The Optimum Team Size in Youth Football
There is an optimum size for a young ones football team. If your team has too few players, a key harm or grade problem can seriously affect your teams ability to fight or even have a productive football practice. Too many players and it turns into very difficult to offer the proper coaching attention and even get the kids realistic amounts of playing time.
There are some youth football coaches that believe “the more the merrier” when it comes to player numbers. I think many of these coaches think the more players they have the better chance that they will have this some superstar among that number will emerge to carry the team. There is a local team that carried 40–60 players on it has the squad and still lost most of its games, poor coaching typically won’t even overcome huge talent pools. Our Omaha addition saw one of our teams face a team that acceptable up 52 kids. Most teams in the league suit right up from 22–35 players. High numbers guarantees nothing but lots of problems for the head coach, very low numbers will do the same.
We have observed the best player to coach ratio is about 5 or 6 players per coach. If you carry 40 kids on your youth เรื่องกีฬาสนใจ team means you need 7 coaches. That many coaches is hard to find to begin with and to train and have them all on the same page would be a management miracle suitable enough to be Donald Trump’s apprentice. Teams this large not usually see players developing to their full potential, as the head trainer and his assistants are spread so thin.
Teams this substantial often see very good players or diamonds in the rough autumn through the cracks. These kind of kids often do not get noticed or acquire very well on large teams. Even doing a simple fit and freeze team drill would mean all players reps would be confined, the starters and the backups would be in just half the time. Receiving all the kids playing time in games would be a disaster. To get your back ups time, your starters would have to come out very early and forget to develop as well as they could with more playing time. If you have minimum play policies, your best players would not be on the field long enough to make much of a change. There is no doubt you will lose lots of players from a team like this i wouldn’t even want to think about the parent hassles, what a nightmare. Group sizes this large are a huge disadvantage, not the advantage the majority of people think.
The first year I started the Screaming Eagle program in Omaha, I had 36 youth football players, all on one team. We had no option of dividing into another team, because for most with the season we had one coach, myself. Later on we got a great gentleman to help that had not coached or played football, but must have been a great basketball coach. That many players with so few coaches was a real disservice to the kids. It didn’t help that all your kids were first year rookie players. While we had some novice raw talent, our season was not as enjoyable or profitable as it could have been had we had a smaller sized team.
My miscalculation was not cutting off the teams enrollment. The problem was this group practiced across the street from Omaha’s largest housing project and the young children had no other place to play football within walking distance. Once the neighborhood kids saw our football practice the first day, more and more boys and girls started showing up, begging to be on the team. I’m not very good on turning away kids in need, and these were kids of which needed the program more than we needed them, so I took all of these books. The following year I had 3 teams and we got the instructors we needed to accommodate team sizes of about 25 or so.
After a while we experimented with various team sizes as my Organization mature to about 400 kids at 5 different fields. Many years we had groups that were too big for one team but not really big enough to divide into 2 teams.
We have fielded teams as small as 17 players, but that is a very dangerous variety. If 17 kids were there for every game you can make 17 do the job, but there are those problem games where one player is definitely sick, another is injured and then you have one that gets organised out for grades and you end up with just 14 players. You are in real trouble in our league if you show up with just 18 kids. Football practice is also a bear with teams this small , and you have to run lots of half line drills and you have to corner train all your players to play other positions. Some coaches get rid of control of teams of this size because they feel they can not hold young people accountable to any kind of standard for fear of losing them. On this situation the inmates (players and parents) end up having the upper hand and chaos ensues.
We have found 24–25 players is the best selection to start your season out with. We mix and match until we have the fact that number now on about every team we field. On my personal teams, I usually lose 1 player before the season will begin, they decide that football is not for them. As the season moves on we are usually missing 1 player per game due to traumas, sickness, grades etc . So most for games and techniques we have about 22–23 kids available. To me this is the perfect phone number, 22 kids means I have 11 on 11 in our healthy and freeze drills during football practice. We can run all of our football plays out against a scout defense of 13 players if we have 22 on the team.
I only need approximately for five coaches to effectively coach this group and playing time as well as attention to each individual youth football player is adequate. With a set this size I’m going to know what every player can do, they can each one learn their football plays and there won’t be anyone dropping through the cracks. There won’t be any player that feels overlooked and my better players as well as my backups will get often the reps and attention they need to become better youth football members.
In the rural area I now coach in, we take the first per day kids that sign up to play, first come first served based on a new flyer we send out at their school.
While many coaches do not input on team sizes, if you do have influence, do your very best self to lobby for a team size of 24–25. Your youth sports coaching experience will be significantly more fun and productive with team shapes like this.
