rush come over me before the game. We couldn’t wait for game day to see coach Schmidt’s big smile and get that personal attention. Something as simple as a 10 second interaction with coach before the big game was enough for me to want to run through walls for Coach Schmidt. Every one of our players on that team got the very same “personal” attention from our head coach before every game and it was something we all looked forward to.

Nebraska’s Tom Osborne would always smile, talk to and shake the hands of his players before every game. Coach Osborne would also pray for each player by name individually in private before every game. It worked pretty well for him.

Buddy System

The Buddy System is mandatory for us and something all youth coaches should seriously consider. Many players quit simply because they feel left out, they have not bonded with other players and have no accountability to show up at practice and games. Early on when I had my first program, I did exit interviews with kids that

had quit before the season ended. When you peeled the layers back most of the time the reason they really quit wasn’t because they weren’t very good or didn’t like football, we had lots of kids like that that played for us for years. The reason they really quit is they were not connected to the team, they didn’t feel like they were part of the team or that they didn’t have any close friends on the team.

The Buddy System will help any team bond and help you retain players. A well connected team is a team that plays together. Pair players together the first day you come together with your final team, after teams have been split-out. Pair the kids, not with their buddies, but with other kids they don’t know. Pair kids with kids that are of different races and backgrounds. Pair kids of differing abilities and backgrounds. Pair that shy lost looking minimum play player with your outgoing and compassionate team leader.

How it Works

Each day the player must meet up with his buddy, and be next to him during warm-ups He must talk with his partner during every water break. Every day have a question of the day that requires the players to learn something new about their partner.

Questions of the day: Players position Players favorite College or Pro Football Team Players favorite food What food the player hates that his mom makes at home How many brothers and sisters Favorite movie Other sports player plays What other sports would the player like to try Does player play any musical instruments Favorite College or Pro football player What type of pets does the player have What does this player like to do that may surprise you Why did player decide to play football Has player ever broken a bone or got stitches What school do they attend What subject do they like best at school What subject do they like least at school Who was their favorite teacher If they dressed up for Halloween, what was their character What kind of outdoor activities do they like to do What kind of outdoor activities would they like to do What hobbies does the player have

Every practice, designate a question of the day. Each day you test the kids on the question of the day during your team water breaks, if the kid gets the question wrong, he runs and his partner runs. The test can be comprehensive each day. Have the partners exchange phone numbers, if a player misses practice it is the role of the other partner to find out where his buddy is and report his findings to the coach.

Shoot For 100% Retention

If you see a player that seems to be isolated or shy, go out of your way to make him feel part of the team. Match him up with a compassionate outgoing player. The shy and isolated kind of players are those most apt to quit. Often times they are the kids that get the most out of playing and being part of a team, it can be life transforming for them. You don’t want to lose any of those kinds of kids. Put this player out front in your warm-ups; let him kick to your kick return team in walk-throughs. Let him do the “break” at the end of practice or some other honor to make him feel like he is contributing. Remember that for many kids this is the only football experience they will ever have and it’s up to you to make it special for him. These kinds of kids can occasionally blossom into real contributors and when they do it’s something you can take great satisfaction in.

It is my goal to make sure every player that was at the first practice, finish the season. I take it as a personal failing when any player quits. Be as motivated to retain 100% of your players, as you are to win 100% of your games. When you make it a goal and a priority you show your kids and your parents that you care and add money into all your emotional bank account relationships. In our hearts we all know as frustrating as it can be sometimes, it is the right thing to do as well.

Unintended Benefits

When the kids and parents see you are legitimately concerned about every player, no matter their contribution to the team, you gain credibility. You start to deserve the right to be listened to, parents start giving you the benefit of the doubt and they start buying into whatever it is you’re selling. You have deposited huge sums into the bank accounts of every parent and player in your organization. You will find instead of your minimum player parents whining about playing time, they will be your biggest supporters because their son is cared about. By your actions you are showing that their son is important to you and important to the team. That’s why my teams simply have few if any parent problems while many coaches are drowning in theirs to the point they give up coaching or do it resentfully.

Kids see everything, when they see you putting the time and effort to make your worst players part of the team, they know that you care about all of the kids beyond what they can contribute on the football field. It’s easy to like and pay attention to the star player, everyone knows his name. When your players see that you care as much about the least of your players as the star, they “get’ you. When you know your minimum players names and take time to encourage them and make them part of the team, your star players play harder too. They all know that you are “real” that you care for them beyond what they can contribute on the football field.

Bad Day Drill

Sometimes a player is just having a bad day. You do not want that player leaving the field down on himself. Ask your players at the end of practice to say something good about the player having a bad day. Tell the team that if you can get 15 kids to say 15 different good things about the player having the bad day, then no sprints for the team. Start it off with something yourself like “Joey does a nice job of sealing the end on the sweep play, and he’s not tooooo ugly.” Keep it fun and upbeat. You will be surprised how quickly that players attitude improves when you show how much you and the team cares about him. I like to use this tactic when I see a kid with that “I give up” look on his face, who looks like he is ready to quit. I’ve also used this with some of our better kids that for whatever reason seem to be real down in the dumps. You just never know what is going on at home. In 2003 one of my better players was having an awful day of practice, he couldn’t seem to do anything right. The next day I found out he and his mom had slept in her car in the practice field parking lot, they were homeless. Our player wasn’t practicing well not because he didn’t want to effort, but because he didn’t have a place to live.

Chapter 4

Developing Trust

When players trust their coaches, they can accomplish great things. When players trust their coaches they will work hard in practice, effort to full potential in games and do what you ask them to do instead of what they might feel is intuitive or selfish. Teams that trust in their coaches and trust in each other are teams that come back from two touchdowns down to win a game on the last play of the game. Teams that don’t trust their coaches or in each other often throw in the towel at the first sign of trouble.

If someone you don’t know very well asks you to do something that is difficult or goes against your natural instincts are you going to do it? The answer is no. But would you answer the same way if the person asking you to do it is someone you deeply trust? That’s what most youth football coaches run into when they ask a player to do a technique or use a key that the player has never used before or is counterintuitive to what the player thinks he should be doing. If you are slow playing your Cornerbacks, that style of play does not come natural to the youth football player, they want to chase a play down and make the tackle immediately. The youth football player has to have the mindset that he is going to trust what his coach says and do what his coach says rather than listen and trust his own instincts.

You develop and earn that trust over time through consistency. Kids crave consistency and you choose whether to model it every day in your behavior. Remember kids do not care what you know until they know you care about them. They know you care when you call them by name, smile, encourage and get to know them. But how do we get to know each other in a deeper way in the short time we have on the football field in such large groups?

Getting to Know Each Other

To develop trust we must get to know who that person is. For most kids, the only thing they know about their coach is maybe what kind of car he drives and what his son’s name is, that isn’t much information to go on when it comes to trust. One way that Turner Gill uses at the University of Kansas is he takes a few minutes out of every practice to let his coaches tell the players who they are, who the person that influenced them the most in their lives and why. After all the coaches have done this over the course of the season, the players do it as well.

Incorporate this into your water break teaching segments. We don’t like to waste a single moment of practice time, so during every team water break have a teaching segment assigned to it. Some days it is an x’s and o’s topic, a technique topic, even strategy topics, they also include trust development and character development topics as well.

It is during these water breaks where you can take the time to talk about the “whys” of why you are doing a specific drill or using a specific technique. None of us has enough practice time to discuss the whys of everything we do, but when you have a chance to discuss it during the “free” time of a water break, do it. It helps the players understand that you aren’t doing something because of tradition, meanness or faulty logic, but to make them into better football players and a better team. The more “whys” you explain, the more trust you develop in your players, especially as the kids get older and you get into the 7th-8th grade age levels.

Letters

At the end of every season I write letters to all the kids who are aging out of the program. I tell them what they did well and try to make it personal by recalling specific incidents of their tenure in the program. I also let them know to put me down as a job reference. Right out of college I got a great job working for a large construction materials manufacturer. It was a very tough job to get; there was a lot of competition for the position. When I asked the sales manager what it was that made me stand out, he said it was my High School JV coach Paul Blazevich. The sales manager had spent nearly an hour talking to coach “Blaz” about my sophomore season and off-season, the time end effort I had put in to earn a starting spot and put myself into a position to start on the varsity against huge odds. I’ve gotten plenty of phone calls from prospective employers doing reference checks. I’ve also been told by several parents that those letters are often coveted and framed even 10 years after their son ended his playing days. You won’t believe the number heartfelt e-mails you will get back from those parents and players after you send out those letters.

We now do end of season letters for every player. These letters spell out the good and bad of the previous season. We talk about effort, alignment, base technique, assignments and what they can specifically do to get better. Let the player know you appreciate and care about him, what he did well and what he needs to work on for next season. Included for your review are examples of both letters.

Player Letter- Aged Out

Dear Calvin,

I wanted to thank you for being part of the Screaming Eagles over the last 5 years. You matured into a very good football player, someone your teammates and coaches could count on. You went from being a minimum play player, to part time starter, to starter on defense, to starter on both sides and in your last season and being the glue of our team.

I can still see the first time you carried the ball as an 8 year old against Glenwood, carrying the ball wasn’t all you thought it would be. You got crunched but got right back up for more.

You are someone we could always count on to work hard, play hard, encourage others and play wherever we needed help. You were always a good listener and very coachable. I appreciate your perseverance and effort. On film you always played to the whistle, you were the standard of effort we only hoped all the other kids would emulate. Your toughness and willingness to help others was a great asset to our team. Your willingness to play out of position was a great testament to your selflessness and humility. These are all important character traits that will serve you well as you get older and will be useful in whatever you do, far beyond the football field.

While you have experienced many great wins and championships while playing for the Screaming Eagles, I think this season was a nice summation of the character you and your teammates possess. We didn’t win the EVW Midget Title, but in my mind we accomplished much more. Going 9-1 with the smallest team in the league, battling injuries and illness every week, this team battled like no other. In 20 years of coaching, I can’t think of a team that showed more heart and your effort and attitude epitomized what that team was all about. I’m very proud of both you and your teammates.

I look forward to watching you play High School football, but more importantly seeing how you turn out as a person. I expect your future looks very bright. Always know that I’m always in your corner. Feel free to use me on that first job application as a reference.

You should be very proud of what you have done over these last 5 years. You will always be a Screaming Eagle, but we will miss having you at practice. Feel free to stop by and say hello or give us a hand at practice. You are the kind of player we want our Eagles copying.

Sincerely, Coach Dave Cisar

Player Letter- Returning Player

Dear Dylan,

We hope you enjoyed your football season, what a great year finishing 8-1 and coming just an extra point away from winning the league championship. You effort very well in practice and your attitude during practice is excellent. You are someone I feel we can always count on to be at practice and work hard to get better, we appreciate that.

Your alignment to the ball on offense is always good and on defense, you do a real nice job at Defensive End aligning just off the outside shoulder of the Tight End.

As a Center your job is very important in our offense, nothing happens without you. It isn’t an easy position to play and you’ve done very well with it. Last season you had 3-4 poor snaps and just 1 ended up being turned over. You do an excellent job of covering for the pulling Guard as well as getting into the wedge quickly. You have a competitive nature which is great, but you need to do a better job of composing yourself once you’ve made a mistake. Often times you respond in a way that doesn’t put you in a good frame of mind for the next play. If you make a mistake, you need to take a couple of deep breaths and think about the next play, not the previous one. No matter how angry you get with yourself the previous play isn’t going to change, it is past, compose yourself with a couple of very deep slow breaths and remember to keep your knees bent.

At Defensive End you didn’t play as much as you may have wanted to. While your consistency is excellent and you do a very nice job of remembering to stay as deep as the deepest back, you don’t have quite the athleticism to play there every down. You do a nice job of keeping your outside arm free and squeezing the off-tackle play and lead blocker. When the play is away, you always do a nice job of trailing through at the deepest back and not cutting off your pursuit path which could end up hurting us on the reverse.

You do need to work to develop your core, as you do struggle at times at being able to change direction and accelerate quickly. I would recommend you stay involved in as many sports as you can and maybe add in some extra activity like some of the cone drills we do during FASST. Lunges, pro agility, cone hops, frog jumps and the zag drills would help you out with developing your core which will in turn help you to change direction more efficiently. If you invest some time consistently doing these drills you should see an improvement in body control and more playing time at Defensive End.

We hope to see you next season Dylan; we couldn’t imagine having a season without you on our team. We know that with your love of the game and your competitive nature, we are going to see even a better Dylan when we start practice in August. See you then.

Coach Dave Cisar

Other Benefits of “Buy In”

When kids know you care about them beyond the football field, you have that trust bond. We do it because it is the right thing to do, but it also benefits your program long term. Parents talk, players talk, players have younger brothers, cousins and neighbors. Once you establish an encouraging trusting culture, people end up flocking to your program. Once your players walk around school with their team links on a chain or show off their foundation rocks, people are going to start talking about your program. You get the benefit of the doubt on that dumb call you made or the mistake you made in practice. You see parents taking the initiative to do their own fundraisers or contribute time and money to the program.

