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A coach’s 5-point message to football parents ©2006 oldschoolsportsparenting.com NOTE: This is the text of a message I put together a few years ago, for use at our high school's annual "Football Parents" meeting. The meeting typically takes place late in the school year, when kids are signing up for the next football season. My goal was to address the most typical "concerns" that parents raise at these meetings. 1. Your son must be 100% responsible for his football success or failure. Coaches and parents are only the facilitators. We’re here to teach, inspire, challenge and guide. But ultimately, your son will succeed or fail on the basis of his own passion and hard work. Just as there’s no crying in baseball, there’s no blaming in football. You want to play? Then get tougher, stronger, quicker -- and better -- than the guy ahead of you. 2. As the ultimate team sport, football requires coaches to spend far more in-season practice time on team activities than other sports do. We simply don’t have enough time to develop your son’s individual football skills and techniques from scratch during game weeks. About all we can do is run some drills to help him sharpen the skills he already has. In a typical 2- to 2 ½-hour practice, we devote roughly 45 minutes to individual skill drills. If there are six other kids in the same drill as your son, that means one-seventh of our individual skill time will be devoted to your son. Based on 45 minutes, that means your son will get about 6 ½ minutes of individual instruction per practice. Clearly, the time to improve his skills is in the offseason. If he plays another sport, or if he simply wants "time off from football," that’s fine. But come football season, he must understand that other kids who worked on football skills all year will likely be ahead of him on the improvement curve. 3. The most important football skill you can work on at home with your son is mental toughness. How? By allowing him no excuses for failure. There may be times when he comes home and says practice was boring, that he hardly did anything. There will be times when he thinks the coaches don’t like him or are favoring other kids. Whatever his complaint is, your response to him should be: "Well, you have three choices. You can quit. You can deal with it and get used to being ignored. Or you can make up your mind right now to outhit and outhustle every kid on the team every chance you get. It’s your decision." 4. If your son truly spends an entire practice standing around, he has only himself to blame. All kids get opportunities to take reps in skill drills. And when we’re doing large-group drills or full-team scrimmages, we typically tell backup players to rotate in every few plays with the guys ahead of them. We say, "Steve, you rotate in every three plays at Safety with Bobby." Then it’s up to Steve and Bobby to rotate. Coaches can’t be expected to police this process. We coach the kids who jump in and participate. 5. Your son must find -- or make -- his own opportunities to show his abilities. I often hear parents complain, "How is he going to prove himself if he never gets to play in the game?" Sorry, friend. Games are for the proven. Practice is for the proving. Your son has a chance to prove himself in practice several days a week. If he seeks out opportunities and takes advantage of them, he will play. But if he’s always the last kid in line for a drill, and if does his reps half speed, and if he hides behind his teammates when the coaches call for "someone to jump in here at left tackle," and if he doesn’t know his assignments, then the real question is, "Why does he expect to play in the game if he makes so little effort to prove himself in practice?" Home Feedback |