“If you give me six hours to chop down a tree, then I’m going to spend the first four sharpening the blade.”
-Abraham Lincoln (but more likely an anonymous lumberjack)
Flag football can be a beautiful thing when it all works, and being the coach makes it all the more rewarding in those times. Of course, when you’re unprepared, have one kid eating grass, another asking to go the bathroom 30-seconds to game time, and you just realized you left your clipboard at home, it can feel more like an exercise in herding cats. That’s why I’ve learned through experience how to set up the perfect blueprint for any flag football coach.
Football has had a meaningful impact on my life, as it’s likely had on yours (if you’re reading this). Football taught me discipline, hard work, strategy, organization, and a team-first attitude. I’m lucky my high school football coaches were among the best in the game — Bruce Kay is now in the Illinois High School Football Coaches Association Hall of Fame. Defensive Coordinator Don “Suds” Sutherland is currently the OLB coach at North Central College (and also in the Illinois High School Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Fame). You will find their inspiration and teachings throughout this blueprint.
As a coach, you will have high expectations for your team and your players — but if you’re not knowledgeable and prepared, how can you expect your team to be?
There is no shortage of youth flag football ideas or resources online. And many great teachers, trainers, and coaches who have made their best thinking available via YouTube and other websites and social media channels — and many of them are referenced in this blueprint.
The goal of this program is to create leverage for you and other coaches and parents by streamlining the learning and organizing process — what to learn/know/do — so you can focus more of your time on doing and less on researching. We’ve used the Swarm Strategy to develop this, so you don’t have to.
The information is organized to not only allow you to categorize the different subject matters, but also linearly think about them (i.e., what do I focus on now vs. what’s next vs. what’s later) to save you time so you can spend more of it putting your unique stamp on your program.
Week by week, we’ll detail what you should be focused on and executing at that particular part of the season. This information will be available first via our newsletter and then published here and on our blog.
Ultimately, you’ll have created an organized,10-stage “blueprint,” in a mostly linear/chronological manner (sections below). These will be editable, public documents, and our hope is they will get even more helpful as we crowdsource suggestions by you and our members.