In Omaha, my program went from 36 to nearly 400 kids in just 5 years, the largest in Omaha proper. There were years we had 200 kids on our waiting list. Where I am now there are just 1,200 people in the nearest town, all four of my teams are full every year and we have a growing waiting list. We are often full by November of the previous season. I have had parents pay me the fee two years in advance of their boy being old enough to play. I’ve had parents stop by my home at 6:30 in the morning to drop off a check to guarantee their child a spot on our team. If you have the trust of the players and parents your organization will burst at the seams with growth.

Chapter 5

Developing Winning Attitudes

Have you ever been part of a team as a player or coach that just knew you were going to play well or win every week? Teams like this don’t panic when they are down by 14-0 even later in games. While they may play with a higher degree of urgency, teams like this just “know” they are going to win. They don’t have any clue of how it is going to happen or even why, they just feel somehow, someway they are going to come out on top. The converse is true of teams that consistently lose; they can be ahead by 20 points in the 4th quarter and then get a punt blocked. In the back of their mind they are thinking, “I wonder how we are going to lose this one.”

How do teams get that level of confidence? How do they get to the point where they have the self fulfilling prophecy of success for every game? It starts with players developing a trust in the coaching staff. Kids that have great confidence trust that the coaches will have the team well prepared. Kids that trust coaches know the coaches will have the players in the schemes, techniques and game plan that puts the team in the best possible position to win the game. Kids that trust each other trust that their teammates will align properly, execute well and effort in such a way to make every snap a winnable snap.

Developing Confidence

Most sports psychologists feel that self confidence is the number one variable that influences performance, but so few of us put time and effort into it. Developing confidence starts with the coaching staff. You and your coaching staff must set the bar high and have the expectation of success. That expectation of success comes with a price; high levels of success require high levels of effort. But without a high expectation there is no requirement for a high level of effort. High expectations mean high standards and holding the players accountable to those high standards. If a blocking scheme calls for a 6 inch step at 30 degrees, it is unacceptable to allow a 9 inch step at 45 degrees to happen, you SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF.

When I moved from Omaha to where I live now, we moved to an area that had never experienced great levels of success in football. The youth program here had won a handful of games the previous 4 years with 40-60 kids on a single team. In one of their seasons they were outscored 260-7. The local high school team hadn’t had a winning record in 10 years. When I shared with people my vision and mission for a new program that would have success on and off the field, people laughed at me and called me a nut. We went on to win our first 31 fall games and not only won a league title, but went on to win a state “select” title with a non-select non cut team of average kids.

Setting High Standards

We set our sights very high, to be the best in the area, the best in our league, the best in our state and the best in the region. When I explained our goals and standards to our first group of parents and players I’m sure many of them thought I was insane, but I was consistent, never wavered. Our practices were designed to develop a team to be the very best, to be champions. We expected the team to play well enough to win every game. Now you can’t win every game, things happen, but we expected to play well enough to win, the win being the byproduct of playing well.

Legendary turnaround artist Donnie Kiefer always shares a vision of winning championships with his players on the very first day he meets them, no matter how poorly they have performed in the seasons before he arrived. Donnie only takes over the worst programs imaginable where the teams would be ecstatic to go .500 or in some instances even win a single game. Yes he talks about winning championships to teams that have not won a single game in 3 years. Donnie coaches at Tuscola High School near Asheville, North Carolina. Tuscola has 1,038 students.

In 25 years as a head football coach at the High School level, he has turned around 7 different High School football programs. He has been in some rough spots, places where the kids were embarrassed to be part of the football team, embarrassed to wear the team gear. At one inner city school the 3 years prior to Coach Kiefer arriving, the team went 0-30. In his year there they played for the first ever East Region Championship game. At another school the team had won just 4 games total in the 5 years before I got there. In the first year there his squad played for the East Region Championship. he went 35-7 while he was there and went 12-2 in his last season. He coached at a well off suburban school where they had won just 1 game in the previous 4 years before he coached there. His team won 15 games in the 2 years there and lost both years to the eventual State Champions. At another school we put together the first back to back winning season that the school had had in over 20 years. He was a head coach at a school where we won 9 games 3 seasons in a row going 27-9, inheriting a program that was considered by many to be unsalvageable.

Donnie is no crazed lunatic, he was able to instill confidence and a willingness to work together in these hapless teams by getting them to believe in themselves. He had a plan and he shared it with everyone, he held the kids accountable but he praised even the smallest gains and helped the kids set even higher goals, never settling on mediocrity or just being competitive.

How do you set that expectation? You consistently share your vision with the team and let them know how they are going to get there. You do it verbally and enthusiastically

sharing it with your team and anyone that will listen. Are there times you are going to doubt yourself and feel like you are a Prophet crying out in the wilderness, yes of course. But if it not you, who is going to set the vision for the team and lead? Are the kids supposed to be aimlessly trying to hit a target that that doesn’t exist. Your kids need to understand what the target is and the path they are going to use to get to that target.

Game Time

Before every game our set goal and expectation is to score on each and every possession on offense. On defense our first half goal and expectation is to not allow a single first down. On special teams our first half goal an expectation is to protect the football and gain one additional possession. Set goals that are measurable and communicate them to your team before games and before practice, always set goals and have high expectations. From doing a simple angle form tackling drill with perfect form to executing a perfect mesh passing pattern, demand and expect great effort and execution.

During practice, we practiced our extra point kicks a lot, because we tell the kids we plan on scoring a lot. We practiced our onside kicks a lot, always telling the kids that when you score as often as we would, our kicking team would be seeing a lot of the field. We practiced subbing a lot because we told the boys that not only were we going to play everyone in every game, but in the blowouts, the starters would be sitting out a good portion of the game. When we were running offensive reps we practiced against a variety of really odd fronts and wild techniques, because we told the players the opposition would be so frustrated with us, they would be trying some very desperate and unusual measures to try and stop us. We practiced running the ball over to the official after scoring touchdowns and kneeling in the victory formation. We even practiced having our kicker score the game winning PAT on the last play of the game and having our kids mob the kicker. We gave our kids the expectation of success.

Developing Kids Who Love to Compete

Great teams are made of individuals that thrive on and embrace competition. Great companies are built on the shoulders of people that compete and win daily in the business world. Rarely does anyone even come close to realizing their full potential without being pushed by legitimate competition. Many kids seem to come to that first day of practice with a competitive nature as almost part of their DNA, they love to win and simply hate to lose. Other kids have to have their “pump primed” a bit to get those competitive juices flowing. Both groups need you to work with them in a way that helps foster a healthy love and appreciation for competition.

From the very first day of practice nearly everything we do is a competition, we want create a “competitive” environment to help the kids excel and embrace competition. When we are doing stances in the very first 2 minutes of the first practice, I’m letting group 2 and Coach Smith know that their group is doing a better job with their stances than coach Bell’s group 4. When we are doing first 2 step drills, we are competing to see who can get their second foot down the quickest. I’m letting everyone know who got their first step down the quickest. When we are doing blocking fit drills we have 3 lines going at once, the winner will be the player that got to the fit the quickest. Nearly everything you do can be made into a competition with a little bit of creative thinking.

Stress both individual and team competitions. When doing drills like the linemen tennis ball drill, divide the group of 12 into 3 teams of 4 and whichever team catches 5 balls first, the losing teams has to do 5 pushups. Do competitive drills like the towel game or Sumo game, where there are clear winners and losers on each repetition. We like to match individual players up in multiple groups. If you are in group 1 and win at sumo, you move to group 2 sumo; if you win there, you go to group 3 sumo, if you lose in group 2 you go back to group 1. In the end all your best players will be in group 3. To make it even more competitive, use a king of the hill format for group 3 with everyone that isn’t in group 3 watching. The winner stays in until he loses, anyone that loses is out. Or you can just do matchups in the last group, send the losers out and you end up with a single winner in the end.

Having Fun

It’s ok to have fun in practice once in awhile, I repeat, fun is good. You need to break up the monotony of practice by going outside the box from time to time. It’s good to mix it up every once in awhile, sharing a fun moment is yet another way to develop relationships with your players. When players share unique moments with you and each other, trust is being developed. I’m not talking about being buddy buddy with every player, but playing a practical joke on another coach or doing something out of the ordinary as a group. One of the things we love to do during the first week of practice is to have water balloon fights. We bring coolers full of water balloons to practice that day and the last 10 minutes of practice we put the linemen pitted against the backs in the mother of all water balloon battles.

Football should be fun for the kids; practice should be something they look forward to every time, not something to dread. We have found the following games are not only fun, but build football skills and a love of competition. Fun is your friend; it significantly improves player and parent buy-in and brings a positive energy to your practices. If you can get what you want by developing football skills or evaluating players while the kids get what they want (having fun), why not kill two birds with one stone.

Towel Game Take a large bath towel, roll it tightly the long way and tape off the ends by wrapping white athletic tape around the end 8-9 times. Also, bind up the middle in same fashion. It now looks like a puffy rope. Now take three cones and space them off in a triangle about 5 yards from the middle of the towel. Select three fairly evenly matched kids and have each grab the towel at a taped area, one on each end and one in the middle. Make sure one cone lines up with each player, again about 5 yards away. Now the player must drag the other players toward their cone and touch the cone with one hand, while keeping hold of the towel. To win, the player must touch his cone AND have hold of towel. The keys are to stay low, use your legs, keep your feet wide, use short choppy steps and never give up, sound familiar? If a player loses contact with towel, he can get back in game as long as the game has not yet declared a winner by another player touching their cone. Have a coach stand behind the cones with a “team.” Have the teams compete against each other, making sure the matchups are reasonable. The first team to have 5 wins, wins the game, the losers have to do 5 pushups or run to the tree and back. This is very fun and team building if done properly. You will see lots of cheering and jeering on this one and many happy parent faces. I’ve seen LSU and Florida use this very drill with a devise called “tug.”

Towel Game (Players that have selected this player to win) x XXXXX (Cone)

XXX x (Towel)

XXXXXX

Deer Hunter This is a great drill to wrap practice up with and to find out in the first week who your best athletes are and maybe sneak in some conditioning. Map out a square or circle with cones. The square is usually 40 yards by 40 yards or so. Choose four kids (hunters) and put yellow shell jerseys on them to distinguish them from the other players. Put the four hunters in the center of the square and ask everyone else spread out. Then take four soft small round balls, like mini nerf soccer balls, and give them to your center guys, the “hunters”. The hunters throw the balls at the other players, the “deer”. If the ball hits a deer, he goes to the outside of the square. Only allow the hunters to throw and the last four deer still left standing are the new hunters. Those deer that survive are almost always your best athletes. If you do not have nerf balls you can do it by having the hunters tag the deer with their hand. Coaches need to supervise and make sure “killed” deer move to

outside the square. If you don’t want to mess with the balls, just have the hunters tag the deer with their hands. You will find that when the last 2-3 survivors are fighting to stay alive you will witness some of the most elusive start and stop football moves known to man. Play this game and you will be nodding knowingly of who your best true athletes are in just 10-20 minutes. The kids LOVE this game and even though they will be sweating and breathing hard after the game is over, they will beg for more. When was the last time your kids begged to do more conditioning sprints? Your parents will love this one as well. Sumo Drill Put all players foot to foot in a big circle. Put two weaker kids in the middle in two-point, low stances, with their hands on the chest of their opponent. On the signal they are to push and drive the other player to the edge of the circle. The player whose foot touches the edge loses: send him to be a member of the circle, and then put the next better kid in the middle. Keep the winner in until he loses, no twisting or turning is allowed, it’s all straight up power. You will find the player that stays low, gets his hips under his opponent and uses his legs in short choppy steps, wins. Sound familiar? When done, this is your “King of the Hill” drill. If time permits do some match-ups against similar skilled players, or demonstrate how a smaller player with good technique crushes a big player with poor technique. Hawaiian Rules Football Map out boundaries of reasonable length 30 x 50 or so. Divide up players 6 or so per side, it can be 4- 5 or 7-8 to a side, but it does not work well over 8. If you have 24 kids, you should have four teams of six players. Two teams play each other head-to-head, so you can have two games going at same time. They have four “downs” to score. All snaps are shotgun style; a player must not take more than two steps before he releases the ball. It can be a forward pass, shovel pass, toss or lateral, etc. Beginning rush is “one- thousand-one, one-thousand-two”, then rush. If the ball carrier takes more than two steps, the play is dead. The play continues until the ball hits the ground or until a player holds the ball past a count of 5. If it was an incomplete pass, the original line of scrimmage or in the event of multiple passes, the point of the last “passers” feet. Once the play is dead, a new down is started. All offensive players must start each play at or behind the line of scrimmage. Each player must rotate, to start out as the quarterback for a down. There is no tackling, the defenders look more like basketball defenders. Coaches need to referee and do ball placement to keep the game moving fast. In the event of interception, remember the players can only run two steps then they have to get rid of the ball. Always encourage lots of short passes and laterals rather than going for a bomb each play. Keep it fast paced, Shirts vs. Skins, it only moves well with better athletes. For teams age 8-10 it’s best to include a coach or two on each team. It should look like a fast-moving rugby game when done right. There are no kicks, extra points, etc. after a score; the ball is placed on the 10 yard line to start a new series.

