You’re four-to-six weeks from your first flag football practice for the fall season. Now what?

Welcome to Week 1 of our Flag Football Blueprint. We will roll out critical information from our Blueprint weekly to get you organized and prepared to max out your team’s potential.

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Administrative

1. Get certified — Either because your league requires it, or it provides you with essential learning opportunities you can use to make your team better (and back up your methods to your parents)

• USA Football — We found the health and safety topics very valuable (e.g., concussion and heat protocol)
• Positive Coaching Alliance — Required by our league, able to take it online or our local league hosts a workshop for free
• How to Coach Kids — Partnership with Nike, the United States Olympic Committee, and The Aspen Institute’s Project Play
• You can check out additional education and training programs we’ve identified here.

2. Develop a team name and logo — You create a mascot and corresponding logo representative of the program you want to be/build, and you don’t want to be scrambling on this right before you need gear made

• We used TemplateMonster (search for your mascot) and got full rights to a unique “Bear” logo below for $23. Can’t beat it.
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3. Aggregate your roster information for easy reference during the season

• Here is a template we used and served as a handy reference time and again

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Program Development

1. Set foundation and team goals

• What’s important? Player development? Championships? Life lessons? Develop your player/parent feedback loop to learn and optimize as you go (see next step)

2. Survey players and parents — Understand goals and get alignment/buy-in from all players and parents (and coaches). Here is the Google Form we developed last year.

• The program offers an “opportunity,” not a “have to.” Two keys to success here: 1) What are your child’s goals? 2) What is s/he willing to do to achieve them? Football is a tough game for tough people. Understanding goals vs. effort allows us to measure a player’s heart.
• Everyone likes to know how they’re doing. Maybe that’s why kids say the most fun thing about sports is “trying your best.” So, set goals with kids that are focused on doing their best and cheer like crazy when they achieve them. Set manageable, incremental goals for individuals, and the team.
• Involve kids in setting the goals that they have some control over.
• Track progress over time.
• Skip goals focused on winning (“Go undefeated this season”) and focus on things kids can do in practice — run faster, kick or throw farther. For the team, it’s things like cheer louder, pass ten times, help a teammate, etc.

3. We mentioned feedback loops in #1 under "Program Development" above. With your initial ideas and then then then the parent survey process, you are well on your way to creating them.

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Next Week (2): Register your team and prepare your coaching staff.

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