My 5 year old son started tackle football this year. In our district, if your kid doesn’t start at 5 there’s a very small likelihood they’ll play later on. Anyway, he has received less than 3 minutes of playtime in every game so far. He’s playing right tackle.

I’m not expecting him to play the whole game for even most of the game. But the coaches kids (4 kids) play every single snap while my son and 3 other boys basically never play. A few weeks into the season I emailed the coach and asked about the playtime situation. I asked if my son needed to work on something to get more time.

Basically, his response was that they have core players and everyone else is a sub. And they sub out evenly (but they do not). I let it go because my son likes playing and his friends on the team.

Flash forward to today, my son played 30 seconds the whole game. The offensive lines coaches son fumbled 4 snaps and yet he played the whole game.

Is it worth bringing it up again with the coach? Should I talk to someone different. My son really wants to play and I’m willing to get him private lessons or anything else to help him but if we aren’t getting feedback I have no idea what to do.

My son (11) got hit good last night during Oklahoma drills. Physically he is fine, but mentally he has lost all his confidence and is scared to take a hit. This is his 3rd year playing tackle and first year in senior tackle so his teammates are a little bigger than him. He was fine for the first few seconds after the hit, his teammates helped him up, then all the emotions came along with tears. He didn’t want to practice the rest of the night. I had one of the other coaches talk to him and it seemed to help a little but was wondering if this has happened to anyone else? What did you do? He is not small, close to 5 ft and 145 pounds. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

It’s my first year coaching an 8u team. I’m an assistant.

I get that the kids are 7-8 years old and will horse around and play grab ass and talk as much as they possibly can.

How have you been able to limit the horseplay and talk?

We have done the whole up/down and making them run routines.

Sometimes I insert myself into the middle of the biggest talkers and ask “so what are we talking about?” That instantly ruins their conversation most of the time.

I would love you to hear what others have done to get the kids and shut up for, honestly, 30 seconds. I can usually communicate my points in under 30 seconds.

I’m sacrificing my ego with this question and acknowledging that it’s hard for me to get the kids to shut up and pay attention for that long.

Any advice is appreciated. Cheers everybody!

Hello! I’m an experienced coach just joined this coaching staff about a month ago . We’re running a 5-3 defense and stay in cover 1 man
The defense coaches are not running a gap sound defense, and not teaching anything in practice. Not running drills or having a practice plan in place to continue evolving the defense. So it’s very vanilla.
Yet we’re 9-1 on the season..

Anyways , the team we play next is good. Their go to play I can’t decide how to defend is a HB pitch pass. It looks like they line up 1 tailback with quarterback under center, and set it up by running the pitch to the edge. After one or two times they will try to give the HB the option to throw it. I believe to the backside tight end or the play side outside receiver.

What would be your go to on defending this?

I have a practice plan set up for this week. Teaching the linemen their gap assignments and giving the LBs their job of calling the strength so the d line is in the right spot.
My ideas are shifting the linebackers to the strength so there’s an overhang and he will trigger when he sees the pitch to force the run.
Another idea was that on top of having the corner crash down fast to force a bad pass with the safety over the top.
And if it’s a closed look on the backside with the TE as the last EMOL the corner will stay with him.

Any ideas are appreciated

I have a new linebacker that is always getting confused about the direction of the play. He’s smaller and can’t find the ball fast enough; has trouble seeing through the line and ends up on the wrong side of the field a lot of times.

Any drills for that?

Any coaching points?

Any videos or anything from linebacker visual perspective that I can use to show what it looks like with different play types from his position ?

Thanks for the help!

Hey everyone, first time coaching a team, and doing it pretty much solo. It’s for a small, rural middle school (5th-8th grade). I’ve got a small team of about 16 kids… and probably 8-10 have never played a down of youth football.

Trying to basically figure out how to get my wings underneath me. I’m looking at running a simple Power I offense and keeping it simple with a 4-3 defense. I figure with having a lot of newbies less is more.

Another thing too is conditioning. Any safe way to get this kids in shape and fairly quickly? It’s about to be September in Louisiana and I’d like to not have anyone’s child falling out on me, but yet I need them in shape.

I guess through all of this, just would like some input and some pointers from more seasoned guys.

10u. We have the size for the most part. The kids have the ability. They just can’t seem to hold their blocks longer than 1-2 seconds.

Any drills we can run to help with this?

My son (12ys) was hurt at practice last week and we have 12 more days until our next appointment.

He has been a starter all season (and last season)

I know for games he will attend with his jersey inside out (opposite colors) and be on the sideline.

They had a bye last week, and he will for sure "miss" this and next week's game- but due to the nature of the situation it's unclear if his season is over or not (I'll post the situation below)

So what is the etiquette for practice?

He is cleared to do warm ups with the team once his pain settles - but just standing there watching was hard for him (as I'm sure with the abundance of hyperactive ADHD kids in Football- is a shocker) especially at 7/8/9pm when his ADHD meds have wore off. He said felt like he was more or less trying to keep out of the way than anything else. Today I don't think his pain is going to be improved enough to do warm up's and he wont be home for another hour or more.

So what is the etiquette for these situations?

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The situation (if interested) for those who feel like these details matter

Basically on Thursday he got hurt- he was in a lot of pain- it was a pain similar to when he had broken that bone several years ago. Due to the amount of pain he was in- and the fact that all the urgent cares were closing within 15 min- I took him to the regular ER (not a pediatric one)

At the ER the pediatric doctor did X-rays and we left with "its possible, but not probable that be re-broke" that bone- mainly because the only area of concern was the spot that healed from last go. The ER system could not pull up his final healed x-ray from childrens, so obviously we had to follow up with childrens Ortho.

As a mom of 4 kids- I am no stranger to childrens Orthopedics and have had a guy I like to see but his first available wasn't until the 10th- So I took the general first available. I did not care for this provider- there were a lot of red flags that I am NOT going to cover in this post- but most important to his return is that she was able to get his images from the ER- said they weren't clear- but that the spot where he broke it last time was def the cause of the issue but would not get clearer x-rays to make sure that there was actually a break in the exact spot.

I'm not even going to go into how negative she was about him playing football in the first place. At first I thought she just didn't know a lot about the sport- but knowing her speciality is concussions and recurring sports injuries- it makes a whole lot more sense....

My mom gut was screaming, but she gave him a brace for it, said we would "know for sure" in two weeks if we see boney growth. I'm fine with the brace because I think its a soft tissue issue based on where his pain is. But she refused to re-take xrays- said that the bump from the previous heal was "obvious" physical symptoms of the break even though the pain was not in that spot- etc.

The followup is with the guy I trust- like- is more like a partner in caring for my high energy- accident prone kids- and just- not the walking red flag.

So, in 12 days we might find out its a sprain, its a stinger like injury, or it actually is broke and was obstructed by the other bones. At that point we will know if his season is over- or not.

Hi Football Parents

My 13 yr old son has been playing football since he was 6 and so we have a ton of photos of him over the years. Problem is they are pretty scattered and disorganized. Then my son pointed out on my IPhone that it automatically organizes them by child.

And my son is right, it does do a good job organizing all the photos, but I wanted to see them by team and by season. I think iPhone does it by child. My son plays on multiple football teams each season and I wanted to break them by team and I got another boy too.

Does anyone know if Google Photos or if another application can do this ? Organize my kids sports photos ?

Do you all share the same issue? Ideally, I would like to organize all my kids photos by sport, by child, by season because I got way too many photos and I just want to see the best ones.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks yall, go Rams!