Well, the start of the football season is now only 3 days away. Starting next week, our organization will run a one week (3 day) evaluation for all players, after which we will draft our teams and get the season going. Here's how things run. For the evaluation we set up 4 stations for the kids to run through each night. All the coaches work together to run the drills, and we can take notes on kids and try to determine who we would like to draft. This is an instructional league, so we do our best to break up the teams evenly by age group, athletic ability, and size. The drills we run help determine speed, agility, and level of ability to block and tackle. This not only allows us to know the athletic level of these kids, which can be quite a range at this age, but it also lets us know how much we need to teach each child. While we start at the beginning for techniques at this age level, its good to know which kids have some knowledge going in. Its good to have some experienced (even just a little bit) kids to help demonstrate drills and techniques to the new kids.
At the end of the week, we will draft our teams. We will probably have about 4-6 teams of about 12 players. We play 7 on 7. All new players are allowed to request their coach, this was if a child or group of children are more comfortable together, or with a particular coach, they can have a more pleasurable first season of football. I have about 4 kids from our lacrosse team that are all first year players so we will be able to keep them together this season. I think this is a good way to get new kids recruited into the organization. It allows parents to be comfortable going into a possibly new sport. Once we determine which kids have requested coaches, we do a round robin draft to fill out the remaining spots. Again, we do our best to accommodate any other requests, while keeping the teams as evenly matched as possible.
Once we are all drafted we will start up our team practices. All the teams practice at the same field, at the same time. We run our practices separately, but it allows us to do mini scrimmages and collaborate with the other coaches and make it a real community feel. I think this system of evaluation, drafting, and practicing works well. It keeps the majority the people happy, and makes a coaches life easier.
