They say to “write what you know.” For going on thirteen years, I’ve known JV football. As a husband, father of three, and special education teacher, I’ve worn many hats over the years, but “JV Football Coach” is the one most people seem to know me for. So, when the opportunity arose to start a blog for coachingshare.com, I decided to take plunge and do exactly that; write what I know.
I’ve coached JV football for over a decade now. I began as a DC and Offensive line coach when I started, then became the head coach of the JV team after 3 years. After 4 seasons as the Head Coach, I had the opportunity to move up to Varsity, where I was once again the DC and Offensive Line Coach. After 2 seasons, I moved back down to the JV team and have been there ever since. And in all honesty, I couldn’t ask for a better job.
JV Football is truly an amazing thing; it’s the last true bastion in football where you play for yourselves and those around you: your name isn’t in the paper, you don’t make the 5:00 news, you don’t even play for championships. As a coach, it’s an even more unique situation, because at the end of the day, the wins and losses don’t really matter. Instead, your main goal by the end of the season is to get your players, whether it be 53 kids or 17 kids, ready for the shine of those Friday Night Lights.
So why the blog?
When I first started coaching, I thought that my players needed to know everything there was to know about football, from terminology to techniques, and my scheme needed to be overly complicated to win. I thought my defense needed to have 20 some odd stunts and schemes, we needed to know 12 different coverages and fronts, and we needed to execute them as well as any NFL team. That’s right: I was going to turn my defense of 14 and 15 year olds into the Legion of Boom. For my first season, it actually worked! We were stopping opponents at the LOS, we were intercepting balls left and right, teams didn’t have answers for us. So I built, and spent the offseason developing even more stunts and calls. And when we came back the next season, we were STEAMROLLED!
I couldn’t understand it. What happened to my Legion of Boom? What happened to all the success? Well what I had learned was a very valuable lesson, the most basic lesson in all of football: it’s not the X’s and O’s, but the Jimmys and the Joes. My new crop of players were not the same kids that I had the season before, and I hadn’t spent enough time developing last year’s freshmen into serviceable sophomores. Regardless of who they were, they were not the caliber of talent I had the year before, who were now up being successful on Varsity.
You see, as a JV coach, it’s my job to develop talent for the next season, not only to benefit the varsity team as a whole, but for myself for the following season. I was so focused on the game that I had forgotten making the pieces involved BETTER.
I had the same lapse in judgement when I started my second stint as JV Head and began calling the offense. This was at a time when football social media was taking off, and accounts like Coach Dan Casey and Pace and Space were starting to pop off videos daily of great play designs in college and pro football. As an inexperienced OC, I saw those and said “Those would be friggin sweet to run.” So we did, and by the end of my first season I had a wristband of over 120 plays, FOR SOPHOMORES AND FRESHMEN!
I’m sure some of you reading this are high school teachers, and I want you to ask yourselves, “Who are the worst kids to try and teach?” If your answer isn’t Freshmen and Sophomores, I want to come work with you! More often than not, 9th and tenth grade students, especially boys, are the WORST in the classroom. Their attention spans are shorter than the line at the brussel sprout stand at the county fair, and their behaviors can be even worse. So to try and teach them 120 different plays, with different formations to boot? What the hell was I thinking?
Once again, I was more focused on the game itself, instead of developing the actual players around me, and the program suffered for it.
So once again, why the blog?
Well after my first year missteps as DC and OC, I took a step back and really reevaluated everything. My playbooks, my schemes, my drills, everything. I watched film and tracked every single call I made. I looked at every practice plan and tracked every drill I ran with my position group AND whole team. I listed out player stats and playing time. What I was finding was:
What I eventually came back to is the point I’ve tried to make a few different times already: My job at the JV level is to get players ready for Varsity, not to win games. It takes a lot of crow to admit that, and takes a lot of introspection to understand it further. But at the end of the day, I had to accept that I was not doing my job and preparing these kids for the next level, and I was letting the program down.
What those of us at the JV (or modified, or even Pop Warner level) need to understand is that our success does not come on a Monday night if we molly-wop a team 56-0. It doesn’t come when we run for 700 yards against a team, dejecting the opposing team further and making kids not want to play the game of football. It doesn’t even come when your stud sophomore DT who is being eyed by varsity sacks the QB 15 times in a blowout. No, our success comes two years later when those players who you worked and toiled with are holding up that Sectional or State Championship banner. It comes when that kid on the lowest part of your depth chart is being swarmed by their teammates because he just got an interception in the endzone. And it comes when that DT who you worked with all freshmen year to even be able to get into a stance gets pulled up to Varsity to help out in the big homecoming game.