Tackle Baseball Align a “baseball” diamond with whatever you can for bases, shell jerseys or cones work fine. Try to have the bases 60 feet apart or so and a “pitchers” mound at about 30 feet. Divide into two evenly matched teams. Team one is the batting team; team two is the defending team. The batter starts at home plate, a single defender is on the pitching mound. On “go” the batter runs to first base, if he is tackled by the “pitcher” before he gets to first base he is out, if not he is safe. The “batter” can continue to run if he wants to, but at his own peril. A referee must end that play and the safe batter, now on base must stay on that base until the next batter advances. A referee coach inserts the next pitcher at the pitchers mound and a new batter is placed “at bat”. If that first runner was safe at first and took second, now the “pitcher” must make sure the player on second base does not advance to third or home, while trying to get a new “batter” out that is trying to advance to first. There are three outs per inning then the teams switch roles. We usually play three innings or whoever gets to 5 first, etc. We realign any obvious mismatches. The runners must stay on the base paths. This is a great game to teach proper pursuit angles, and tackling in space. Slam Dunk Put cones up to boundary a 10-yard-by-10-yard square. In the center of the square lay out two mesh shell jerseys on the ground. Choose two teams of similar sized and skilled players. Team one is on offense first with just two players. Team two is on defense, with three players all holding blocking shields. Give each offensive player a football, at the sound the offense has 10 seconds to enter the square and slam the ball into the mesh jersey. The defenders must stay inside the square. If a ball carrier is driven out of the square, he is done for that possession. Give each team 10 seconds to get together and formulate a strategy prior to starting each possession. The two players on offense can both be ball carriers and try to score or one can block for the other. Give each team a chance to go on offense and defense before we declare a winner. This game helps develop teamwork, aggression and open field tackling skills and gets those competitive juices flowing.

ball carrier X X ball carrier

dd defenders

Dummy Relay Races

Divide the team into 4 equal groups and line them up in a column behind a cone. Line up all 4 teams in columns that are even. Set another cone out about 10 yards from the starting line cone of each team. Set a tall blocking dummy in front of the line of each

team. The first player on each team must pick up the dummy and carry it 10 yards to the cone, go around the cone and come back to the starting line where he the passes the dummy to the next player in line on his team. There are no rules as how the dummy must be carried but most just bear hug it and run. Most players hold the dummy upright, close to their chests. The losing team must run a short lap or do 10 pushups etc. This one will get the players and parent howling, To spice it up, pair two teams against each other and have just one cone 10 yards away set up for both teams to “share” the cone. Now have your relay race with no restrictions on contact at the intersection cone, be ready for some awesome demolition derby type action as the players slam into each other with their dummy in front for protection kind of like one of those inflatable sumo wrestling games.

Mind you that while mom and dad and the kids are thinking we are just playing a fun game, I’m looking at which players core strength allows them to carry a 30+ pound awkward dummy 10 yards and back on a run without losing their balance. Find kids that can do this well and you’ve found your athletes. They may not have won any straight speed race, or strength test, but they will be able to carry themselves on the football field. This is one of the very best evaluation games you can do.

Other Benefits of Team Competitions

When you do fun team and individual competitions like these you have happy kids. Happy kids are kids that will buy in and bond with you and their teammates. Don’t forget your parents, when they see their kids having fun, they buy in to you and the program as you continue to make deposits into those very important emotional bank account relationships. Remember all relationships are governed by how much “money” is in the emotional bank account with the two parties. If you have developed enough trust and care between the two parties, the relationship can withstand reasonable withdrawals over time. One great way to build up those accounts is to make sure your practices are fun. Getting Players to Thrive Under Pressure

Some youth football teams seem to be able to handle pressure situations better than others. A very small number of games are decided on a final play or last minute drive, many are decided on key plays that often turn a close game into a laugher. In any case, every single youth football game is filled with snaps where the games result is in balance.

Your kids are going to either be the kind that embrace these moments or dread them. If you played baseball it is similar to the situation where your team is in the field ahead by 4-3 in the bottom of the ninth inning with 2 outs, the bases are loaded and you are playing second base. Are you the type of player that is praying that the ball won’t be hit to you or

are you the kind of player that wants that ground ball and you want to make that final throw to first base to end the game?

Pressure Games

If kids are going to embrace pressure situations, you first have to practice pressure situations just like anything else. Kids fear the unknown, if they’ve experienced pressure they can deal with it much better than if they haven’t. There are varieties of ways to apply pressure to your team in a reasonable way; one that we like is the “touchdown compete” drill. Put your first team offense on the field at the 5 yard line against all the remaining players on defense. If you have 26 kids, that’s 11 against 15. The offense must score on 5 consecutive plays to “win.” If they don’t score on all 5 plays, they go for a short run while the backups drink water.

Consecutive Catch Game

The consecutive catch game pairs 2 teams against each other teams facing a coach at 15 yards who is leading his team. Team one’s coach throws the ball to the first player in that coach’s row, he catches it and runs it back to the coach. The coach for team two does the same, the first time a player in either row drops the ball, all the players in that row do 5 pushups. Remember to keep the “all time record” of consecutive catches; none of your players wants to be the kid that drops the 51st catch in a row, when the team record is 52.

Another great way to create those pressure packed situations is dong a 2 minute offense drill complete with a clock, down markers and a referee, or someone playing the role. I especially like to put kids in a situation where we tell them there is just one play before the half or just 6 seconds left to play in the game and that the offense must score on the last play. You can do this in team or also in skeleton or individual drills. One of my favorites is creating jump ball situations with your best defensive backs against your best receivers. You can even put your best receiver in a jump ball situation against your best two defensive backs, letting everyone know the scenario is that this is the last play of the game, winner take all.

Last Play Game

We always have at least 2 “last play” plays in the playbook. One is always a play where we are trying to get the ball to our best player in space; the other is a bit of a trick play for longer yardage situations. The end of practice almost always concludes with us running one of these plays. If the offense catches the ball the remaining players carry the equipment to the cars, if the offense drops it, the offense carries the gear.

To add some of the crowd noise and pressure to the situation try adding in your players and even parents into the mix. Extra point attempts are very important in youth football. In many leagues PAT kicks count for 2 points instead of 1, they are huge difference makers. At the end of practice set up your PAT team and put all the remaining players up front jumping up and down and screaming at the top of their lungs. Put the parents and coaches just behind the kicker cheering wildly and making as much racket as humanly possible. Give the kicker 1 kick, if he makes it practice is over and the kids get to play deer hunter for 10 minutes. If he doesn’t make it, practice continues with more of the kicking game. Of course you could use the same method on the “last play” play as well.

If you take a little bit of time to structure your practices and reps in this way to create those pressure situations, your kids won’t be shaking in their boots when it gets to crunch time. Most likely they will be looking at each other with smiles on their faces knowing they’ve practiced for pressure situations nearly every day during the entire season. Using Words as Influencers

Use language that gives the expectation of a positive end result. With the new rural team I started where I live now, during the first season we went to big city Omaha to play a non-league game against a very big well established team. Our team was from a town with the population of about 1,200. Omaha metro with all the suburbs is about 900,000. Needless to say our kids were a bit intimidated by the big city surroundings and the team we were playing.

We were down 12-0 at the half and getting pushed around pretty badly, it looked like we might be on the wrong end of a 30-0 game if things continued on the same path. I didn’t talk much about what we didn’t do well, I talked about what we did do well and the fact we could build on those strengths to pull out the game. Our Left Guard was getting mauled by a player twice his size, so we talked about what a big difference it was going to be in the second half now that we had given our Left Guard Alijah the green light to crab block on every play but wedge. We talked about how the nasty tunnel adjustment looked good against the killer Defensive End the other team had.

I talked about how important our extra points were going to be. I told the kids “Don’t get real excited about the second touchdown we are going to score, we need to make sure we make our extra points in case the other team was lucky enough to get another score.” I let the players know that AFTER we scored on the initial drive, we were going to onside kick, recover it and score on the ensuing possession. I told them the key to the game was going to be how our defense responded after we took the lead; I let them know we had to stop them on their first drive. Sure enough, we returned the opening kickoff of the second half for an unlikely score, onside kicked and scored again to take the lead. The boys had remembered what I told them about not getting excited about scoring the second

Copyright 2011 Cisar Management, all rights reserved 46 touchdown, that we needed those extra points. Well the other team ended up scoring to take the lead back but we had the ball at the other teams 10 yard line, first and ten with less than a minute to go.

During a timeout, I told the kids that we were going to run a “no play” to get the other team to jump off-sides and give us a first and five. On the ensuing play the other team would be dejected and sitting back so we would score on a 22 wedge. I let the boys know that I didn’t want them to jump up and down AFTER we scored, we needed to finish off the last minute and that we didn’t want to get too excited because this was their stadium and there would be no need to embarrass those kids. Just like I had said, we got the other team to jump on the “no play” and we scored on the very next play, a 22 wedge. As instructed the kids didn’t make a big deal out of it, but they were all smiles.

Be Positive

The coaching staff must always stay positive, even when things aren’t going well and even when you don’t have the answers you can’t panic. If you waiver, the kids cue in on that and will falter as well.

In another game the following year we were playing a select team from Omaha that had not been beaten in 3 years. They were huge, they had chosen their team from over 150 kids and had at least 4 kids over 160 lbs at age 8-10 and had another 6 over 110 easily. We were grossly overmatched both from a size and speed standpoint. I never let our kids see the other team until kickoff; we kept the other team completely out of our vision. We talked about the fact the other team was big and fast but we were going to use crab blocks and max slowdown as countermeasures. We shared why the no plays and spinner plays were going to work and why our lack of penalties and turnovers were going to win the game for us. Lastly I let the boys know that they shouldn’t celebrate after any touchdown or even after the win, because the other team was going to be very disappointed that they couldn’t beat such a small team and would have a 90 minute drive home to think about it. AFTER we win, we don’t celebrate, because we expect to win, AFTER a touchdown we don’t celebrate because we expect to score every time we have the ball.

Now this doesn’t mean you tell your kids every game is going to be a blowout or not to have fun. Prepare your team for the times they may be down, over matched or made a mistake or two to put themselves into a bind.

Create the Expectation of Success

Coach your coaches to expect success, not to be surprised by it. Everyone is different; some people are more expressive that others, God made us all different, I get that. However if you get all crazy after your teams first score, what does that tell your kids? Maybe it tells them you didn’t think they were going to play well. After we score, I don’t waste a second, I’m getting our PAT or extra point play ready. When the players head to the sidelines, I only smile and give a knowing nod.

On real good plays, I may whisper to the offensive linemen, “nice job, way to go” and give some very weak low hand slaps to the linemen. You won’t see any fists pumping in the air or jumping up and down from our coaching staff. Why would we, we fully expect to score on every possession and win every game. That’s probably why none of us have ever had a Gatorade bath and thank goodness I don’t want to have to drive home stuck to my car seats.

Creating a Success Environment

At any home game or event we do, we bring out all of our championship banners. When anyone enters our stadium they must walk past all 11 of them. On weekends with big games we may even trot out all of our trophies. Guess what the other teams kids do before the games played in our stadium? They look, study, touch and admire all of our championship banners and trophies. We create the expectation of success before the game ever commences.

We display those same banners at events we do and at the very first practice. Let the kids know that if they effort hard and listen to the coaches (trust them) they can succeed. If you haven’t won one yet, go buy a banner and a trophy and show your kids what it is going to look like when they do win.

Gaining Confidence

Being confident is healthy and much different than being cocky. Confident teams respect their opponents and know they must effort to full potential in practice and games to have success. Confident teams respect the game and the effort their opponents put in. Confident teams expect to win because they have put the work in prior to the game to the point they feel they deserve to win. Confident teams don’t mock or belittle their opponents. Confident teams don’t need gimmicks, face painting or pyrotechnics to get “up” for games, they expect to win.

I remember the old Nebraska teams from 93-97, they went 60-3 and won 3 National Titles, barely losing a fourth on a last second score

at the Orange Bowl against Florida State in 1993. I used to go watch those Nebraska teams run out from their dressing room through the tunnel. There was very little fanfare, very little jumping around, those players came through the tunnel with a determined look on their face and the quiet confidence that they were going to go out on that field and kick the ever loving snot out of whoever they were playing. That’s how I want my teams to feel before the games, not whistling through the graveyard with some phony dog and pony show theatrics. Confidence is not arrogance or cockiness, there is a big difference.

Team Building

One of the more important aspects of championship teams are they play together. While there may be a selfish or one man team here and there that my have some short term success in some non-competitive leagues, it does not happen over the long haul. I was fortunate enough to spend a week in 2009 and 2010 in Orlando at the Pop Warner and AYF National Championships. While many of the teams had very talented players, none of them were one man shows or displayed any selfish behavior at all. That goes double for Eddie Alford’s talented Richmond Florida Midget DI team, chocked full of athletes including Michael Irvin’s son. My friend Eddie’s team played as selflessly and as disciplined as any Navy team coached by Ken Niumatalolo that you’ve ever seen. Coach Eddie’s team is pictured below. Coach Ken is pictured above, he coaches a team that I have great respect for, the epitome of a selfless team.

How do you bring teams together? You do all the things we’ve been talking about so far; build trust, deserve to be heard, set the bar high, develop a success environment, use positive control, develop confidence, use the buddy system, stress teamwork, use teambuilding games and drills and develop character with a program like foundations. Great teamwork is simply character in action.

