A New Football Season Down Under
Mar 25th, 2009 by Coach DeLorm
Here is another great post from football coach Dan Levin. He is a Head Coach of a football team in Australia. If you would like to contribute to the site please drop me a line using our contact form.
Well, we’ve moved into pads, and now things have started to get very interesting:
For the first few weeks of the season, we had approximately 16 people at practice, with another 4 out with various injuries or illnesses, or other commitments, giving us a stable squad of 20. Once the hard work started well…we had some considerable drop off.
As I said, my job is to reverse a losing culture. One way of doing that is to make these guys realize that Gridiron is NOT easy. It’s not a game where you can go down to a park with some friends, put the pads on and pretend to be a football player. It requires hard work and dedication. The word on this team is that’s exactly what they did for years. From day one, we were working hard. Running, pushups, and technique work - I pushed my team. A number of players from the past season - guys who were identified by other players as lacking dedication and commitment - suddenly stopped showing up to training. No phone calls, no e-mails, no excuses. They just stopped showing up.
I’m a firm believer that if people want to play, they know where we are. I’m going to play the guys that want to be there, not the guys who I have to beg to get to come down.
As such, our numbers have dwindled to 8-12 at practices - which makes it incredibly difficult to get anything accomplished other than
technique. While there’s a fair bit to go over, I have to start installing our schemes if we’re to have a chance at being competitive this season. We’ve only installed two plays on offense, and even then we’ve not had a full offensive line at practice.
To make matters worse, for some reason our training venue has been usurped by a local Australian Rules team - not to mention some of our
lights are broken (we only train at nights because of work commitments). Seems like our guys can’t catch a break at the minute.
We need to have 20 players registered by this Monday. We’re at 19 now, but I have no idea if we’ll get it. Here’s hoping.
