A Football Season On The Brink
Jul 16th, 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.
Our football season has reached the halfway point and the issue of where to go to from here has never been a more difficult one.
In short, we’re winless, we’re injured, and we’re lacking commitment.
In our first game we dressed 29 players. In last week’s game, we dressed 14 - a forfeit (teams must field at least 15). We had one player from another team dress for the game to give us 15, but it was effectively a forfeit. We played until midway through the 3rd quarter, where after I myself went out with a shoulder injury, and two players had knee injuries, I threw in the towel. The reasons for the player dropoff are many but we had players out injured, traveling, sick, studying for college exams (which are held during the season), or just AWOL.
The sad thing is that this team is making progress. We’re moving the ball, we’re scoring, we’re making stops. Are we good? No. But we have the potential to be competitive. We’ve had two halves where we were within a touchdown of the opponent - which is actually more of an accomplishment than it sounds like for this team. It’s important to remember that every single football player on our team is effectively a rookie. They’ve never played football before, or if they had, was given such inadequate coaching that they were virtually unusable. Our average player has no experience, while most other clubs have guys with 5+ years or more. We’re simply not on the same playing field - not yet.
After last season, most of the team quit. I can’t blame them. Losing 60-0 each week and getting hurt and paying AND traveling for the privilege isn’t exactly a pleasant proposition. However, with that we lost about 10 players who had talent in a variety of areas. They weren’t good, but over time could have become good players. Now it looks like the pattern is repeating.
It was said before I got down there that a team in this location wasn’t viable, no matter who the coach was. A team previously folded and was then reborn as this squad. I refused to believe it. I chose to believe that given good football coaching (or short of that, just being competent), there could be a turnaround. I wasn’t expecting worst to first, but at least we’d have committed football players who would stick out the season. Right now, everyone is questioning that.
We’ve had a team meeting to discuss it. I’m going to call for a players only meeting so they can discuss the problem amongst themselves. We can’t continue on like this. We have one more game before 2 bye weeks, and then 5 games to finish out the season. I don’t want to “just finish the season”. I want to get better while doing it.
