Youth Coaches are in a unique position to teach their players and even their fellow coaches about taking responsibility. Many youth football teams have to deal with a number of team dynamics; the parents, the kids, the assistant coaches, the referees and even the coaches for the opposing team. In my mind the most important and the most impressionable dynamic is the player group. Adults already have their world view set, but most kids are in the process of developing theirs and often they just copy what they see from others they respect. This means as a youth football coach you have an enormous responsibility to be a man of integrity.
Unfortunately our world has shifted to a blame others society. It seems like anytime anything goes wrong, we want to blame others for the problem, no one is ever at fault for anything. Criminals are never at fault, it had to do with their environment and childhood. Our society even has a booming blame others economy with lawyers at the ready to sue companies with deep pockets for our own ineptness. Just think of the elderly lady that spilled hot coffee on her lap in a moving car and won millions or the man that ate petroleum jelly and got sick because the jar didn’t say “not edible”. Our society has become a world of excuse makers and some football coaches are right there arm-in-arm with them.
When a football team loses, we hear a litany of excuses from coaches, it was the referees fault, the players fault, the weathers fault, we were missing players, the other team cheated, we have no size, we have no speed, we have no athletes, our kids won’t hit, our kids aren’t aggressive, the other team got lucky, our kids didn’t make plays, we are just trying to have fun, we don’t have enough players, the kids didn’t “want” it, we didn’t execute, we practice less than the other team, etc etc etc. Many of the excuses I hear border on the bizarre and should be in the National Enquirer, but in the end are nothing more than “the dog ate my homework”. Many football coaches are some of the biggest excuse makers out there and that includes many paid High School coaches. I often wonder why the losing coach has all these problems, when the weather is real bad for his team, is his opponent playing on a different field with different weather? Doesn’t the opponent have kids that are ill or out too or does that ONLY happen with his team?
In 2005 we beat a team that had not lost in 5 years, their excuse was one of their kids was ill. In that game I started my 4th string tailback, my first teamer broke his arm in game 5, my second teamer banged up his