by Dave Cisar

As I try to arrange some extra end of season games for both my teams, I hear some interesting stories from some of the youth football coaches I talk to. One organization I contacted last week to play an extra game has a pretty good age 10-11 team that is 6-1 now, so they’re willing to play an extra game. But their youngest team isn't. It seems the younger team has yet to win a game and does not want to play any additional games.

When I asked why they didn't want to extend their season, the coach said they were just "tired.” Yet, this team was still practicing 3 nights a week, plus a walk-through on Saturday. So, five days a week these 7-9 year olds were doing football stuff and they had not won a single game. I asked him to describe what their typical football practice was like and it was no wonder that none of the kids didn't want to play anymore--lots of conditioning and none of the fun stuff. No doubt these kids are burned out, and my guess is they won't have a very good return rate for next year’s team.

I don't understand why so many youth football coaches don't get that you can have fun, teach great fundamentals and win too.

At this point in our football season, we are only practicing two nights per week and now are down to 1:15 per practice. This is the time of the year to skinny down the practice time. We know all our competitors are practicing at least twice that much but, to be quite frank, I wouldn't know what to do with all that extra time. With our rapid pace and exclusion of non-football activities, including conditioning, we get all we need to get done in the limited time we practice. We still seem to have plenty of time for practicing fundamentals, schemes and perfecting the execution of our football plays and defense.

Our kids are still real excited about coming to football practice and we have had perfect attendance by both teams for the last 2 1/2 weeks. To keep the kids appetite wet for football you have to mix it up this time of year and not get caught up in doing the same old thing at every football practice.

Some ideas to keep the kids interested:

- Put in a trick play or two, even if you don't run them in a game.
- Put in a wall kickoff or punt return.
- Learn to go on a quick first sound count.
- Cross train players in positions they may be playing next year.
- If you have your base series down, add a twist like "jet" motion.
- Play some of the fun team building games in my book like: tackle baseball, towel game or Hawaiian Rules Football.
- Do a full contact scrimmage with players changing to other positions. For example, linemen are backs and backs are linemen.
- Have pizza delivered to your field for a surprise pizza party after football practice is over.
- Play relay games, like the large dummy carry relay race.
- Coaches choose sides and for the team that loses the losing coach and team has to run a lap.
- If you don't kick field goals, practice them anyway.
- Add twists to your drills--add a blocker, tackler or running back to a drill that doesn't require one.

There are countless creative ways to keep the kids interested. Use some of these ideas or your own imagination. It will help to keep your kids out of a late season funk.

Dave has a passion for developing youth coaches so they can in turn develop teams that are competitive and well organized. His teams have won over 97% of their games in five different leagues. For 150 free youth football practice tips: Football Plays

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