naive question

Your considerations are 1) weight rules 2) practice time and 3) help.

WEIGHT RULES: A 12 year old would weigh about 72 pounds to be on physical parity with a 10 or 11 year old. What this means is, if your 12's have a 72 pound max by rule, the playing field is equal. But as the weight of your 12's increases, a disparity ocurs in which the 12's dominate - and the greater their weight, the greater the disparity. Many leagues think that by increasing the weight of 11 year olds to, say, 140 pounds and holding the 12's to a lesser weight that parity is achieved between the 11's and the 12's. IMO, that's not true. Adding more weight to an 11 year old and equating that with muscle mass and strength is, to me, a false assumption. Now I'm not speaking from the position of scientific study (We'll let Jack Gregory provide that.). I'm speaking from past experience. The key factor is puberty, which occurs at around 12-13 years of age. Your 10-11 year olds are basically girls. Your 12 year olds are basically men. When you bring a big 11 year old in to play with 12's, all you've done is bring in a big girl to play with the 12's. Again, bringing up the weight of 11 year olds will not equalize them with 12's. To equalize, you must bring the weight of the 12's down to 72 pounds. If your league hasn't done this then your team, and all your opponents teams, are "weighted" towards the 12 year olds. The playfield is unequal. Where the playfield is unequal, you have to adopt an offense and defense that does not require equal talent. So look at the size and number of your 12 year olds. If over 72 pounds, they will become your key players. Similarly, the number of "heavy" 11's will impact your team. A "heavy" 11 begins, IMO, at 128 pounds. As 11's exceed this weight, their ability to carry it decreases. A "heavy" 10 begins at about 109 pounds. Then you also have the problem of "light" 10's. A 10 year old, under 89 pounds, is light. Under 82 pounds is very light. "Light" is generally not a factor with 11's.

These numbers are not cast in cement. They are only averages. There are always exceptions (I've seen a 125 pound 8 year old stud.). Still, for the most part, it should be accurate. Your better players should be 1) all 12's over 72 pounds 2) All 10's 89-108 pounds and 3) all 11's up to 127 pounds. Of the "better" players, your "studs" will be all your 12's, your 95-102 pound 10's and all your 11's up to 114. Again, there are always exceptions but this will give you an idea of your "talent pool". If you don't know your player weights, you can take the weight of your returning 11's and add 9 pounds to their weight on your roster as 10's. Your returning 11's, now 12's, will run 9-15 pounds heavier from last year's weight.

How important is this? It's critical with the 12's if they're allowed to play at over 72 pounds with your 10-11's. A 140 pound 12 year old is twice the player of a 140 pound 11 year old. 11 year olds over 127 pounds are usually linemen and usually S-L-O-W. 10's over 108 begin to have the same problem. 10's under 82 pounds will be hard to find positions for (but not impossible). Again, this is not specific. It's just a general guideline to figure out where you will be. In order to implement solutions, it always helps to know the problem.

PRACTICE TIME: Practice time before your first game is critical for planning for success. Many coaches have 30 days of practice before their first game. Many have two weeks. That difference is huge. In 30 days you can teach a lot. In two weeks you can teach very little. And, if practice starts at 5 and ends at 7, that's not really a 2 hour practice. The first 20 minutes, unless you plan carefully, is usually lost to calesthetics and "late arrivals". You're actual "football practice time" would be closer to 100 minutes. For your age group, a 20 minute drill would be appropriate, allowing for "five drills" in your 100 minutes. However, this too can be deceiving since you have allotted zero time for water breaks.

As a general rule of thumb, you spend twice as much time on offense as you do defense. I find it takes me 120 minutes to teach a defender his position. That equates to 240 minutes for an offensive player. This adds up to 360 minutes of position training time (6 hours) plus an equal amount of time for "general" (non-position specific) drills. That's 12 hours time, in pads, exclusive of calesthetics and water breaks. But you have still not accounted for special teams. In all probability, you'll need 18 hours of practice time, minimum, in pads, to be ready for your first game. That's 9 two hour practices. If you practice three times a week for two hours a night, that's THREE WEEKS. Hence, coaches with 30 days before their first game have it easy. Coaches with TWO WEEKS before their first game have it hard. Which do you have? Hard or easy? If you have it HARD, then you must install an EASY offense. If you have it EASY, you can install a HARDER offense.

Regardless of whether you have 'hard" or "easy", you will be faced with limited memorization skills. The average player can memorize eight things. For many teams, this means teaching 8 plays. But, since some players have below average memory skills, some teams can only teach 6 plays. For a "new coach", the discovery of "limited player" memorization can lead to a humiliating season. If you install a "25 play offense", where each play requires each player to do something different than the play before, you can rest assurred that your players will get all 25 plays wrong, 100% of the time, come game day - And you will lose. A simple rule of thumb is, "If you have to get the playbook out to show a player what to do in a certain situation because you don't know it yourself, then don't expect the player to know it either." Show me a coach carrying around his playbook during practice and I'll show you a losing coach. Do not think that copying off the plays and handing them to the players will help them memorize the plays either. It won't (Unless the parents participate in the player's memorization - which is unlikely).

HELP: There was a time in football when you had more parents offering to help than you had assistant positions. Those days are gone. Today, many parents are dropping their kids off at practise as INEXPENSIVE DAY CARE. You are not a coach to them. You are a babysitter. They want to leave and not to help. If you ask for help (volunteers) few hands will rise. Half of those hands that do go up are raising them for the wrong reasons. They're not offering to coach your system. They're offering to help you coach their system. If your system does not agree with theirs, disagreement and hard feelings will follow. The ones who will give you the most disagreement will have played college football. If you haven't, and they have, they will look down on you. Oddly enough, many of the parents who do not raise their hands to volunteer to help coach will still show up to watch their kid practice. He doesn't raise his hand to volunteer because he feels he doesn't know enough to help. This is actually the parent you want as your assistant. Since he doesn't have his own system, he can't argue with yours. If you can get this parent to volunteer you will avoid the "disagreement and hard feelings" that follow with the parents who volunteer to teach you theirs. To separate the two different types of volunteers, do NOT ask on the first day of practice, "Are there any parents here who would like to help COACH?" The words "help coach" mean to an ex-college football player that you're asking for his help to implement his system. Instead, you would ask "Are there any parents here who would like to help by holding a BAG?" There is a difference. You're no longer asking for coaching help, you're asking for bagholders. Now hands go up that wouldn't go up before. From this bigger pool of bag holders you can start promoting people into your system - and start excluding the ex-college players who don't buy into your system. You want to avoid the confrontational disagreement with an ex-college player because, more often than not, his kid is your best player (heriditary) and, when he walks, he takes his kid with him. So don't place him in a position to disagree.

There are a million traps for first year coaches. The first trap is when you inherit a team you didn't ask for. You're walking in blind. Some common first year coaching mistakes:

1) More than 2 pass plays
2) More than 8 running plays
3) Coaching the backfield but not the line
4) Not punting from your own 20
5) Positioning players by their appearance
6) Favoring your own son
7) Placing blame on others but not yourself
8) Picking your offense/defense from television
9) Picking ex-college players to help
10) Kids standing in line in practice
11) No practice schedule
12) Humiliating players*

*Telling them what they did wrong versus what they did right.