To become a successful youth football coach you have to get better every day. The off season is the perfect time to improve your coaching skills.  

Here are some tips:

Coaching Clinics:  Attending coaching clinics can be very beneficial. There are many different clinics that are offered nationwide. Every year my coaching staff and I attend at least one coaching clinic as a group. You will meet and talk x’s and o’s with coaching peers and learn new things that can be implemented next season.   Visit YFBCA’s Coaches Clinic Finder Page to see where clinics are held in 2012.

Watch Film. Every year my coaches and I sit down and watch the old game tapes from the prior season. One night we will watch all of our offensive snaps. The next night we are able to meet we watch every defensive snap, then we will watch every special teams/extra point plays. As a coaching staff we all will discuss what we did well and what we didn’t do so well. We will discuss new ideas for each phase of football and how we can improve on them next season. We will also discuss who played well and who didn’t. Did we have a player out of position? What players are coming back next year and is he in the right position?  The game film doesn’t lie- it is a great coaching tool to help improve our coaching skills. Film everything, so no mistake is missed. The naked eye does not catch everything.

Take a Look in the Mirror. As a coach it is important that you evaluate how well you coached this past season. Every year I look back at the season and try to figure out what I could have done better. I’ll first analyze  practices. How did I operate my practices? Were they productive? Did I make the most out of every minute we had?  What ways can I make my practices more interesting and fun for the kids?  There are always ways to improve practice productivity. We try to make every minute productive, we waste no time.

Y.F.O Coaching Tip- Many coaches make the mistake of doing one drill at a time. The best way to make the most out of your practice time is to practice multiple techniques during each drill. For example: When we do a tackling drill we will make the kids explode out on ball movement, loose a blocker, make the tackle, and then the players jump up and recover a fumble. This will allow us to work four defensive techniques at one time. We also have multiple groups doing the same drill so there are more reps and less waiting time.  

Remember, the off season is a great time to get better as a youth football coach. 

By Coach Jeff Hemhauser of YouthFootballOnline.com