Time is important to coaches, players and parents. As coaches, we expect parents to make sure their children show up on time. If a player is late, he may miss warm ups, important technique teaching or implementation of new schemes or concepts.

Many youth football coaches teach in progressions, so if a player arrives mid-progression, it forces the coach to start over for everyone. In youth football, we limited practice time to begin with, and unlike college, NFL or even many high school players, youth players usually play offense, defense and special teams.

The bottom line is practice time is valuable. Still, some youth football parents won’t go the extra mile or make arrangements to ensure their children get to practice on time. This shows a lack of respect for the coach and families who do their best to meet on schedule.

Unfortunately, many youth coaches are just as responsible for this problem because they show the same lack of respect for the parents’ time. When a coach says practice is supposed to be over at 8 p.m., but he holds the kids back for another 10 minutes to continue drills, add a play in or give a motivational talk, he is doing the same thing to the parents that the parents did to him. If the coach won’t end on time, why in the world should parents feel they should show up on time?

Before I had kids of my own, I used to go over from time to time. I thought that as a volunteer with no kids on the team, parents should be thankful I was there and that if I felt that we needed five to 10 extra minutes to wrap things up, that wasn’t a deal. Fast forward 15 years to an experience I had after I got married and had three kids of my own.

It was a nice spring Sunday afternoon, and we had just gotten out of church. We had heard an inspiring message and were waiting in line to pick our kids up from their Sunday school classes. These classes were taught by kind unpaid volunteer teachers. Sound familiar?

The kids were always scheduled to be done at noon, and it was already 12:10. I could see through the windows that the teachers were taking their time wrapping things up, and while they had more teachers in the room, there was just a single person helping to check kids out one at a time to a long line of 70-plus parents. Every child was taking at least a minute to go through the checkout process, and we were about halfway through the line. Doing the math, I calculated that we would get out of there about 12:45, about 30 minutes later than we had planned.

The teachers didn’t know that we had plans to be at a graduation ceremony that day. It was an hour away and started at 1:30 p.m. With this delay, we wouldn’t be allowed to enter late and would be letting down someone very important to us who had overcome some pretty big obstacles in order to graduate. While I didn’t say anything, under the surface my blood was boiling. These people had zero respect for my time.

What about my youth football parents? What if a dad had a bad day at work and my holding him up 15 extra minutes made him 15 minutes late for picking up his nervous 10-year-old daughter from her gymnastics class across town?

Most families today have lots of things going on. Both parents work. Kids are going to lots of different activities. Everyone is busy. Don’t hurt relationships with your parents by going over on time. If practice is supposed to be over at 8 p.m., make sure at 7:59 you are out of there. It’s your job to make sure you get everything in you want to get in during the budgeted time. We all have to make compromises when it comes to what we want to accomplish in a practice and what we can actually do.

When parents, players and coaches see that you value time and commitments, that will set the example for them to follow.

Dave Cisar has coached youth football for more than 20 years. He founded and ran two large youth football organizations in Omaha and Lincoln, Neb. He has been named a Nike Coach of the Year designate five times and has spoken at more than 180 coaches clinics worldwide. Dave helps thousands of youth coaches and teams with his book and Instructional DVDs offered at http://winningyouthfootball.com He currently resides in Lincoln, Neb. Follow him on twitter @davecisar.