I would call us JV coaches the “Mushroom Society,” because we get fed crap and kept in the dark, but that phrase was already co-opted by Bob Wylie for O-Line Coaches everywhere. Instead, I’ll call us what we are: we are the Corps Coaches, for ours is not to wonder why, ours is but to do and die. We get the dregs of the program, the players that Varsity doesn’t want, or don’t think are ready, and we have to be ok with it, because THAT’S OUR JOB; to develop the unready, even if it means we’re getting crushed week-to-week.
Now the question remains: HOW? How do I develop these players week to week, while still trying to compete in games? (because let’s be honest, no coach truly wants to go 0-8 every season just because they’re trying to develop their players.) The answer is simple, and it’s what took me a long time as a coach to finally wrap my head around: SIMPLIFY!!! Your drills, your practices, your schemes, and your playbook need to be simple for your young players, or else you’re never going to get anything done.
This past season, I simplified my scheme down to 4 run plays and 6 pass plays, among 4 formations, and I told my assistant coaches, my best friends, that if I try to add anything else, to punch me really, really hard. And while they forgot to get their licks in a couple times (I ended up adding two run schemes that REALLY helped us) they kept me honest. Every time I came in with a crazy idea, they held their fists up and said “Do we actually need it?” Because they had a point every week: this season, using 4 run plays and 4 pass plays, we had our highest producing offense in four seasons. Our practices, centralized around four base skills at each position, were sharp, focused, and fast paced. Simplifying helped us to create a team that was EXCITED week to week to participate, and allowed us to get A LOT of players in games, because our schemes weren’t too crazy or too much to understand.
That’s why simplifying is so important at our levels, something that every coach seems to know but doesn’t want to admit. Do you think I like to admit that my players know a total of 8 plays? At first, it was an ego thing, and it made me think I was failing my kids. But then I looked at all of their successes, and how it was helping them to develop. We went from a team of 42, with maybe 20 kids that could help us in games, to a true team of 42 kids that could cycle in somewhere and not scare the holy hell out of me when some of them were in there. Simplifying isn’t cheapening your team, it’s making it more accessible for everyone involved.
That’s the “why” of the blog. I’m here to help you simplify. So every week, I’ll be here, talking to you about simplifying the different aspects of the game of football for your players so you can focus on the real goal of your sub-varsity career: developing your players so they can shine on a Friday night. From scheme to drills, and practices to preaching culture, I want to help you sub-varsity coaches out there figure out how to take what your varsity coach is doing and SIMPLIFY it for your players to understand. Building the base of a good program starts with coaches that understand how to make things simpler (notice I’m not saying easier) for their players, then being able to make it more advanced as they themselves become more advanced.
I’m hoping to be a resource to all of those coaches out there just starting out in this great profession, or even to those that have been in it for a while and can commiserate with me on the lives of us special few, doomed with the privilege of developing younger players rather than winning championships. There’s so much material out there for football coaches these days, but very little of it seems to be aimed at the sub-varsity level of school ball. That’s a niche I’m hoping to fill here; to provide material and insights that are different from those competing on Friday nights for the fame and glory.
I’ll leave you with this: one of my favorite videos I’ve ever watched is a pregame speech by Drew Brees before one of his last games. In it, he explains that there are three phases to the lives of a football player. In the beginning, you PLAY. You play the game with your friends because you love the game. It’s fun. Then, you COMPETE. You start learning fundamentals, and technique. You become better at it. Then at the third stage, you become LETHAL. You learn how to execute at a high level. In High School ball, we JV coaches, we’re the COMPETE stage of that speech, and I’ve always truly believed that. It’s not the prettiest stage, the most fun stage, or the most glamorous, but by God if it isn’t the most important. Because without us, our players can’t go do work on a Friday night, and Varsity coaches couldn’t do their jobs effectively.
Next week, I’ll be going deeper into the development piece of JV and Modified football, and how to really put the onus on making kids better in the eyes of the program. Thanks for taking the time to read, and leave a comment if you liked it, or have any questions. Also, if you have any questions, don’t be afraid to DM me on X or Instagram, @CoachEaston268.
2 Responses
Very Useful Post
Awesome, coach! keep it up.