The Australian Gridiron: Game 1
May 29th, 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.
After months of pre-season football conditioning, technique drilling, and play
install, we had our first football game of the season. Well, the dream of an
unbeaten season washed away pretty quickly.
Things started well enough, opening up with a 50-yard bomb that no one
was expecting but us. We’d have scored a touchdown if the receiver
kept his feet. We couldn’t get the ball in the end zone though, and a
FG attempt went awful, and we lost a bit of momentum at that point.
We played hard in the first half, keeping things close at 11-6, but
the line got tired having to go both ways and eventually things broke
down and we ended up losing 38-6. It was a solid first effort from
the team in what really could be considered their first quality game
in a year.
The game was a huge learning experience for not only our players, who
were effectively all rookies up to that point, but also for myself as
a player-coach. Aside from playing 5 positions on the day
(G/T/DT/DE/FB), I had to keep conscious of the insanely accelerated
play clock (now 40 seconds from previous play as per college rules),
and player substitutions. That last one was a killer. As players
tired or got hurt, they pulled themselves out of the game…and didn’t
replace themselves. This constantly left us with people missing from
the huddle, forcing me to burn timeouts - and I LOATHE wasting
timeouts. Many times during change of posession plays guys were
aimlessly wandering around on the sidelines, not paying attention to
the game. As much as I wanted to get mad at them for not paying
attention, I had to realize that for more than 3/4 of these guys, this
is their first game. They have no idea what to do or how to behave on
the sideline. And without another coach on the sideline to be in
charge of personnel changes, there was no one to herd the cats. It’s
the smallest, simplest thing to overlook as a coach - after all, who
thinks about player substitution rules at practice? But when you’re
the one and only - it’s just another thing to keep in mind.
38-6 sound like a beatdown, and in some ways it was. However,
considering that this team lost every game last season by an average
margin of 60 points, a 32 point loss is a moral victory - albeit a
small one. We have tougher competition next week, but I expect that
many of the mistakes that cost us in the first game will be corrected
by this weekend. Bring on Game 2.
