The Trials of A Football Coach Down Under
May 6th, 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.
The season is but two weeks away, and now things have started to get really interesting:
Over the past few years, the Eagles have required the use of “loan football players”, which were basically players from other football teams coming down on gameday to fill out the club’s roster. I say fill out because the team consistently had no more than 16 players on their active roster, a number of whom were hurt and were only there as stand-ins.
This season, with our official playing roster somewhat more robust (20), we haven’t had a need for loan football players, as such. However, in our league, one team based out of a local university, has a roster of well over 60 players. Last season, they split the squad into an A and B team. This year, due to a lack of coaching, they’ve chosen instead to offer their rookies and third stringers to us as part-time players. They’d train with us once a week and be on our sideline on game-days.
We had our first joint training session this past Sunday, and despite gale force winds and temperatures in the low 40’s, had a respectable turnout of about 20 players, about a 50/50 split. The session, as a whole, worked quite well, with players and coaches on both teams mixing and learning from each other. The obvious challenge of this arrangement is not only can the players work together, but how quickly can the “Foreign Legion”, as they’re called, learn our playbooks? While neither playbook is by any means complicated, they now have to ditch the playbook they had been learning and learn a whole new one in a matter of weeks. It’ll be interesting to see how they go.
Our season starts in just over 2 weeks - I can’t wait.