The Marine Corps

There are also some other tools you can use to help your kids understand the value of teamwork. The Marine Corps are a unit that while very large has a special aura and pride that is built around team work. One of the things they do at Paris Island to build this unity is to teach all the members of a unit how important each of them are to the teams ultimate success. They illustrate this by having teams pull on opposite sides of a chain with just a single weak link, the entire chain breaks at the weak link and both sides fall to the ground. They then award pristine perfect links to the Marines that are able to complete a

very difficult three day exercise that tests the willpower, commitment and teamwork of every Marine in the unit.

The Strong Link

In youth football every player is important and when you play against well coached teams, they will expose your weakest link. In the end you are only as strong as your weakest link. Through teamwork your weakest link can be less of a factor, but the best teams, those winning National Championships have very few of those. In youth football we award “links” to individual players when we feel we can trust them. That trust is earned when we see the player consistently paying attention, consistently attending practice, consistently giving 100% effort, consistently aligning properly and consistently encouraging their fellow team mates.

Just go to Home Depot and buy a length of heavy twisted link chain and use a bolt cutter to cut every other link, leaving perfect links for the prize. The Marines suggest using twisted links to signify that the link has been tested and judged to be sound. We bought some very inexpensive but very neat looking tiny black velvet bags to hold the prized links along with an inexpensive bead chain. The links are given out after Thursday practice. Many of the players wear their prized link to school, a great way to publicize what your team is all about to other kids and the community. This is a very inexpensive but powerful way to get your kids on the same page.

The Team Poison Demonstration

Another simple way to demonstrate the importance of each and every player to the group is to do an easy but powerful demonstration. Use a 24 clear glass of water to start with. Let the players know each ounce represents a player on the team. Now take a bottle of red food coloring and an eye dropper. There are approximately 420 drops of water in one ounce or 10,080 drops of water in your 24 ounce glass. Let the players know there are 420 drops of water in an ounce and that you would need to drop 420 drops of the food coloring to equal the volume of just a single player. Now tell the kids each drop of food coloring represents negativity and a lack of teamwork from a single player. Slowly add a drop of red to the large glass hold it up high for the group to see, stop after a drop or two turns the entire glass a light shade of red.

They will find it only takes a drop of two to color the entire glass red. Ask them what they see. Ask them what the glass would look like if you put the equivalent of one player,

420 drops into the water. It’s amazing to see how one or two tiny drops “poisons” and changes the color of the entire class. Let the team know it only takes a tiny bit of negatively and selfishness from a single player to taint an ENTIRE team that is the dynamic of great teams. Great teams have everyone on the same page working for the same goal, excellence. If you have earned the right to be heard and developed a high level of trust with your kids, they will eat things like this up. Exercises like these can help you illustrate a point more effectively than just telling them about the importance of every player and teamwork.

Once again, the more you do things like this during your water breaks the more “buy in” you get from your kids and parents. I’ve found when you do exercises like this in a serious and solemn tone in complete silence, they have a very high impact. You can even take is a step further by encouraging players that are giving their all by saying things like, “Way to be a strong link” or with kids that are being positive and encouraging say something like “Way to keep the glass clear.” They will know what you mean if you say it often enough.

Chapter 6 Academic Program

Why it Makes Sense

Consider adding an academic component to your program, it is a simple and easy way to motivate your players to excel in the classroom. Many programs talk a good game when it comes to academics and sportsmanship, but it’s all fluff in most cases. I have not heard of many teams being aggressive in this area. The facts are that most studies say 70% of the kids playing youth football will not play a single down of High School football. Every year in the state of Nebraska, a state known for its fanaticism for football, there will be just 8-12 kids offered full ride athletic scholarships to Division I schools. Of that number, less than half will end up getting to play a single down of college football; many of them will be injured or quit. Even fewer of this already tiny number will go on to play in the NFL. Out of a state of over 1.7 million people, you probably have a better chance of hitting the lottery than playing a down of major college football. On the other hand every year, thousands of Nebraska kids are given full or partial academic scholarships to attend college. Some of our inner-city kids have yet to be told the truth about these numbers. Unfortunately, some players were told these facts and choose to ignore them. As a football coach, you are in a unique position to offer the right incentives for the kids to perform well in the classroom and in life. You are with them 6-8 hours weekly and quite frankly, they may listen to you more than they do mom or dad and their teachers. Many kids are not hearing this message at home and many of our kids are dad-less or parentless. We have had several parents tell us that they tell their kids these things over and over and over again, but until someone verifies it from outside the home the kids do not pay any attention to it. An academic program also helps you get allies like schools or local companies. My guess is many; if not most of the Screaming Eagle sponsors would not have helped us, if we did not have an academic accountability program. It is very simple to set up and we usually have a team mom manage it after week one.

How it Works

We send our academic accountability forms home with the kids on Tuesday, on Thursday it is returned to us before practice. The player’s teacher checks and scores the child’s effort and behavior for the week, as do the parents. Those players that fail to bring an academic accountability paper in for whatever reason are given a zero for the week and run after practice. The team mom tallies the scores for the week and calls the president with the team totals only. We take the number of kids on the team and divide by the total number of points for that team, to give us a team average.

On the following Thursday, the team that had the highest total the previous week gets 4 extra large pizzas delivered to their practice site for the kids to eat after practice. Individually the team mom keeps a running log for every player.

Awards

We hand out little helmet decals for academic performance weekly. We give out one decal for scores of 15-20 points, two decals for scores of 21-24 points and three decals for perfect scores of 25. The funny thing is, quite often our poorer performing athletes are often the best students and have helmets covered with stickers. It really causes confusion for the opposition when they see your best player with no stickers and a minimum play kid with a helmet covered in them. At seasons end, we hand out awards to the year’s best academic performers like used computers, jackets, t- shirts, fat heads and trophies. Just think of that child that doesn’t have his own computer going to school and bragging to his friends and teachers about the “new” computer he won for his academic progress. What kind of buzz and impression does that create for your program?

Local businesses have donated over 300 used computers that we rehab and hand out to the top academic performers. These are very easy to get since most large companies pay to have these computers disposed of. When you go out into the community or ask your stakeholders to do the same word gets out about what you are doing and that you are really much more than a football team trying to win games. It is much easier asking for donations for an academic accountability and awards program than it is for money to lower everyone’s entry fee. Sometimes help just appears out of nowhere. One year a local caterer heard about our program and awards banquet. He donated and served over 1500 people an amazing first class meal, saving us over $9,000.

Remember that every time you do something for your player that goes beyond the football field you are building trust with them and their parents. Every plank of this plan that you decide to implement adds to the emotional bank account you have with each player and parent.

Weekly Eligibility Feedback Form Teacher Portion Students Name______Week Ending______

5-Excellent 4-Good 3-Satisfactory 2–Improving 1-Needs Improvement 0-Poor

Reading or English______Math______Behavior______

Comments (Optional) ______

Teachers Signature______……………………………………………………………………………………………… Parents Portion

5-Excellent 4-Good 3-Satisfactory 2–Improving 1-Needs Improvement 0-Poor

Homework Effort______Behavior______

Comments (Optional) ______The player has my permission to participate in this week’s game.______Guardian Signature______

Chapter 7

The Foundations Program

Character influences action, it is the foundation that determines how we will respond to the challenges we face every day. It is who we are at the atomic level and it is enduring. Character determines our actions and our priorities and is often referred to as what we would do in a situation if there were no consequences and no one would ever find out. While certainly the game inherently helps player in developing perseverance and other traits, much of what your players need isn’t going to be “caught” from the game, it is going to have to be taught. These are the Foundation character traits we try to impart into the lives of our youth football players.

Perseverance Goal Setting 100% Effort Selflessness Teamwork Positive Attitude Finishing Depth Coachability Compassion Honesty Emotional Control Consistency Humility Grace Sportsmanship Thankfulness

How it Works

Each Foundation block is a mini-lesson that is delivered by e-mail to your coaches and players or parents by cutting and pasting the lessons from this manuel. You choose which lessons you want to send and when. We send the e-mail out on Sunday so our players have a chance to see it before your first practice of the week.

The lesson will consist of a mini-poster that the player prints out and places in a prominent place like on his bedroom door, above his bed or even on the fridge. Some of

Copyright 2011 Cisar Management, all rights reserved 55 the kids even insert into their notebook and take it to school with them for the week. The poster just says what that week’s theme with a short definition and quote.

The Lesson

The lesson itself is in story format, telling your player not only what the theme means but a real world story where the kids can see and experience the value of embracing the character trait in the theme. In most cases, there is a link to a very short YouTube video clip that brings the story to life. We did not post these video clips and they are not owned by us, they are simply examples of the many available on the web that illustrate the story we are trying to tell. We have included every lesson here for you to review. Every clip is G-rated as are the stories. On occasion, there may be text comments in the comments area of the video that are not G-rated; unfortunately, we have no control over those.

Questions

At the first practice of the week there are questions that you can ask to get the process rolling in the minds of your kids. All the questions are listed here in this Leadership Manual. The first day questions are very short and do not involve a lot of interaction, they are just meant to prime the pump and to get the kids thinking about that week’s theme. You can do it during your first team water break. Make sure all your coaches have read the Foundation theme of the week, because they are each going to be looking for visible evidence of that theme in the players in their “mini teams” groups that week.

Whale Done

During the week make sure to make a big deal about your “whale done” moments. In Ken Blanchard's book “Whale Done” he talks about how great companies and super performers are made through encouragement. He talks first about how they teach the killer whales at Sea World to do those amazing tricks. The trainers start first by drawing a line at the bottom of the pool and every time the whale passes over the line, they throw some fish in for the whale to eat. Over time the whale figures out that it is a good thing to swim over the line. Over time the trainers turn that line into a pole and slowly start raising it day by day until the pole is out of the water. Of course each time the whale crosses over the pole they are rewarded with the tasty fish the whale craves. Eventually the trainers are able to remove the pole altogether. The key component in this whole exercise is that the trainers got the whale to do the end task by simply catching him doing something right and rewarding him for it.

How often do we do that during football practices? How much of our time is spent pointing out what kids do wrong instead of pointing out what they did right? I’m not suggesting we all abandon correcting kids that are doing something incorrectly, what I’m suggesting is we get more passionate about looking hard for situations where kids are doing something right, acknowledging it and making a big deal out of it.

How It Worked With My Team

One week our Foundation Theme of the Week was selflessness. It was a Tuesday; we had talked a little about selflessness on Monday. It was a real hot August day, about 90 degrees and about 60% humidity. I noticed one of our players David was out of water, he had already gone through his jug during the first hour of practice. His partner buddy Tony had the same size jug of water and Tony offered to share his remaining water with David. Not a big deal right? Oh no, it was a big deal and during that water break we made sure to let Tony we appreciated his selflessness act of sharing what little water he had with a very thirsty teammate. You would be amazed at what a small gesture like that does for a youth football team. Many kids start to “get it” and go out of their way to gain the approval of their coach.

The team David and Tony played on was very small, it was the smallest 7-8th grade team I had ever coached or even seen in my 20 years of coaching. We had just 2 players over 140 lbs and just 1 player above the “striper” weight over 160 pounds. We had a STARTING line of kids who weighed 113, 118, 120, 140, 212, 120, 115 Tight End to Tight End. I was literally scared to death that we would even be able to make it to the end of the season on one piece, let alone win a few games. Our 140 lb Right Guard Nolan was a kid we kind of pressed into duty because of his “size”, mind you 140 isn’t very big at all in our league. We would play teams that would start four 200 lb kids on their front line. To give you an idea how small we were - we had two eighth graders that weighed less than 85 lbs. We were so small that in the pre-game prayer with a select team from Omaha, the Omaha players were visibly laughing at the size of our kids. A game we were ahead at the half by 24-0 and won easily 30-12.

Nolan had always played a backup Fullback or Blocking Back position for us on offense and started at Defensive End on defense. I pulled Nolan aside early during that first week of practice and let him know how much I appreciated his hard work and commitment. I also asked him what he thought of our team. He responded, “we’re pretty small, we’re going to have to work real hard otherwise we’re going to get killed.” I told him I appreciated his candor and agreed we had a lot of work to do, but I liked our team’s attitude and football smarts and that if we came together as a team I would figure out a way where we could compete. I told him it looked like he could be a backup Blocking

Back again or probably be a starter as a Right Guard a key cog in the offense if he worked real hard. He asked if he could still run a few plays at Blocking Back if there were any games we had a big lead in, I told him of course. I also reminded him that that day may never come unless all of us maxed out on our potentials.

During the water break the next day in front of the entire team, I made a HUGE deal out of the fact Nolan agreed to the move to Right Guard. I let the kids know how proud I was of Nolan and how far he had come from the early days when his main concern was how much time was left in practice and if he could carry the ball. The next day Nolan came up to me before practice and told me, “Coach I see we are real small up front, if you need me at Defensive Tackle I’ll do it.” This came from a player that had started for us at Defensive End the previous 3 seasons and relished the role. I was in near tears as I told the team the following day about Nolan volunteering to play a position he really wasn’t suited for and didn’t really want to play. He had been selfless, thinking of his team above himself.

