Overall rating: (3.0 of 5.0 possible)

Available through: www.amazon.com

Youth coaches must be able to teach the skills necessary to play the game effectively and safely, but they must also realize how important they are to the children that they teach. Coaches often take the place of absent or busy parents. They must realize that the game is fun, but that the children are the most important part of the activity. The game offers ways to educate them, but the children must be the coaches’ main concern. – From the Foreword to Youth League Football: Coaching and Playing by Tom Flores and Bob O’Conner.

Coach Flores and Coach O’Conner hit the nail on the head with this section. I have to pause here and salute them for their apparent reasons for writing this book. Anyone that drops by this site should know within a few minutes that the kids are the reason we’re all here. I love the sport, and I love watching young people learn and grow. When they intersect on grass we reach the best part of my life.

The problem, though, is that the sport of football is just too darn complex. 173 pages is simply not enough space to cover the whole thing, and coaches turned authors who try usually end up sounding vague and contradictory.

Youth League Football: Coaching and Playing falls into this category. Broadly. And then makes mistakes.

Here are a couple:

On page 127 the authors try to demonstrate a single-handed bail for bump and run pass coverage with a photo, but the receiver is on the outside shade and the defender is bumping with the inside arm, cross body and standing straight up! His feet are out of the picture, but judging from the angle of his hips the defender’s heels are on the ground! How does a defensive back get into cutoff position against a receiver when his feet are flat and his hips are rolled under him? (They also don’t mention that the one-hand bail is only a fallback when the receiver picks a side for his first step instead of charging forward and the defender is in danger of losing the bail.)

Page 67 shows a picture of a player in a four-point stance. The general positioning is decent, except that the player doesn't have his weight balanced properly. His backside is up way too far. In other words, his knees aren’t flexed enough. A four-point stance is usually used to help provide a player with a low line charge. The lower the hips, the more compression at the knee, the more explosion the player is capable of outputting.

Page 73 shows a picture of a shoulder block in which the blocker is angled quite a bit; his feet are so far behind him that his upper body is almost parallel with the ground. That’s not the problem. It's actually a good impact position for the delivery of the block. The problem, honestly, is that the player's non-contact hand is floating around his waist instead of up and in contact with the bad guy.

I really, really do not like the discussion of the most fundamental skill in football, tackling. The authors "cover" this skill in four pages, two of which are half pages and one of which is devoted to ball stripping.

One of the things that irritates me the most is the authors' discussion of route running mechanics and the passing game. There’s some good stuff in there: the discussion of the "weave" technique for pulling a defender off balance is great and can be highly effective at the youth level. (Basically, the receiver runs in an "S" shaped pattern before cutting back sharply when the defensive back jumps what he thinks is the route.) My biggest complaint involves the phrase "many hours."

"…By working many hours with his receivers youth quarterbacks can gain an instinctive understanding of how they will get open against certain types of coverage." Even at the high school level I don’t have "many hours" to work with my receivers on one aspect of stemming.

Youth football coaching is about time management and attention to detail, most notably those details involving safety. Coach O’Conner and Coach Flores are right; it’s quite possible to coach an effective read/react passing game at the youth level. I know several coaches that do so every year with a great deal of success. My main issue with Coaches Flores and O’Conner is that they seem to have forgotten that the foundation of the youth football offense is and always will be the running game. (If you want to coach a good passing game, try going to Ted Seay’s forum and asking some questions. He will hook a brutha’ up with his Wild Bunch or SST or Spread Option Run and Shoot systems and you will decimate your league.)

Passing is possible, but not easy.

The reason this gets so under my skin is that youth football coaches have a hard enough time gaining the respect of their peers in the coaching community, most notably high school coaches with over-inflated notions of their importance. Giving them incomplete or inaccurate information at best puts them on the field in position to look like a fool in front of thirty players and their families. At worst it can get a player badly hurt when his coach teaches him something stupid. How many youth football coaches go out there every year armed with the knowledge that the proper way to tackle is to put the mask on the numbers? I was taught that in 1985, and I’d be teaching that right now if I hadn’t gotten some very good instruction from people like Hugh Wyatt and Jack Reed. The average father of a ten-year-old is my age; there’s a very real possibility that some of my former teammates are now coaching their sons using the ineffective and dangerous techniques we were taught twenty years ago.

It strikes me that Bob O’Conner fell into the trap of pro coaching: He thinks his level is the epitome of coaching football. When was the last time he coached a game with minimum-play-rules in force? When was the last time a player ran up to him at practice and said, "Coach, I gotta pee!" When was the last time a parent approached him to ask, "Why has my son not started as the quarterback? We all know he’s better than the other guy."?

Now the good. The first time I read this book I overlooked some of the depth that the coaches put into the material. Included, for example, is a glossary of football terms. This is something I felt was so important that I included it in Impact! Volume One. The descriptions of linebacker play are also well described and effective, especially the clear distinction between inside and outside linebacker play.

I give the book the following scores:

Readability: 4

Some of the techniques and descriptions are a little vague, but the included glossary helps to cut through the detritus. The lack of diagrams really hurts this book. For example, several drills are explained with a verbal breakdown. A simple X’s and O’s diagram would have made it considerably easier for the neophyte coach to decipher. However, the writers used clear and effective language to describe their thoughts, something that is never easy.

Usefulness: 3

The mistakes made in the pictures, such as the incorrect stiff arm shown on page 43, could cause the inexperienced coach to find himself incorrectly coaching some important skills. A better effort should have been made to make sure that the models used had solid football fundamentals before using them in the book.

Practicality: 2

My overall feeling about the book is that the authors presented much more material, and in the editing phases this was pared down too much. The flow of the book feels haphazard and uncomfortable, and the emphasis seems to be clearly on the passing game instead of on the running game, without really containing an accompanying explanation for the coaches to use when trying to develop one.

Furthermore, the mistakes like suggesting youth coaches have “many hours” to work on a single part of their offense serve to remind us that Bob O’Conner and Tom Flores are professional coaches working with the highest level of football and solely with adults. One has to wonder on reading this book if they have spent much time coaching below the high school level. It is obvious that they have much familiarity with the sport, but not necessarily with teaching it to eight-year-olds.

Overall score: 3

Although it falls pretty much in the middle, I recommend that you purchase this book. If you are looking to explain certain concepts of football beyond the basics, it will probably aid you. You should have a solid foundation of the fundamental theories and mechanics of the sport before you purchase, but it should move the second or third year coach further along his path.