In youth football many of the leagues rules seem to be very fluid. Special rules are put in place one year and are out the next. These special rules are often developed to hinder or help specific organizations within the league that have the political power to put them in place. I’m not speaking about rules like minimum play rules which help coaches get all the kids into games for a set number of football plays. I’m speaking of rules designed to water down the effectiveness and efficiency of certain teams systems.
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In the leagues my team plays, football rules change slightly from year to year based on the decisions of the ruling Board. In the previous youth football league my teams played in, all the teams voted on the rules changes each year. Regardless of the ruling body or structure, we all have to deal with rule changes from year to year. Part of coaching youth football well involves adapting and making adjustments. Part of the youth football game are yearly rule changes. It doesn’t do your team, coaches or parents any good to lament about woulda, coulda, shouldas when it comes to rule changes. Adapt and overcome, heck embrace the challenge, unfortunately it’s part of the wonderful world of youth football.
If you run the Single Wing offense, you may have already run into some of these special rules being put in to hinder your success. Many youth football Board members are made up of coaches in the league and quite frankly many of them don’t like seeing their teams get clobbered each week by physically inferior teams, its embarrassing to them. Heck that’s one reason we have a heck of a time getting teams to play us in extra games, they can’t use the excuse “they were bigger, faster, had more kids etc”. So the leadership often try to give themselves even greater advantages via additional “special rules”.
I’ve yet to see a special rule that did little more than aggravate a well coached Single Wing team but here is a story from one of the guys running my system we can all appreciate:
One of the coaches that went to the Orlando Coach of the Year Clinics I did in 2007, bought into the system full tilt down to the tiniest detail. This guy did his homework as he is a very detail oriented, thorough and aggressive person by nature. I’m not sure I know my system as well as he does, in all seriousness. I had the privilege of working with him, his coaches and some of his kids for a day. These are all first year tackle coaches and all first year tackle players in an age 7-9 league. Like most youth football teams, he h