The following day a backup Wingback came up to me before practice and said he would be willing to move to the line if that would help the team, he only weighed 120 lbs. He ended up starting for us at Power Tackle after we had to reshuffle our starting lineup due to injuries. These kids were literally falling all over themselves to be more selfless than each other. That season we had a lot of kids playing out of their natural positions, the positions they will probably play in High School. We had to in order to max out the potential of the team.

I’ve never seen a group of kids so committed to the team concept and play so selflessly as this group. While we didn’t win a lot of games by blowout scores, we went 9-1 losing only to the league champions in a game we had 4 starters out with the flu, concussion and a knee problem. When you catch someone doing something good, communicate it to the player and the team, let your praise be the reward like in the whale done story.

The Awards

After your last day of practice that week, bring the teams together for the awards portion of the process. Ask the questions in this manuel at the end of each lesson to get the kids involved in the discussion about that weeks Foundation theme. Then have each of your coaches award Foundation Block Awards to one of the kids from each of the mini teams they are responsible for. Work together

Copyright 2011 Cisar Management, all rights reserved 58 to make sure kids that were exhibiting that weeks Foundation theme are recognized. If there is a group where no one deserves the award, don’t award one, it would cheapen the value of the award. Let the kids know who won and what the player did that week that allowed him to win the prize for the mini team that week. Let your assistants hand out the awards for their respective mini team and speak in front of the group, that helps build their buy in and commitment as well.

The Foundation awards are nothing more than painted rocks with the Foundation award printed on them. The award symbolizes the building blocks on which our players and our team are being built upon, the solid rock of character.

You will be amazed at what the effect of these simple rocks will have on your team and parents. Kids will covet and show off these symbols to their peers. I had one panicked parent who called me one day in a tizzy because when they moved they couldn’t find their sons coveted Foundation awards. She was almost in tears when I told her I would be happy to replace the misplaced award. Just think of how may of us have a little football trophy sitting in the attic from 30 years ago. Wouldn’t it be better if those trophies were sitting beside something that is much more enduring than a piece of molded plastic, the symbol of what was instilled in them as an impressionable youth by football coaches that cared about his future well beyond any athletic field glories?

We do our awards on Thursday evenings after practice. It has become a big event in our program with parents showing up with cameras, video cameras and lots of food. This isn’t anything we planned, it has just evolved, the parents love hearing the coaches talk about their kids in a positive way and helping them lay the foundation for their children’s success. It is by far the thing the parents like most about our program and what we get the most feedback on.

The Foundation Rocks

The rocks as you can see are round landscaping rocks that weigh about a half pound each. I get mine from a local landscape supply company. The first day I showed up at the front counter with a bucket of about 30 rocks the owner looked at me somewhat odd and asked me what I was doing with so few rocks. I mentioned they were “Foundation” awards for a character development program for youth football, he told me there was no charge, to take what I needed. We painted them with high gloss gold metallic paint and then put team stickers and a sticker with the theme of the week printed on it. On the bottom we put the date and team name. The following pages are the posters and e-mails that you

Before you pick the lesson and send them out to your distribution list per the winningyouthfootball.com Foundations System you should talk to and e-mail the parents about the program. The winningyouthfootball.com distribution system does not capture or use the e-mail addresses of any of your parents or kids, those lists are not kept, used or sold to anyone. The e-mail appears to have come from you. Before you send out the first lesson an e-mail message to the parents may look something like this:

Dear Parent,

We appreciate having you and your son as part of our program. The game of football is in many ways like life. In order to be successful on the football field you have to listen, try hard, set goals, be consistent, persevere, finish and be selfless. These are all character traits that will serve our players well beyond the football field.

To augment these lessons the boys learn on the field we are also implementing the Foundations Character Development program for our players through winningyouthfootball.com. Each week a different Foundations theme will be stressed and discussed. An e-mail will come to you weekly. This e-mail will have a 1-page poster that will highlight that week’s theme. Please print it out and have your son tape it up in some prominent place like above his bed or maybe on the fridge door.

The e-mail will also include a short 3-4 paragraph Foundations character lesson on subjects like perseverance, selflessness, humility, consistency and teamwork to name just a few. Each e-mail will usually also include a link to a YouTube link that will often bring that week’s theme to life. All of the materials are G- rated.

Please review each e-mail and pass along to your son. We will be presenting Foundation Awards to several players each week who have been exhibiting the character theme traits.

Please join us after practice on Thursdays, listen to the discussion, and watch the awards ceremony. Our coaching staff is trained to use the positive reinforcement practices advocated by the Foundations program as well as using some of the unique team bonding methods to help and bring our team together.

We hope to be augmenting what you are already teaching and modeling at home. Sometimes hearing the exact same thing from someone other than mom or dad gives more credibility to the initial message and primary messenger - you.

Participating in this program is not mandatory. Please support us in this effort, we want this years football experience to be very special, not just for this season but for the years thereafter.

Dave Cisar Head Coach, Screaming Eagles

You always want to communicate anything you are going to do ahead of time and the Foundations program is no different. You will probably find like most coaches do that the reception is lukewarm at first. But as the season progresses, your consistency and time investment will show you are serious about this. When they start to see progress in their

Copyright 2011 Cisar Management, all rights reserved 60 childrens lives, you will see the support for this build. All’s it takes is a few players showing improvement where mom and dad thought there wasn’t much of a chance. Every year our parents rank this as the thing they like most about our program. Believe it or not, its not all the wins or championships or even our use of Hudl and game film, it is the Foundations program.

Foundations

Theme of the Week

Perseverance

Definition: Steady action to a set purpose in spite of difficulties, obstacles, setbacks or discouragement.

Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Perseverance e-mail

When I hear the word perseverance I think of Dan (Rudy) Ruettiger. He grew up in Joliet Illinois in a lower-middle class blue collar family, the third of fourteen children. Ever since he was a small boy, Rudy dreamed of going to college and playing football at Notre Dame. But he was small, his grades weren't good and his family had little money.

Because of Dyslexia, a learning disability, Rudy struggled in school. When he was a senior in High School, he was just 5 foot 7 inches tall and weighed only 150 pounds. No one thought Rudy would ever make it to Notre Dame, let alone play football there. Rudy worked at a Boiler Factory after High School for 2 years, saving money to pursue his dream. His grades weren’t good enough to get into Notre Dame, so he spent two years at Holy Cross Junior College. He suffered through three crushing rejections to transfer into Notre Dame, but was finally accepted as a student in 1974. He came close many times to giving up on his dream of going to Notre Dame and playing football, as he worked tirelessly to pay his own way through college and make good grades.

Beating all odds, Rudy earned a place on the Notre Dame scout team, a grueling practice- squad position that helps the varsity team practice for games with almost no chance of playing in real games. Rudy’s perseverance and hard work on the scout team caught the eyes of his coaches. In Rudy's senior year the coaches allowed him to suit up for the final game against Georgia Tech. Coach put him into the game as defensive end for the last two plays, on the final play of the game Rudy sacked the Quarterback and was carried off the field by his teammates.

Rudy went on to be the first college graduate from his family. The perseverance Rudy learned on his football journey played a key role in his later success as a husband, father and in the business world. His story was immortalized in the movie “Rudy”.

The real “Rudy Play”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-z950ovP7N4

Daniel Ruettiger’s picture should in the dictionary next to the word perseverance. He had a dream and he did whatever he could to make that dream happen, no matter how big or how many obstacles were in his path.

If you want to find out more: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEGOTWwd14M&feature=related

Perseverance Questions

Day 1

What is the theme of the week?

What does perseverance mean?

How many of you watched the video clip?

Who is Rudy Ruettiger?

Awards Day

Perseverance is one of the key ingredients coaches look for in football players. Teams that persevere and refuse to give up are successful teams no matter the final outcome; they almost always outperform teams made up of great athletes who get discouraged when things don’t go well right away.

How did Rudy show perseverance in his life?

What are some things we have to do as football players that require perseverance?

What types of things in life away from the football field require perseverance to be successful?

Foundation

Theme of the Week

Selflessness

Definition: Acting with less concern for yourself than for the success of the others. Putting the needs of others above your own selfish desires.

Only those who have learned the power of sincere and selfless contribution experience life's deepest joy. Tony Robbins

Selflessness e-mail

Selflessness, what is it?

Definition: Acting with less concern for yourself than for someone else or group. Putting the needs of others above your own selfish desires.

Football, just like family and life or work is a team game. In order to be successful we have to be willing to put our own selfish desires aside for the sake of the team. Maybe the team is better off with you playing a position that you really didn’t want to play. Maybe instead of making all the tackles, in order for the team to play great defense, your job is to plug up a gap or be the “roadblock” on the sweep.

Maybe instead of carrying the ball on the winning touchdown, your job is to make a great fake so the linebackers follow you away from the player with the ball.

Surprisingly we often get what we want when we put the needs of the team and others ahead of our own.

How did you act selfless last week?

If you watched this powerful video clip, how did Dick and Rich Hoyt. Mr Hoyt made tremendous sacrifices so his son could experience the thrill of competing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flRvsO8m_KI

Selflessness Questions

Day 1

What is the theme of the week?

What does selflessness mean?

What is the opposite of selflessness?

How many of you watched the video clip?

Who is Richard Hoyt?

Awards Day

Great football teams play together; their only goal is to play well, to their full effort and potential. Teams that play together without any regard for their own personal statistics will almost always out play teams full of great athletes who only care about themselves.

How did Mr Hoyt show selflessness in his life?

What are some things we have to do as football players that require selflessness?

What are some things you have seen SELFISH players do in football?

How can being selfish ruin a football team?

Foundation

Theme of the Week

Goal Setting

Definition: Setting Goals- The act of defining what your end objectives will be.

The world makes way for the man who knows where he is going. Ralph Waldo Emerson

You have to set goals that are almost out of reach. If you set a goal that is attainable without much work or thought, you are stuck with something below your true talent and potential. Steve Garvey

Goal Setting e-mail

Going through life without goals is like going on a trip without a destination or even a map. Imagine going on a road trip to Grandmas house (imagine you have never been there before). Grandma lives 2,000 miles away and you don’t know her address and you don’t have a map to get there. That is what going through life without goals is like. In any task you do, ask yourself what is my goal? If I do my very best, put all I have into this effort, what can I achieve?

Have you ever done something and not given it your all? Maybe your job at home is to mow the yard and you just weren’t into it this week. You didn’t bother to trim around the trees or bushes; you missed a few spots here and there. What did you feel when you looked at that lawn all week? How about the time you really decided to do a great job? You didn’t miss a single spot; you even went diagonally to make some real cool lines on the grass. You edged around all the planters and trees and even went the extra mile and used dads edging tool to trim next to the sidewalk. What did you feel like after you were done? Did you look over your handiwork and feel proud of your work and yourself?

Too often we set our goals too low. We let others bound us in with their limitations, like we heard from the Rudy Ruettiger story a few weeks ago. No one thought Rudy would ever go to College or play football for Notre Dame, but Rudy set his goals high and persisted to his dream.

In 1954 no one had ever run the mile in less than 4 minutes. Most people thought there was a Barrier at 4 minutes - that no human being could ever run under 4 minutes. In 1954 Roger Bannister from England finally broke the 4 minute barrier. In less than 3 years another 17 runners had run the mile in less than 4 minutes. This barrier had just been in these runners minds, once they saw that one man could run the race in less than 4 minutes, they knew they could do it too. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEgHhijFnEU&feature=fvst

In sports and business, people are often their own worst enemies when it comes to goal setting. They set goals that are far lower than what they can really accomplish when they give it their all. In the case of these achievers like Roger Bannister, Jack Nicholas or Bill Gates, they all had one thing in common, they set very high goals. They also all visualized themselves reaching their goals; they saw themselves already in possession of their goal years before they actually accomplished the goal. They all worked relentlessly for their goal and once they met it, they set even higher goals.

Goal Setting Questions

Day 1

What is the theme of the week?

What does Goal Setting mean?

How many of you watched the video clip?

Who is Roger Bannister?

Awards Day

Every team and every player must sit down and figure out what their goals are for the season. Several studies have shown that people are 80% more likely to accomplish a goal if they write it down on paper than if they just have it floating around in their heads. How will you know if the time you spent playing football was worthwhile if you don’t have goals? How will you prepare your efforts for the season if you have no idea what you want to get out of the season?

What are your goals for this season as a team?

What are your goals as a player?

Why did so many people break the 4 minute mile barrier right after Roger Bannister first did it in 1954?

How do you feel when you set and accomplish a very easy goal?

How do you feel when you set, work very hard and accomplish a very difficult goal?

Foundations

Theme of the Week

Being Coachable

Definition: Paying attention to and following the directions of your coaching staff. Being open minded and not overly sensitive to constructive criticism from your coaches.

To accept criticism with poise is the mark of maturity and grace. Ward

Coachable e-mail

One of the most important factors in a player’s individual success and growth is how “coachable” he is. Being coachable means that a player listens carefully to the coaches, and he follows and applies their instructions. In football you have to be proficient in technique, alignment, scheme, assignment and adjustments in order to play well and add value to your team. You also have to understand the effort, focus and speed required to play to your full potential. Good coaches help you get there.

Being coachable also means you accept criticism as a way to better yourself as a player. Instead of moping around, you listen carefully to what the coach tells you and change your behavior so you can be a better player and a better asset to your fellow players and football team. When coach says you are doing something wrong and then tells you how to do it right, he is just trying to help you become a better player. Don’t take it personal, listen and use it to become a better player.

