Many freshman or sophomore youth soccer coaches make a big mistake with their teams trying to tie together offenses that are like oil and water. These well-meaning guys watch something on TV or get excited about what someone says in a football forum post, and suddenly they have fallen in love with a play. They see something else on YouTube of a high school team running X and now they have to put X on their offense. Then someone convinces them that they need to play Y to make sure they keep the Linebackers “honest” and they feel compelled to add Y. Then they go to a clinic and drink a high-scoring college coach’s koolaid and feel like they need to. get the Z to play offense.

Before you know it, they have an “offense” that is not an offense at all, but just a combination of unrelated plays with little in common. There is no what my friend Ted Seay calls “Unity of Apparent Intent” in crime. When you have a bunch of unrelated single-trick ponies welded together, there’s no apparent drive of intent and defenses eat those kinds of “offenses” alive.

What makes series-based offenses like Single Wing, Wing T, Double Wing, Dead T, Flexbone, or Veer Offenses so effective is that each play in a series starts to look like one play, but it can be many. They take advantage of what the defense gives them, put the defense in a real conflict and have an answer for when a team is stopping or exaggerating a facet of the game series. These offenses share a general philosophy and consistent blocking rules, schemes, and techniques that allow players a reasonable chance of success.

I recently had a conversation with a freshman head coach, who wanted to run Single Wing and marry it to some Midline concepts. Mind you, this coach had never run the single wing or the midline. I have a good friend who is very successful with Single Wing at the high school level in the largest class in Florida. He’s also a former Flexbone player who did very well with that offense as well. When I asked him about Midline and Single Wing, he laughed. He felt that even though he LOVES the midline, there was no way he could improve on the midline AND on the single wing in the same season. He just didn’t have time to practice.

Now if a high school coach in Florida who KNOWS the midline and single wing that also has Spring Football and is a two-platoon team feels like he doesn’t have enough time to do both, does he know of a youth coach who hasn’t either. Run y ​​Do you have much less practice time, with many children playing both ways (less offensive practice time) and with younger children having time? No, but all the logic in the world probably won’t stop this determined youth coach and he will most likely fail. Lots of guys try to marry incompatible partners like Zone Read and a lock-out system. Like the midline, zone reading takes time and the midline is a completely different approach to blocking. Each takes an enormous amount of time to function consistently. Of course anyone can do a horrible job, what does that prove? What is important is that you can run well consistently.

We don’t have to look any further than the University of Nebraska offense in the last two years. They tried to tie together a power and zone running game and the zone reading option with their existing west coast style offense. The experiment failed miserably, the offense rated in the 15th to 20th percentile by most measures, while failing to score in the big games, while one of the top 10 best-rated defenses carries the water. Needless to say, the NU Offensive Coordinator was fired this year and a new Coordinator stated that his team would no longer be “executing a lot of plays, but an offense.” Hmm, sounds familiar.

I guess this youth coach who tries so hard to mix his oil and water with the single wing and midline is going to have the same result, a season where they don’t score very often. Like many, he will simply attribute it to poor talent, when the real reason was arrogance in decision-making. Don’t mix incompatible plays and offenses if they don’t fit into your current philosophy, blocking schemes and blocking techniques, it’s a recipe for a season of disaster. If there is no apparent unity of intention in what you are attempting, seriously consider getting rid of the work. One of the goals in youth soccer training is to put kids in a position to score as many points as they can, without seeing who is the smartest person in the room.