Hello there, TKPers!
So this week, I'm home and helping out with my dad's HS frosh/soph football team, just for funsies. They've got 3 coaches and maybe 35 guys (and not exactly an Alabama talent level). They run a wing-T offense and a pretty basic 3-5-3 defense (it's essentially a 4-3 really). As a guy who watches a lot of football and played a bit in high school, I feel like I've got a pretty good understanding of the game and most positions (especially QB and LB). My question for you all is this: what are the absolute vital skills you think all HS football players should be taught early in their careers? For any and all positions you feel comfortable with, what's one/a couple skills you would make darn sure your kids knew before their Junior year of high school? Just curious to see what other football junkies have to say.
Vital High School Skills
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As a WR, my high school coach taught us two seemingly opposing lessons on how to catch the football.
Soft Hands: Ever see the egg scene in Mighty Ducks. This is where he got it from. Threw ten eggs at us at various speed (not really fast overall), distance and height. We had to catch and protect the egg from being broken. Was good fun but you had to do the same number of suicides as broken eggs.
Attacking the Football: attached a football to a small bungee type cord and threw at us. The idea was that he would pull back on the ball at the last moment to encourage you to attack the ball to prevent the DB from touching it. Only he would again throw you ten balls, some he pulled back and others he didn't. Sometimes only would pull back once. If you were lazy and got caught you had to start running a suicide at that moment.
He was big on suicides. And throwing things at us ten times. He had some other gems about footwork, routes, getting out of jams, and cuts but these were two that stood out to me. We only did the egg thing once or twice a season to illustrate the point. But we did the attack drill A LOT.
I am a WR coach at my old high school and I was going to say the exact same 2 things. Soft hands and attack the ball. I see my guys all the time beat their man on the route but the ball gets intercepted or knocked down because they don't come to the football. It makes a tremendous difference in the passing game if your receivers go to the football rather than sit and wait.
man, you are doing the job I would have loved to do had I not gone into design. I am fanatical about WR's actually catching balls.
I posted this in another thread, but my coach had 1 rule. Catch the ball. If you can touch the ball, even with the tip of one finger, you can catch the ball. If you didn't then you just didn't try hard enough. Jump higher, run faster... do whatever it takes.
If we dropped a pass in a game we had suicides waiting for us Monday equal to the number of yards we just cost the team. If we dropped a touchdown pass we were replaced by next guy immediately and could expect to be running all week.
Believe me, I am living the dream right now. I grew up wanting to be a football coach and at Tech especially. I now have a coaching position and I haven't even gotten out of college yet. Life is good. I also coach the DBs and all these same things can be said for defensive backs. Every day I have them doing drills for attacking the football.
Not much advice to give, but if you're interested in Wing-T help, watch some Brendan Motley footage. He played in that style offense at Christiansburg High.
keep. their. heads. up. = #1 always and what high school & lower coaches should constantly be on the lookout for.
Other than that:
As a life-long undersized Center who later became an oversized Wide Receiver my final year of high school, I think there was never really a solid emphasis on blocking techniques for WR's in high school. I always loved the plays where we could come down and lay our bodies into an unsuspecting LB on an outside run while the FB swung out and was faced with either a CB or Safety.
Maybe Oklahoma drills featuring WRs vs. CBs with a couple of extra sprints on the line would be enough to get the guys fired up to block?
A really underrated QB & RB skill is the ability to sell the play-action, but I know our coaches never really focused on that with QB's. It sucked because our bread and butter play was a counter run (I'll never forget the god damned "17 Rip" for as long as I live), and we'd usually run it 25-35 times a game (my coaches were terrible, by the way).
Whenever we ran the play-action version, it was usually ruined because neither the QB or RB sold the fake very well.
Also, a pivotal skill for LBs is the use of their hands to disengage blockers.
man... I forgot how much I wanted to coach footbawww. Have fun man!
Good old 17 rip.
Our bread and butter play in middle school
All very good points. And I hear ya on that last bit. I'm kinda bummed I've only got a few days before I head back to blacksburg (I'm home for the week). Coaching football is pretty fun.
Tackling fundamentals. Wrap em up don't just go for the big hit. See Fuller, Kyle and Tyler, Jack for more specifics.
Fitness, conditioning, strength training are all vital. Without the body the mind suffers, techniques suffer, performance suffers.
Encourage learning, practice, and self motivation. You can't be there 24/7 so kids need to do some things on their own. Give them homework.