Have you ever watched American Idol? Have you ever seen those REALLY BAD singers that think they are really good? Do you want to be like that? Should the coaches just pat you on the back and tell you are great when you aren’t doing something correctly? If your coaches acted like that, your team would be getting beat every week 50-0. You would play poorly because you wouldn’t have known you were doing anything wrong. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmWL73k11NA

In 2002 the Omaha, Nebraska Screaming Eagles B team was moving up to A. They had gone 3-8 the previous season and the team had almost everyone back and had a new coach. The star player was a running back named Richard Wynne who had scored all but 2 of the teams 13 touchdowns that season. Richard was very fast and he loved running everything to the outside, even when a play wasn’t called there. In practice the coaches tried to break Richard of this habit by using several methods. After carefully explaining and demonstrating to everyone why a carefully crafted off-tackle play with numbers advantages had to be run off-tackle and not wide, they got started. They stationed a coach outside the end with a shield and let Richard know that anytime he went outside on the off-tackle play, coach was going to stand in his way and give him a tap. They even had one practice where all they did was run that one play, for nearly 2 solid hours. It seemed to work.

In the Eagles first game that year, there was a HUGE crowd on hand as they were playing Harlan, Iowa, the defending league champions. On the first play of the game they called 16 Power, the off-tackle play they had been practicing so much. Richard ran the ball from his own 40 to the other team’s 10 yard line, a 50 yard gain on a nice run. The fans and players were cheering, all excited that the first play went for 50 yards, all looking forward to celebrating their first touchdown of the season on the next play. The only problem was, Richard had run outside the kick-out block, outside like he wanted to, rather to where the play was designed to go. The coaches immediately took Richard out of the game and he sat for the rest of the first half in this hotly contested game.

Richard didn’t get angry or mope around, he sat patiently on the bench until halftime were the coaches took the time to let him know the play was designed and had to be run at the 6 hole and not outside in order for the team and Richard to have consistent success. Richard listened well and assured the coaches he would not make the same mistake again. They put him back in and Richard helped lead his team to a 38-6 win in that game. Richard went on to score 31 touchdowns that season for a team that ended up as State Champions and 12-0. Had Richard not been corrected there is no chance he would have rushed for over 2,000 yards and led his team to an undefeated season. Richard went on to in his Senior year of High School lead the states largest class in rushing with over 1,700 yards.

Coachability Questions

Day 1

What is the theme of the week?

What does being coachable mean?

How many of you watched the video clip?

Who was Richard Wynne?

Awards Day

Coachability is something all good coaches want in their football players, kids that will listen and follow directions without getting angry or down on themselves. You can be the greatest athlete in the world, but if you aren’t coachable it’s difficult for the coach to trust you well enough to put you on the field. The same goes for employers. Coaching is what we do FOR you so you can be the best player you can possibly be.

How did Richard Wynne demonstrate coachability?

What would happen if a coach NEVER corrected your mistakes and just let you do things your own way even if it was wrong?

What would happen to you if you were working for a company that trained you to do something a certain way, you ignored the training, did it your own way and caused the company to lose $100,000?

Foundation

Theme of the Week

Compassion

Definition: Understanding of another person’s distress and a willingness to alleviate it

When we are compassionate we make others problems our own.

Compassion e-mail

Please review this lesson and the YouTube link to a short video and then share it with your son. Please print out the Theme of the Week Attachment and have your son tape it up somewhere prominent to remind him of what we are trying to confirm. Compassion is rarely thought of as something that could or should be taught on the football field. Most of us think of football being a game of hard hits and domination. As it turns out, the football field can be one of the best venues for teaching compassion.

In 2008 a High School football team in Grapevine, Texas played one of the oddest game in football history. Grapevine Faith was playing Gainesville State School, “GSS”. GSS is a state school for boys convicted of serious crimes, it is run like a prison with walls and cells, but the boys also receive an education comparable to other public high school students. GSS was 0-9 going into this game and had scored just 2 touchdowns the entire season.

GSS has no home games and other than the coaches, they had yet to have a single home fan at any of their games. While all GSS players are criminals, each player has to meet a very rigid code of conduct for the opportunity to play on the team. In most of the games GSS played many of the players and fans from the opposing team made fun of and harassed the GSS players even before the first snap of the game. That changed when GSS played Grapevine Faith. Grapevine Faith split up their fans and had half of their fans on the GSS side of the stadium. The Grapevine Faith fans were actually cheering for the GSS players by name. They even made them sandwiches for the GSS players for the ride home and gave them a big send off after the game with a 40-yard spirit line to run through.

The Grapevine Faith coaches subbed early and often and won by just 33-14 in a game they could have easily won by 50 points. The GSS kids were floored; they couldn’t believe people they didn’t even know were cheering for them by name and for their team. Even though GSS lost, they acted like they won, after the game giving their coach a Gatorade bath. No one knows when these kids were last showed compassion or what it might lead to in their lives, but one would think it would have a long lasting and deep impact. The idea was planted during that game that if you make good choices, there are people out there that are willing to give you a second chance. That there are people around willing to forgive you and help you. What an encouragement! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuxejhBOCOo&feature=related

In 2001 the Screaming Eagle football team was playing the Gladiators in Omaha Nebraska in the last game of the season. Our team 11-12 “A” team was 10-0 and the Gladiators were 0-10. The Gladiators in fact had yet to score a single touchdown that season and had lost the previous 2 weeks 52-0 and 50-0. The Eagle team was heavily favored in this game, but we had another agenda. We suited up some of our more mature 10 year olds for this game and after we got our 3 touchdown lead, we subbed in all the younger kids. In a game we could have named the score; it was just 28-0 in the fourth quarter. With just 3 minutes to go in that dreadful season for the Gladiators, they somehow broke loose on an 80 yard touchdown run down their own sidelines. The Gladiator coach and several Gladiator parents were so excited about the prospect of scoring their very first touchdown of the season; they were running right along side of the running back right into the end zone. We had allowed them to score on purpose on a “special play” we had practiced all week, they had no idea. We gave the Gladiators a good memory and taught our kids about compassion.

Compassion Questions

Day 1

What is the theme of the week?

What does being compassionate mean?

How many of you watched the video clip?

What is the Grapevine State School?

Awards Day

Compassion is something we don’t often talk about on the football field. While we play to win, are we gaining anything when we beat a team 66-0 instead of 36-6? We are always going to be there for our players first, but know we care about the opposition players as well.

How did Grapevine Faith show compassion to the Grapevine State School?

Is your teammate going to play better if you berate him for a mistake that doesn’t have anything to do with his effort?

How do you feel when opponent players taunt you and tell you that you stink?

How can you show compassion on the football field?

Foundations

Theme of the Week Attitude

Definition: Disposition, feelings, tendency or orientation to an act or thing.

The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life.

Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness, or skill. It will make or break a company ... a church ... a home.

The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past. We cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable.

The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude ... I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me, and 90% how I react to it. And so it is with you ... we are in charge of our Attitudes.

Charles Swindoll

Attitude e-mail

Attitude like the Charles Swindoll quote says is a choice. We can choose to have a great attitude or choose to have a poor attitude; it is all up to us.

Many people let their circumstances determine their attitudes. If something bad happens to them or someone says something negative towards them their attitude goes into the tank. The world can throw you a curve ball from time to time and things won’t always go your way. When those things happen, and they will, your attitude is going to determine your end result.

Let’s say we are down in a game 14-0 because we fumbled the opening kickoff and our Corner blew his coverage on an out and up pass pattern twice. Are we going to be able to come back if we start feeling sorry for ourselves and are dwelling on the three mistakes that put us in the hole? Will having a bad attitude help you or your teammates to play better?

If you are having a bad practice and coach has had to correct you several times about your pad level and your first step, does it do you any good to get down on yourself or angry at the coach ? A positive attitude will always precede success and a negative attitude almost always is a precursor to failure.

Take a look at this video clip about a very special person and their attitude. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxh4K73v0Ds

Attitude Questions

Day 1

What is the theme of the week?

What does attitude mean?

How many of you watched the video clip?

Who is Avi ?

Who is Lawrence Phillips?

Awards Day

Attitude determines everything in your life, it is more important than talent or circumstances.

What is different about Avi than most people?

Did Avi let the loss of his legs keep him down?

Lawrence Phillips was the leading contender for the Heisman Trophy in 1995 and was considered one of the best Nebraska running backs of all time. He was a first round draft pick in the NFL Draft. His mother abandoned him as a child and he grew up in an orphanage, so like Avi, he had some rough beaks. Lawrence had a lot of people that tried to help him but his negative attitude ended up costing him his position on several NFL teams and he ended up committing several crimes that put him into prison. What is the difference between Avi and Lawrence?

What can you do as a football player to demonstrate a positive attitude and help your team?

Foundations

Theme of the Week Depth

Depth- Looking at people based on the content of their character rather than how their outside appearance.

Depth e-mail

In football we often rush to judge a team based on how they look. We always seem to obsess on how big and how fast the opposing team is. Yet how many times have you played teams that were much bigger than your team or looked like they had great athletes, yet your team ended up squashing the other guys? How many times have you seen teams with small and not so athletic looking players end up being much better than you originally thought?

What did you miss out on? In football you can’t judge the heart, desire, and ambition of a player or team by just seeing how big or fast they are. You can’t tell how much time and effort the player or team has put into their season just by watching them walk by you in pre-game. Looks often deceive in youth football.

Many of us make the exact same mistake in life. Many times we miss out on positive experiences and relationships because we rush to judge or classify people based on what they look like or worse yet, because we fear if we associate with unpopular people, others will think badly about us. We miss out on seeing the talent and value others can bring into our lives because of the way someone looks or the way they dress.

Have you ever thought badly about someone just because they looked odd, weak or maybe overweight? Have you ever avoided talking to someone because of the way they looked or the clothes they wore? Have you avoided relating to someone because you were afraid other people might think badly about you if you did?

Here are a couple of videos that might make you think about how short sighted doing this might be. These are the videos of two people that should have been superstars, but no one would give them a chance because of how they looked on the outside. Susan Boyle was picked on so much in school for her frumpy looks and wide eyebrows; she would hardly go out in public. Notice in the video there are people laughing at her as she goes on stage, they were all judging her by her frumpy looks and old dress. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxPZh4AnWyk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Phg35avpgYM

Both of these incredible talents went on to become big stars, but were denied a chance earlier in life because of the superficial nature of many of us. Thank goodness both were finally “discovered” in middle age. How many of us miss out on hidden gems like these people in our own lives due to our superficial nature? If you judge a book by its cover in life, you will miss out on so much.

Depth Questions

Day 1

What is the theme of the week?

What does depth mean?

How many of you watched the video clip?

Who is Susan Boyle?

Awards Day

Many of us judge people or teams by what they look like on the outside. When you do that you often get it wrong and miss out on great experiences. As football coaches we do our best to look beyond outward appearances to evaluate our players and opponents.

What does the phrase “Don’t judge a book by its cover” mean?

What did you think when you first saw Susan Boyle walk on stage, did you think she would sing well?

Have you ever been left out of a group, if so how did that make you feel inside?

Are there kids at school or on your team that you avoid because of the way they look, talk or the way they dress?

Do you think if you got to know some of those kids could be great friends or have some hind of hidden talent if you gave them a chance?

Foundations

Theme of the Week

Finish

Finish- To complete a task to the desired result or end goal.

Finishing e-mail

Definition: To arrive at or attain the end goal.

How well do you finish? Many people I know are great at starting things, but I know just a handful of people that are great finishers. How many people do you know that dream great dreams (which is great) and start many projects only to be sidetracked and rarely finish?

It’s important to have great dreams and to get started on your goals, but finishing what you start defines a major part of your success. Too many of us settle for a good start and loose track of the end goal, often letting a very attainable goal slip through our fingers.

How does this apply to you on the football field? If you are on offensive lineman your stance is great, you come out low knee to chest, your first two steps are perfect fast and at the correct angle, your head placement is correct, you pad level is where it is supposed to be and so are your shoulders and hands. Your feet are wide you take short choppy steps, but then you let up at the end of the block and let the defender slide off and he makes a touchdown saving tackle 15 yards downfield. You did 9 of the 10 things you needed to do correctly, but by letting off at the end it cost your team a touchdown.

How many times do we let up when we are right at the edge of claiming our goal? How many times have you been on the edge of finishing your block or tackle and just stopped your effort? How many times has your team had a team on the run and let them off the hook?

Look at this clip. You will see an absolutely amazing comeback, but what is the end result? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHkABO0VwCg

Finish, so much effort goes into getting started, finish. A task isn’t finished until you have completed your task to the very end result.

Finishing Questions

Day 1

What is the theme of the week?

What does finishing mean?

How many of you watched the video clip?

Awards Day

Many people start tasks but very few finish them. The differences between those that achieve success and those that achieve mediocrity is how they finish.

What was special about the Plano East and John Tyler game?

Football has been called a game of inches, why is that?

Why is it important to play to the whistle in football?

Foundations

Theme of the Week

Humility

Humility- Modest opinion or estimate of one’s own importance.

