Dum Coach opinion

" It is a middle school team made up of 9 8th graders, 2 7th graders and 8 to 10 6th graders. Decent size, very little speed... I would appreciate any help you could give and I would also like to request a copy of your playbook."

Your situation includes one positive and one negative. The positive is that while most wing T offenses are "speed" oriented, the DC Wing T is not. This is to your advantage. Of course, while the line can be slower, it cannot be "dirt slow". If your line can't move to cover their inside gaps, you must play the Double Wing. Otherwise, the negative is that 11's do not fit in well with 12-13's, IMO. I am faced with that situation now where, with a team of 11 kids at this point, four are 11's. They're very good 11's - big, strong, decent speed - but they still won't keep up with the 12's and 13's (Even the small 12-13's). You can fit them into the DC Wing T, but probably no more than three at a time if your opponent is playing all 12-13's. If the opposition is playing the same number of 11's as you, and you can match your 11's against their 11's, you're fine. But, if not, and you find you must get more 11's on the field than the opposition, once more you should consider the Double Wing. Another thing to consider is that the DC Wing T is a passing wing T. True wing T offenses place the defenders in conflict where they are at risk of "whatever they do is wrong". This is especially true of the DC Wing T passing game. Unless we "break one" up the middle or to the outside, most of our TD's are scored through the air. These are not long throws but they are thrown to wide open players. The DC Wing T works on four attack principals. It forces the defense to stop a fullback that has a lead blocker and who is trained to get 5 tough, bruising, punishing yards every time he touches the ball. His motto is "Run fast, go in a straight line, fall forward." He's not a TD threat (Our FB's average one TD a year). He's a "first down" threat. The second attack principal is the halfback. He's trained to get 8 yards, usually at the expense of the DE to the short side of the field. He's an "overcome the penalty" threat and he's usually your team stud. The third attack principal is the wingback. He's trained to run the wide side of the field and down the sideline. Ours average 35 yards per carry and, obviously, are "touchdown" threats. Ours are also bullet fast. Slower "bullets" will average 8-13 yards. The fourth attack is through the air. We only throw about once every five plays but, on virtually every play, we have a receiver running wide open. We'll use four running plays to spot who they're not covering. The defense pretty much leaves the receivers alone in order to deal with the first three running threats - and we may score (with the wingback) before we get a chance to call our pass play. But if we haven't scored yet and we throw, two out of every three completions go for TD's (and the other goes for a first down). Throwing is where the money is at. In 16 years of coaching, I can remember giving up only about 4 QB sacks and 3 interceptions. I can recall only throwing to one receiver who was covered and he still caught the pass. Otherwise, they're wide open (The three INT's all had wide open receivers too but underthrown passes). Adding to the defense's problem, if the QB does see his receiver covered, he will pump fake and run as he does so, running for the first down marker and out of bounds (Similar to "waggle" pass). No QB has ever taken off on me and not gotten the first down. All of this is great if you have a QB that can run, throw, and receivers that can catch. It's not so great if the QB is SLOW, throws INT's, and the receivers drop everything that hits their hands. If that happens, you can end up putting only 6 points on the board. As a baseball coach, your best receivers are at 1st base, catcher, and on the pitcher's mound (We often have the pitcher playing QB, however.). The others on the team must usually be trained to catch (The manual explains how to do this.). So you need the players to pass with to make the offense work. Finally, I didn't design the offense to win games. I designed it to maximize player fun by spreading the ball around and not requiring much talent (Although every player must have at least one thing that he does well.). Simply put, it gives everyone a chance to score. It wins games simply because there are more offensive players with the chance to score than the defense can cover. Over half your TD's are scored by kids that no one would expect to see score - including the defense which focuses on stopping your players they think are your studs. So you end up with kids "cake walking" into the endzone provided you can throw. Our goal is to get 21 points a game passing and 7 running (But it's pretty easy to get another 7 running.). Coach JB here runs the offense and can add, subtract, or whatever to my comments.

I'll e mail you the playbook.