Only Youth Football Coach — Practice Planning — Position Coaching — How to

I received an email a few days ago from a youth football coach asking about pee wee football practice planning. See below the email and my answer about youth football practice planning and specific position skill development.

I’ve appreciated your info over the years. I recently purchased your playbooks as I’m starting to think about about next season starting over with 7/8 year olds. In our league there’s no drafting and we have min. play rules. We typically have 15–19 kids on a team.

I’m looking for some of your thoughts on how you might go about coaching a team if you were the only coach (no assistants). This situation has been the majority of my head coaching experience to date (9, 10 and 11 yo teams).

Specifically, I’m looking for ideas on how to organize practices to get in position specific skill development as well as the general offensive/defensive systems and reps when it’s just you by your lonesome. The first 2 weeks we can practice 5 days/2 hours each. After that we can practice up to 4 days a week for 1.5 hours a practice, but we typically only do 3 because kids are involved in church activities and many have older brothers on the high school teams which will play on Thurs or Fri nights.

Thanks for your time.

Hi Coach,

Thanks for your email and support.

Trying to coach a youth football team by yourself and also coach position specific skill development without help is very tough, especially with 19 kids. Your practice schedule does look better than most youth football teams I’ve coached since you can practice 4 to 5 days a week.

If possible, I would ask for dads or moms from the team to help during practice. If you get a few to hold bags etc. that is great. You can still be the main coach doing all the teaching and demonstrating.

I currently hold before practice “Mini Camps” for detailed specific position techniques, skills, responsibilities. These are usually no more than 6 players. They last for about 30 to 45 minutes. I also do YouTube videos for players to learn their positions. I would introduce these Position Specific Mini Camps into your practice schedule.

Since you have a ton of practice time, I would do Mini Camps for position specific coaching before each of your practices or after depending on player ride schedules. Especially on your 2 hour practice days for the first two weeks. You can get in maybe 8 positions which should be enough to start with. Then during the 4 day week when you said you practice 3 days, make the 4th day a position Mini Camp practice and have only a sub set of players show up for that practice. You can also still hold 20 minute mini camps on the other days for a position sub set.

This is how I would probably set up my practices. I am already doing a little of that now since we can only practice two days a week. I do pre-pactice mini camps.

Hope that helps! Good luck. Thanks again for your question. Contact me anytime.

~ Coach Parker

Check out my new post Coaching Youth Football Basics