Substitutions

[Kaatz99 0]

Folks,

First year coach of K-1st graders, the info on this site is very helpful. One thing I cannot find is how other coaches do substitutes. I have 9 players, it is 5 on 5 (coach QB) and I want to make sure everyone gets a fair shake at playing each "position". Does anyone have a reference or other tool to help sub players in an out. Of course, I also want to make sure I have a decent team on both the offensive and defensive side of the ball.

Thanks in advance!

[Orange 26]

This has been asked before but I think its worth repeating. I would divide the kids into two equally competent squads. Since you have 9, one squad would have 4 and one would have 5. During the first half of the game squad 1 plays offense and squad 2 plays defense. During the second half you reverse it so squad 1 plays defense and squad 2 plays offense. You then supplement the short squad with a rotating player from the 5-man squad.

This system is simple since you don't have to worry about subbing in and out too much (other than for the short squad). Every player will play just about the same amount of playing time and no less than 50% of the game. Plus every players will get to play an equal amount of defense and offense.

[Kaatz99 0]

Awesome...that confirms what I was thinking. Thanks for the suggestion!

[Coach Rob 26]

Agree with Orange, especially at K-1st level. Throw a few of the stronger players on each squad to make things even skill-wise. Strongly suggest having a parent track ball touches on the side.

Good luck!

[tom48160 0]

We started out with an 8 player roster. One player brought their cousin, and we also added a friend's kid to bring our number up to 10. Perfect, right? The league then added 2 more players to my roster. Who knows, maybe the league thought I could handle it. No question this makes substitution patterns tougher to make. I talked about this in my season thread, so I'll copy in what I wrote there:

Our roster is larger than I'd like for a 5v5 league. We have 12 players. To me, teams need to be capped at 2x the number of players that can be on the field at a time. That way, coaches can go to their players' parents and say with confidence that their kids will be able to play no less than half the game. I prefer having 10 players so we can split them into 2 squads. Squad A plays offenseand Squad B plays defense in the first half. The squads then switch offense/defense for the second half. If we have less than 10 players, we can rotate players in from the squad on the sideline, but every player would play at least half the game. When you have more than 10 players, now you have to build in a rotation of players who sit out an extra turn. If squads have 6 players each, as my team stands to have, a player who is rotating out can feel like they're out of the action forever.

Let's say that squad B is on defense for the first half. We start the game with the ball, so Squad A starts the game off the field. The offense drives the ball down the field and scores (ideally!), then Squad B takes the field on defense minus the player who is rotated out to start the game. When posession changes, Squad A takes the field again. That's three posessions where a player has yet to see the field. That's forever for a younger kid. This issue is similar to the fact that we only have one football and everyone wants touches. I think our team has bought in to the fact that we spread out touches and the better everyone plays, the more we posess the ball, and the more touches everyone can get. Not even getting on the field for a good chunk of time is the type of thing that can get a kid down and can make parents/family flip out.

I track practice attendance, and that will help guide my selections of players who rotate out first, but over the course of a game, we'll get to players who have perfect attendance rotating out as well. I don't want parents to see this and then feel that attendance doesn't matter.

I even went back to the league and offered to coach two teams in the same league. My plan was to sucker my defensive coordinator to coach both teams' D and I would coach offense for both teams. That way, when our two teams met, there would be no conflict of interest--I'd want my offenses to score on every posession and he'd want his defenses to stop us every time. I also offered to take on any more latecomers that wanted to sign up after practices started, because a 6 person roster for a 5v5 team is cutting things close.

The league didn't want me to coach two teams but instead tried to convince a coach from last season to take on a team. That process took a week and ended with the other coach not coming back. In the meantime, we've conducted our practices with 12 players. This has made even scrimmaging amongst ourselves difficult, as the two players subbed out were likely to wander around or rejoin their parents in the fans' section. I'm going to try to recruit some parents to help manage the sidelines and substituting, since the existing coaches are still herding cats to an extent. I just hate having kids sit out--I'd rather have them active, which is why we've run a lot of drills to this point.

[Johnp2 21]

I would not concern yourself too much on getting players equal playing time in each game, but instead get them equal playing time for the season as a whole. By that, some kids will play three quarters, and some will play two. In the next game, the ones that played three quarters, play two....etc.

Just track how many quarters each player plays in the games and make new lineup each game.

If you try to focus on getting each player equal time (i.e. down to the minute) in each game it can become too much.

Remember, you can still do this AND have separate squads.

Lineup.doc

[Johnp2 21]

Also, I agree having 12 players on 5v5 team is too much. I would not be happy about it, especially if other teams don't have that many.