Overdue Season Adjustments Make Big Differences in Youth Sports

Annually I do a thorough analysis of my teams and the machine via in-depth film study. This year it was a further study than ever before and I started doing it even before our season ended. I actually was in the process of putting together the 2007 Season DVD. I actually added subtitles to every single snap of each and every game so you can see what football plays and defensive calls are in place ahead of the play begins. I'm also adding music commentary to emphasize the key points to look for on each snap. Because the season progressed, we found several of clubs would send their protecting tackles for their knees, "diving" our wedge play if they felt our linemen were wedge blocking. What this did was create a pile that caused it to be a lttle bit more difficult to wedge.

We also found that if the linebackers saw a wedge creating, they would quickly come up to fill the middle and the defensive ends would curl around the wedge and attempt to drag the ball carrier down from behind. The initial response was to have our offensive linemen just keep their legs up and trample over the defensive lineman, the defensive linemen rarely like using this diving approach the complete game and can rarely hi pod stick to it for long. We were still getting good yardage on our wedge, although not quite what we had gotten in the past. Of course for those teams that would dive every play, we simply ran lots of off-tackle, sweeps, counters, buck wedges and passes and just ran wild. In fact this season we proportioned comparable number of points per game (35) with our age 10-11 team as we did the prior year and we were smaller this season. Yet for those teams that would wait to "feel" the wedge before scuba diving, we had a different plan waiting for them.

Late this season we had extra a football play that was really only a small modification of two sports plays we already run. The 16 Power, our tailback power play off-tackle run to the strong side and 22 our Wedge, a fullback sand wedge to the Right Safeguard. While nether of these is the "sexiest" of football plays, together they averaged almost 9 years per carry this year. The new hybrid play hit so quick and was so open, it looked like our tailback was chance out of a cannon.

This is exactly what we did:

In case you've ever seen those Power T teams run the ball, it is an amazing offense. Just like the Single Wing, it is real tough to choose up the ball and they hit the line very quickly out of a compressed formation with 3 backs attacking 3 different parts of attack. On the base play, the fullback attacks the playside get or trap hole, the backside halfback attacks the playside off-tackle hole and the quarterback attacks the playside sweep area. The quarterback either gives to the fullback, backside halfback or keeps it on a sweep. Everything is so compressed also it hits so quick, that you have no clue who has the football. To add to this mess, all the ballcarriers and fake ballcarriers use a "layered" handoff method to hide the ball and carry their knockoffs out 20 + back yards. When I watch these High School teams play on my DVD player, I have to sluggish everything down frame by frame to see who the heck has the darn football, I kind of like that especially in youth football..

We made a decision to incorporate many of these concepts into one football play we would use late in our 2007 youth football season. We would take those "double dive" concept from the Power T teams and adapt it to our youth football playbook. All of us would run our off-tackle play to our tailback out of our base arranged, but use wedge obstructing and a fake to our fullback to pull the defense in.

It absolutely was simple to put in, our linemen wedge blocked, something we learned in the first week of practice and use on a number of our existing football plays. Our own backfield would run our base 16 Power (tailback off tackle strong) with the exception being that our fullback would fake a 22 wedge run (wedge run at our right guard). The blocking back would execute his normal kickout block of the playside defensive conclusion and the wingback would do his normal seal off of the near linebacker like these were all used to doing on the 16 power.

There was no need for a pulling guard, as the linebackers were already coming up hard when they saw any wedge creating and would get lost in the wash. The tailback would run off-tackle to the strong aspect, inside the blocking back kickout block and then just outside the wingbacks seal block, just like the 16 Power we usually run. Both our Fullback and Tailback would carry the ball or fake with both forearms completely over the basketball, or their stomachs (if faking) and were bent at the waist more than usual. Since this was obviously a mixture of 2 football plays we already run, it took all of 1 minute to setup, it stole zero time from our regular football practice schedule.