r/YouthFootball

Question for coaches and people running youth football orgs - where do you set the bar for fair vs equitable vs equal playing time?

The question derives from an issue I’m sure most involved in youth football have dealt with to varying degrees, but here’s the situation: we are a pretty good 5th grade group of kids with 35ish players in the age group who get along well and have no real discipline problems. Our group of starters can beat most teams in our 14-team league and can hang with / have a punchers chance vs the top 2-3 teams.

Below that starter group are the 2’s - about 6-8 kids who are competent enough, and can get mixed in with the starters without getting exposed badly.

Below that group are about 7-10 that simply can’t make a tackle or throw a block if their life depended on it. And of course that group have the most vocal parents, arguing for more PT than the MPR of six.

Currently we’ve been doing our best to filter in the weaker group and surround them with stronger players to minimize the damage, which has worked in spurts but still costs us at least 2-3 long plays / TD’s per game. And it honestly hasn’t quieted the parents

A couple coaches are getting fed up with the complaining and argued that we alternate series - starters / 1’s + 2’s / 3’s - and “give the parents exactly what they’ve been demanding” (those offensive series will last 4 plays if we’re lucky and 3 plays on defense if we’re extremely lucky)

I don’t love the idea bc it’ll be viewed as “showing the kids up to teach the parents a lesson”… but at the same time I’m genuinely frustrated by the offhand comments, complaints-disguised-as-questions texted to the Board, and general inability to realize that if the coaching staff does what they are asking, their kids will be humiliated. Which could cause a rift among the players, who are generally pretty well behaved and get along well

So, I dunno… how would ppl who’ve been in this situation handle it? Aside from sending individual parents cut-ups of the game film and saying “see these six plays, your kid went the wrong way on 3 of them and badly missed tackles on the other 3… when we can cut those mistakes down to 0 or 1, he’ll get more snaps on gameday”… I’m at a loss

(And yes, I’ve seriously entertained sending that last email and had it drafted in my head before snapping out of it)

M son is currently a freshman who wants to play football but he missed out on this year so he will be playing as a sophomore but he has no experience playing in the game before other than flag football and knowing the rules and I don’t know if I should let him.

So I’m talking 9u and the coach seems to just be pumping up kids whose parents (single moms to be real) keep complaining to him about their kid not getting the position they want or not getting the ball. Some of these kids shouldn’t even be out there. They constantly disrupt practice. Insult the coach, swearing, throwing their equipment around the field. all that negative stuff. They even had to stop practice because one of the moms was yelling and screaming and insulting the coach from the sidelines because she thinks the coach is too much of a softie to discipline her kid when he disrupts everyone else. But sure enough, by the next game, the coach is propping her kid up and giving him opportunity’s and denying opportunity’s to the kids that show up and put effort in and compete and prioritize being a good teammate while being 100x more talented than these problem kids.

We try and teach our children the benefits of a solid team mentality but here we have a guy that just operates under the control of those who complain the most get the rewards.

frustrating as hell but looking to see what others would do in this situation.

Do you ever ask them which positions that they are hoping to play? Use any sort of rubric? Etc.

This is my first year coaching 8u. The only position that was easy to fill was center bc we just chose the kid who could yell “huddle” the loudest, pay attention to the cadence and never screw it up, and shotgun snap the ball.

I’m just an AC and struggled to match kids with most of the other positions.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts or input.

This play has bailed our team out on 3rd & long, in the 2 minute drill, and as a shot play. Post-Wheel creates an easy deep-to-shallow read for the QB and has answers for any flag defense/coverage.