To be humble to superiors is duty, to equals courtesy, to inferiors nobleness. Benjamin Franklin

Humility e-mail

Walter Payton is the NFL’s all-time leading rusher with 16,726 yards, 133 Touchdowns and a Super Bowl ring. But for those that know him well, he was well known for his ferocious blocking and his willingness to always give credit to his linemen and his fullback, the seldom mentioned Matt Suey.

Rarely did you see Payton spike the ball, point to himself or refer to himself in the third person. After scoring even the most incredible runs, Payton would just calmly hand the ball to the referee. After these scores if you watched him closely, you would always see Payton thanking his lineman and lead blocker for doing their job to clear the path for him. During his press interviews it was all about team and his lineman, rarely would you hear an “I” or “me”.

He became one of the most beloved players, in the NFL. Friend or foe, Walter Payton was admired and respected by everyone because of his humility.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAeo4ZqHC2c&feature=related

Humility Questions

Day 1

What is the theme of the week?

What does humility mean?

How many of you watched the video clip?

Who was Walter Payton?

Awards Day

Walter Payton is the all time leading rusher in NFL history. He was a Super Bowl MVP and is in the NFL Hall of Fame. He was known as much for his humility as he was for all of his touchdowns and records. Football is an 11 man game and everyone shares in the success or failure of the team.

What did Walter Payton usually do after scoring a touchdown?

How does it make you feel when one of your teammates takes credit for your team’s success?

Foundations

Theme of the Week

100% Effort

Effort- An honest attempt to do something to your full potential

Winning is not everything, but the effort to win is. Zig Ziglar

100% Effort e-mail

In football and life there are very few things you can control, fortunately the most important one you have complete control over. This “thing” is effort and effort can oftentimes overcome talent over time. When college football coaches are looking at high school players to put on scholarship, one of the first things they look at is how often that player “takes plays off.” Many people wonder why some great high school players with fantastic statistics and seemingly good size and speed don’t get a single college offer; the answer is often times because of lack of effort.

A youth football game is typically about 80 plays long, with the average play taking up less than 6 seconds. That means the actual amount of time played in a full game is 480 seconds or 8 minutes if a player played every snap of the entire game. Giving 100% effort for 8 minutes is not asking too much of any player, all it takes is a commitment.

When you watch youth football game film you see many players effort for just 4 of those 6 seconds. Those two wasted seconds are often times the difference between finishing off a block or making a second block or maybe assisting on a tackle that looks like is going to be made. Those extra blocks spring the backs for first down gains or touchdowns; those tackle assists save broken tackle touchdowns from being made. Those 2 seconds over the course of an 80 play game add up to just 2 minutes and 40 seconds. Less than 3 minutes and that is IF the player is playing for every snap of the entire game. Yet most youth football players are willing to trade those 2 minutes and 40 seconds in for the chance to catch a breather. Many youth football players expect their teammates to make plays instead of pulling their own weight, by taking off those last 2 seconds.

The amount of effort required to play all out to the whistle on every play is a tiny fraction of the entire amount of time played in a game, yet those that play to the whistle are few and far between. Almost all youth football coaches would take a team of players that effort to the whistle on every down over a team full of all-stars any day of the week.

Look at the effort on this play:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VKUSgHPm4E

What is your choice when it comes to effort? Are you going to play 4 seconds on every play or 6 seconds?

100% Effort Questions

Day 1

What is the theme of the week?

What does 100% effort mean?

How many of you watched the video clip?

Awards Day

How long does a youth football game really last?

How many seconds does a usual play take?

How many seconds does the usual youth football player effort during a play?

What is the difference between teams that consistently play well and those that don’t in youth football?

What happens to the player across from you when you effort for the full 6 seconds instead of 4?

Who controls effort?

Foundation

Theme of the Week

Grace

Definition: Forgiveness

Grace is the final form of love.

Grace e-mail

In football and in life we all are going to be in a position where we are wronged. A teammate lets us down, the referee makes a bad call or maybe the coach has made a poor decision. It’s going to happen, that is an absolute 100% guarantee.

Jim Marshall played from 1961 to 1979 with the Minnesota Vikings. He played in 282 consecutive games, a record. He recovered 30 fumbles, an NFL record. The Vikings credit Marshall with 127 career quarterback sacks.

Marshall was involved in what is considered by many to be one of the most embarrassing moments in professional sports history on October 25, 1964 in a game against the Forty- Niners. Marshall recovered a fumble, but ran 66 yards with it the wrong way, into his own end zone. Thinking that he had scored a touchdown for the Vikings, Marshall then threw the ball away in celebration. The ball landed out of bounds, resulting in a safety for the 49ers.

In a later interview Marshall said that his coach didn’t chastise him for running the wrong way. In fact his coach said that if Jim hadn’t been playing so hard he wouldn’t have even been in position to pick up the fumble. Coach Norm Van Brocklin encouraged Jim to shake it off and continue to play hard. None of Jim’s Viking teammates got angry or made fun of Jim’s mistake.

Here is the play: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8QjcW9NcgQ

Late in the fourth quarter Marshall got his chance, coming hard off the edge, Jim stripped the Quarterback of the ball and teammate Carl Eller scooped up the ball and returned it for the winning touchdown in the 27-22 win.

When a teammate makes an honest mistake, they need encouragement, not an angry stare or biting words from you.

Grace Questions

Day 1

What is the theme of the week?

What does grace mean?

How many of you watched the video clip?

Awards Day

Who is Jim Marshall?

What mistake did Jim do that made him so famous?

How did Jim’s coaches and teammates respond to his mistake?

When you see football teams that argue amongst each other, are those teams typically very good?

Have you ever made a mistake in a game?

How should you respond to your teammates when they make mistakes?

Foundations

Theme of the Week

Emotional Control

Definition: The ability to keep ones feelings and emotions within a reasonable level of civility.

Control your Emotions or they will control you.

Emotional Control e-mail

Do you have emotional control? Can you maintain your composure and emotions through big highs and big lows? In football and in life all of us are going to experience highs and lows. In a football game huge highs and lows can happen within seconds of one another. The same is true in life.

In football when you lose control of your emotions because another player has antagonized you or you made a mistake, you usually play poorly. Let’s say you are a Defensive End and your job is to make sure no one runs outside of you. On the previous play the Quarterback gave you a forearm to the chin and told you your team “stinks.” So on the next play instead of containing to the outside, you make a beeline to the quarterback so you can make a sack, but the QB pitched the ball to the outside and the running back went right around your end for a touchdown.

Worse yet, lets say on the play after the QB gave you a cheap shot, you did the same thing back to him and got a 15 yard unnecessary roughness call. This penalty gives the other team a first down that leads to a touchdown and cost your team the game.

Coaches decide to play players based on who they can trust. Can the coach trust that you will line up correctly? Can the coach depend you will try hard on every snap? Can the coach depend on you to use the correct base technique or read? Can the coach count on you keeping your emotions in check? Players that can’t keep their cool are a liability for any team no matter how talented they are. Players that can’t keep their cools usually end up sitting on the bench or worse yet, getting kicked off the team.

See what happened when a player lost his cool and decided to take a cheap shot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePtTZZkaVqA&feature=PlayList&p=B6700E780440 99A2&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=35

What about this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiTF5FTdIvc

We all have to learn to control our emotions, whether we are at school, home, work or the football field there are going to be situations that are unfair and will make you angry.

Emotional Control Questions

Day 1

What is the theme of the week?

What does emotional control mean?

How many of you watched the video clip?

Awards Day

What are some of the ways you can lose emotional control in a game?

Do you help your team when you lose emotional control during a game?

How do you “get back” at opposing players who you think are playing dirty?

What happened in the video?

Could that happen in one of our games?

How do we stop things like this from happening?

Foundation

Theme of the Week

Teamwork

Definition: The process of working together within a group to achieve a goal.

“Individual commitment to a group effort -- that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.” Vince Lombardi

Teamwork e-mail

The greatest teams of all time are that, teams of individuals that put aside their selfish needs to come together for a common cause. There may be no greater story of teamwork than the United States Olympic Hockey team of 1980. This team was made up of college players from all over the United States, but was so lacking in stars that head coach Herb Brooks was widely criticized by hockey experts for picking a team that lacked any big stars. Brooks purposely picked players that worked hard and were team players rather than record setting scorers or players that had accumulated lots of big statistical numbers.

Many of the experts predicted the US team would finish last in the Olympic tournament. Russia entered the Olympic tournament as heavy favorites, having won every ice hockey gold medal but one since 1956. The Russian team was made up of professionals that played year round with each other, some having played together for more than 10 years. They trained in world class training facilities, had the best food and were able to travel the world to play. The US team were young amateurs who were brought together just for the Olympics and had played together for just a few short months.

In exhibition games that year, the Russian teams had crushed most of the US professional NHL teams and even beat the NHL All-Stars 6-0. On February 9th less than a month before the Olympics, the Russians played the US Olympic team at Madison Square Garden. The Russians dominated from the opening puck drop in route to a blow out 10-3 win. So no one gave the American amateurs any chance of beating the Russians or even challenging for an Olympic Medal.

In the first round the American team tied a weak Sweden team by scoring a lucky goal with just 27 seconds left to play. Slowly but surely the Americans gained more confidence as they surprised everyone by winning their next 4 games. It set up an unlikely showdown against the invincible Russian team. Even the most loyal US fans didn’t think the American amateurs had any chance to win the big game. The Russians had won their games by the scores of; 16-0, 17-4, 8-1, 4-2 and 6-4. The day before the match, writer Dave Anderson wrote in the New York Times "Unless the ice melts, the Russians are expected to easily win the Olympic gold medal for the sixth time in the last seven tournaments.” The US team went on to win against the Russians in a game most sports historians claim to be the greatest upset in the history of ALL sports. The US team trailed until just 8 minutes left in the game. This team of amateurs playing together as a team upset possibly one of the most talented hockey teams of all time and went on to win the gold medal. Only 7 of the US players went on to play in the NHL and none of them ended up having stellar professional hockey careers. The last minute of the game: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYscemhnf88

Teamwork Questions

Day 1

What is the theme of the week?

What does teamwork mean?

How many of you watched the video clip?

Awards Day

Was the US Hockey team made up of the best players in the country?

Who did Herb Brooks choose for his team and why?

What is an example of great teamwork for our team?

Foundation

Theme of the Week

Consistency

Definition: The ability to replicate a process or activity with the same level of quality over and over again.

“A consistent man believes in destiny, a silly man in chance.”

Benjamin Disraeli

Consistency e-mail

People in all walks of life look for consistency in their lives. Employers look for employees that consistently show up for work. People look for friends that they can consistently count on. Spouses are looking for partners that are faithful, consistent and dependable. Football coaches look for players who they can trust to consistently effort well, to consistently align properly and to consistently execute their jobs.

Consistency is a very important component of long term success. In order to succeed in sports and life you don’t always have to be the best, many do so by being consistent. Baseballs Cal Ripken is someone that made it to the Baseball Hall of Fame, through his consistency.

On September 6, 1995, Ripken became baseball's "Iron Man" by playing in 2,130 consecutive games. He had not missed a game since May 30, 1982, playing through fatigue, injury and illness. On September 20, 1998, Ripken finally took a day off work, leaving his streak of most consecutive games played at an astounding 2,632. This is considered to be a record that will never be broken according to most sports historians. He also set a shortstop record by playing ninety-five games without committing an error.

While Ripken never led the major leagues in hits, batting average or home runs, his consistency allowed him to be named to the All-Star team 19 times and was named to baseballs Hall of Fame. Ripken’s lifetime batting average was .276

A video tribute to Cal Ripken:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8Rnc1C_1QE

Consistency Questions

Day 1

What is the theme of the week?

What does consistency mean?

How many of you watched the video clip?

Awards Day

Who is Cal Ripken?

What is he famous for?

How do we exhibit consistency on the football field?

What does your youth football coach value more? Making a big play every once in awhile or consistently doing your job with good effort, good alignment and solid base reads and techniques.

Theme of the Week

Honesty

Definition: The quality or condition of being truthful or sincere.

No legacy is as rich as honesty. Shakespeare

Honesty e-mail

Imagine you're a golfing for a state championship and the chance to win a golf scholarship to a major university. You roll to a seven-stroke victory, sign your score card and receive congratulations from teammates, friends and family. But later in the day, you look at your scorecard a little closer and notice the player who wrote down your scores had made a mistake. The chances of you getting caught would be slim to none.

This isn’t someone’s nightmare moral dilemma; this happened to Adam Van Houten in 2005 at the Ohio High School State Championships. Adam had worked tirelessly for years to fulfill his dream of winning the state title and a golf scholarship. Adam didn’t take the easy way out when he discovered his mistake. He alerted officials of the mistake even though he knew that by doing so he would disqualify himself. You see in golf, when you sign your scorecard you are saying the score is accurate, even though someone other than yourself is marking down the score. Adam was disqualified from the tournament; he didn’t even register a top 10 finish even though with the stroke added back to his scorecard he had won the tournament by a whopping 6 strokes.

What Adam did earn was a spot on Sports Illustrated sportsmanship of the decade list and the Ohio State High School Athletic Association gave him a commemorative medal. Adams honesty got him a lot of national exposure as well and his story was picked up by the news wires. Adam’s honesty and integrity also got the attention of George Mason University, where is earned him a golf scholarship.

