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If you’re coaching youth football you are always watching for new ways to teach the skills to your youngsters. Here are three ideas that work well with even your 5 year olds. But, don’t be fooled because they will work with older kids as well.

Color Coding
Since I was coaching a team of first-time 5-year olds, I found that identifying positions by color worked well. Our practices include a magnetic whiteboard with colored magnets and the boys wear colored shirts which corresponds to their position color.

Our playbook was created with PowerPoint utilizing the same color scheme. For games, the boys wear colored wristbands-again corresponding with their position color.

I plan on expanding their vocabulary in the coming months – but for now they understand the two running positions are blue and green (running backs).

Hand-Off Drill
This is probably an old drill and I know I didn’t invent it. To coach a 7 year old team that can’t get the hand-off down I came up with this.

Put 2 cones about 5 yards apart and put a kid on each side. Have them go around with one bal–just handing to each other making sure the proper hand is up. They should learn quickly!

Snap Drill
My 7U QB was having problems receiving the snap. As much as we told him to keep the base of his palms together, he kept pulling his hands apart which was causing problems with holding onto the football.

We took a wristband and stretched it out a bit and placed it around his wrists to keep his hands together. This easy and cheap trick seemed to really help him…problem solved!

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