Honesty Questions

Day 1

What is the theme of the week?

What does honesty mean?

Who is Adam Van Houten?

Awards Day

What was so special about Adam Van Houten?

How can a coach trust you if you’ve lied to him?

Would you trust a coach that has lied to you?

Would you trust a teammate that lied to you?

Once you lie to a coach or teammate, they may still care about you, but it will be very difficult if not impossible for them to trust you again.

Foundation

Theme of the Week

Sportsmanship

Definition: The conduct considered proper participants in sports, including fair play, courtesy, a striving spirit and grace in losing.

"When you win, say nothing, when you lose, say less."-

Paul Brown

"You can stand tall without standing on someone. You can be a victor without having victims."- Harriet Woods

Sportsmanship

In 2008 Western Oregon University and Central Washington were playing a college softball game to determine the league championship. With two runners on base and a strike against her, Sara Tucholsky of Western Oregon did something she had never done in a game in College or High School or even practice, she hit a homerun. But when she was rounding first base she landed funny on her leg and tore her ACL.

Unable to walk, she clung to first base. If she subbed out for another player, the homerun wouldn’t count, if she had a teammate help her, she would be called out. The Central Washington pitcher and third baseman got together with their teammates and decided they were going to carry Sara around the bases so she would get the homerun she deserved. They were under no obligation to do this and had they not, the homerun would not have counted. The Central Washington players were just doing what they thought was right in spite of it hurting the chances of them winning the game, they ended up losing 4-2 and ended their season.

It’s easy being a good sport when your team is winning by a large margin, but this team showed their true selves by doing the right thing and helping Sara get her homerun. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaXVk5GBx-s&feature=related

Sportsmanship Questions

Day 1

What is the theme of the week?

What does sportsmanship mean?

Who is Sara Tucholsky?

Awards Day

What happened in the softball game?

Did Central Washington have to help Sara around the bases?

What are some bad sportsmanship examples on the football field?

What are examples of good sportsmanship in youth football?

How can we be better sports this week on the football field?

Foundations

Theme of the Week

Thankfulness

Definition: Aware and appreciative of a benefit. Grateful attitude for ones situation.

Quotes: A thankful heart is not only the greatest virtue, it is the parent of all other virtues.

Tillius

Thankfulness

Many of us take our lives for granted, we assume our moms and dads are going to always be around. We take for granted our ability to walk and run and play football. We never think twice about having a field to play on or a league to play in. We assume we are always going to have a warm bed to sleep in and to be able to eat three meals a day or more if we like.

So many of us feel entitled to great service in a restaurant or to be waited on hand and foot by our parents, coaches and team moms. Do you realize there are hundreds of thousands of boys that can’t play football because they don’t have enough money to play? Did you know there are hundreds of places all over the USA where they can’t field teams because they don’t have enough coaches willing to donate their free time? Did you know there are hundreds of thousands of boys that can’t play football because these boys aren’t healthy enough to play? Did you know there are thousands of boys that would give up everything they had for the privilege to play, just for the chance to sit on the bench?

Yet so many youth football players feel they are doing their team and coach a favor by being on the team or feel bitter because they aren’t playing the position they want to. When we have the privilege to be able to play football, we should be thankful. Say thanks to your coaches, league administrators, team moms and all the volunteers. Without them you wouldn’t be able to play. Remember all those people could be at home doing something for themselves rather than helping you play football. They don’t do it for the thanks they get, but how do you feel when you do something selfless for someone else and they don’t say thank you? Be thankful that you can play, that you have a way to get back and forth to practice and way to make it to games.

Watch how Nick Vujicic feels about being thankful:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciYk-UwqFKA

Do you think Nick would have liked for the chance to play football?

Thankfulness Questions

Day 1

What is the theme of the week?

What does thankfulness mean?

Who is Nick Vujicic?

Awards Day

Does everyone that wants to play get to play youth football in the USA?

What do we take for granted in football?

What do we take for granted at home?

How do you feel when people don’t appreciate you or say thanks when you do something nice for them?

What are you going to do be more thankful over the next week?

Chapter 8

Taking it Forward

So now what? Are you saying that’s nice, maybe if we have some time we can spare, maybe we will get around to doing something in this area?

The facts are all the best coaches with all the championship trophies are telling you this is important if you want to win games. Do you think you can develop great team chemistry team character and confidence without being proactive and methodical in developing it?

So why not kill two birds with one stone? Help your team win games, get the parents and kids to buy in and be on your side and affect the kids for eternity, it’s a win, win, win.

Just follow the template of developing trust, developing dependence on one another, encourage, help players self motivate, proactively teach and encourage positive character traits

Tom Osborne stated in his book “Faith in the Game” that honesty is key in building trust and confidence in one another. He felt that good team chemistry was dependent on the trust and confidence that is developed from honesty. It goes without saying for players and coaches to trust one another; we have to be honest with one another. The player has to be able to trust in the coach’s motives, judgment and coaching, the coach has to trust in the player’s effort and execution. When trust breaks down, team problems are inevitable.

Don’t be one of those guys that 20 years from now is kicking himself in the pants because you failed to implement a character development program. You will never know what impact you may have had on your team or a young mans life if you just decide to do nothing in this area again this coming season.

How many of your youth football players will be at your funeral talking about what an impact you had on your life? Will they be talking about how courageous you were for caring enough about their future to invest your precious time in their lives beyond football, or will you be another forgotten face?

If you read about the “perfect storm” season story from the first page of the manuel and are still wondering how big of a disaster we had it wasn’t near as bad as you may have imagined. We pulled together a coaching staff from our other teams, all of us pulling double duty. We lost our first two games, and then went on a real tear to take second place in the league finishing an “A” level schedule with a “B” roster of just 17 very small

Copyright 2011 Cisar Management, all rights reserved 113 and unathletic 7-8th grade kids. We never won in blowouts and several games were decided on last second plays, one of my most memorable seasons as a coach.

We certainly hope and pray you move full steam ahead by proactively implementing a character development program, you will be glad you did when it is all said and done.

Player Contract A very valuable tool in helping communicate to your players your standards is a player contract. We use the following contract with our players to make sure they understand our rules and expectations; I highly recommend you develop one of your own to hold your players accountable to the standards you develop.

I do hereby agree to abide by the Screaming Eagle Players Conduct Code as well as to the discretionary authority given all authorized coaches in the program. Failure to follow the code or coaches instruction will be deemed grounds for disciplinary actions and or dismissal from the team. 1) I will respect all coaches at all times, calling them Coach or Mr. Last name.

2) I will work hard in school. I will turn in weekly school accountability reports on Thursdays. This Screaming Eagles form will be filled out by your teacher and parent.

3) I will respect and obey my parents/guardian.

4) I will respect referees and opponent players and coaches at all times.

5) I will have sportsmanship as my number one priority in all games and practices

6) If I have an unsportsmanlike event, it will result in my immediate removal from game and one game suspension. If I have an unsportsmanlike event that is a result of poor interaction with a referee, it will result in my season long suspension.

7) I will not use profanity or gang talk. Nor wear gang clothing, bandanas, gang clothing styles, colors, hats turned backward/sideways etc.

8) I will encourage my teammates in a positive way, regardless of circumstances.

9) I will attend all scheduled practices and games. If unable to do so, I will contact my coach beforehand. If I have an unexcused absence, it will result in loss of playing time.

10) If I have two unexcused absences, it will result in expulsion from the team. If I have multiple excused absences, it will result in loss of playing time.

11) I will respect, protect and maintain my equipment. I will never throw my helmet.

12) I will return all equipment at years end or immediately upon dismissal from team. Failure to do so will result in $5 per day fee plus the cost of equipment ($250) as well as legal and collection costs assessed to my guardian and me.

13) I will conduct myself in a way that presents a positive image of the Screaming Eagles and myself on and off the field.

Agreed Players Signature…………………………………………………..Date………

About the Author

“Developing Character and a Winning Attitude in Youth Foootball” was written by Dave Cisar. Dave is the founder and President of the Screaming Eagles Organization. It was started in 1998 as a free program for at-risk youth in inner-city Omaha, Nebraska. In 2004 Dave started up the Lincoln, Nebraska area program and continues to coach there today. The Omaha program became independent in 2007. The programs have served over 3,000 children ages 6-14 with programs in academic accountability, football, baseball, weight training and basketball.

He has coached 18 years at all levels of youth football. His teams have played in 5 different Leagues in 2 different cities. Since moving to this system his teams have gone 121-17 and won multiple division, league and State Titles. He gives youth coaching clinics all over the country including the Nike Coach of the Year Clinics and the Frank Glazier Mega Clinics. His program has been endorsed by several of the top coaches in the country including Nebraska’s Tom Osborne.

Dave is a former business owner in his forties and is a proud family man. He played college football at the University Nebraska at Omaha before transferring and graduating from Texas A&M University where he did not play sports. He gave his life to Christ in 1996.

Additional Materials: To order additional materials go to [email protected] or www.winningyouthfootball.com

Installing the Single Wing Offense For Youth Football: $49.95 2 DVDs nearly 2 hours -White board instruction by Dave along with play clips inserted from his last 8 teams. You get practice tape clips, so you can see the plays and techniques in action as they are being discussed on the white board. Includes base blocking rules, detailed coaching points, implementation tricks and instructions to install the entire offense. Professionally developed by Reliant Video. Winning Youth Football, a Step by Step Plan: $29.95 274 pages. This is the paperback book. We give you everything you need to succeed in coaching a youth football team. This isn’t written in “coach talk” and is easy to understand. We take you from the preseason coaches meetings through the last game of the season. This includes our practice plans and practice methodology as well as our drills, techniques and implementation break down steps. It includes our schemes and plays on offense, special teams and defense as well as the reads and adjustments. It is a comprehensive guide to coaching effectively using the Single Wing Offense that anyone can use. It also contains some much needed team and program management material as well.

Developing a Smothering Defense in Youth Football, Step by Step on DVD- $39.95 Dave’s base defense as well as attacking “Viper” defenses is featured along with the defensive drills his teams use to smother the willpower of opposing defenses. Includes: position descriptions and responsibilities, techniques, drills, alignments, stunts and blitzes. Over half of this DVD are game and practice footage clips. 80 minute run time. Professionally developed by Reliant Video.

Dominant Offensive Line Play in Youth Football- Step by Step on DVD - $39.95 See how Dave builds his offensive lines step by step into cohesive aggressive units that gobble up chunks of yardage. You get the base blocking rules, stances, base block, down blocks, double teams, crab blocking, open field blocking, pulling and detailed wedge implementation. You get blocking rule implementation, adjustments, quickness development, advanced techniques, fun drills and more. Lot's of great practice and game footage included. 80 minute run time. Our best quality yet, Reliant Video product.

2006 Games DVD: $29.95 on DVD See Dave’s 2006 age 8-10 kids go 11-1 and win the EVW South Division Title. See every defensive snap and special teams play too. The offense runs the power series, wedge series, mesh series, full spinner series and Tailback half-spin or “mouse” series. This team scored 64 touchdowns and “mercy ruled” 10 of its 12 opponents. This was professionally shot and edited with fades on every play.

2007 Games DVD: $29.95 on DVD See Dave’s age 10-11 team go 9-1. See the Jet Series in these DVD’s including all 6 plays in the series. This is an excellent resource with subtitles and with the games narrated by Dave. Produced by Reliant Video.

2008 Games DVD: $29.95 on DVD See full games of all three of the teams Dave Coached in 2008. You get 3 full games of his age 7-9 team, 3 full games of his age 10-11 team and 1 full game of his age 12-13 team. Includes base, spinner, mouse, jet and burst series plays. All plays are subtitled, produced by Reliant Video.

Game Day Management Becoming a Good Game Day Coach $39.95 on DVD Learn how to effectively manage your game day, something that takes most coaches years develop. Learn how to effectively manage the pre-game, scouting, setting goals, spotting, making adjustments, managing playing time, play call sequencing, no-huddle methodology, clock management, coaching an effective halftime as well as a good post game wrap up. Included is Dave’s “Cheat Sheet” for effective play calling based solely on his simple pre-count method. He reviews his easy to install game day scouting method to determining plays to be called and players to be coached up. Learn how to get the most out of your team and to “steal” games from more skilled opponents, through game day coaching. Includes both white board and game day clips of the 2006 season. Produced by Reliant Video.

The Perfect Practice, The Perfect Practice $39.95 on DVD Cut hours off your weekly practice grind using Dave’s practice methodology, while at the same time improving the skill levels of your players and team. See how he makes practices both fun and instructional so the kids beg to come to practice, not dread it. See his secrets to developing players and teams from scratch using progression teaching methods and his ease into contact approach. His player selection process and fit and freeze methods have helped his teams and many others make tremendous progress. These methods, games and drills make any youth coach look like a genius. Includes both white board instruction and lots of practice footage. Reliant Video product. Coaching Clinics Go to the web site http://winningyouthfootball.com for more information about the Coaching Clinics Dave will be speaking at this year. He usually does about 20 public clinics at various locations across the US as well as a handful of private clinics. Send checks to Dave Cisar, PO Box 274, Firth, NE 68358 or go to www.winningyouthfootball.com to order by Visa/MasterCard or Call 402-730-8151 to order by phone.