USA Football Senior Manager of Education and Engagement Andy Ryland recently volunteered to be an assistant coach for his local youth football team. A former Penn State linebacker and member of the U.S. Men’s Rugby National Team, Ryland is an expert on tackling and preparation for contact with athletes, consistent with USA Football's Football Development Model. He also assists coaches of all sports in areas of drill design and skill development. This series of journal entries chronicles his 2023 youth football experience. 

I said in my last entry that I was going to discuss all my players’ responses to being out physical-ed in a game. Well, I’m pulling a left turn to double down on something I said last year. 

My family and I arrived at the field a bit earlier than expected last night, and the games before us were both still in the third quarter. As we were the first there, we started watching some of the other games. Our teams’ game field had one team up three scores, but the other field had a close one score game. I wandered over to check it out. 

The team we had just laid an egg against was in a close game! 

They were up one score but struggling. I saw multiple penalties, a turnover, giving up a 40-yard run. It didn’t even look like the same team. The team they were playing is a team we had scrimmaged against in a joint practice. It also has one of my son’s best friends from the neighborhood and a classmate from his desk pod on it. I think I had a good feel for the team. “In theory,” they shouldn’t have been able to hang, at least not against the team we played on Saturday. 

That brings me to something I brough up last year. Consistency. 

My favorite definition of consistency is “the difference between your best and worst performance.” You will not always play your best but how far you drop determines a lot. Also, one or two outrageous performances are awesome for the highlights, but coaches prefer to know what they are going to get and what they can count on day in and day out. 

It is my experience that the younger the players are, the less consistency and the greater variance in performance they show. A huge portion of this is age and maturity. 

When you think about performance and the psychological side of it, there are a lot of traits that are just starting to be developed and learned by younger players. The ability to constantly focus, as any parent knows, is drastically impacted by what appears to be the littlest thing. A poor night’s sleep, good/bad days at school. Heck, my kids didn’t want to go to practice because they didn’t want to have to break up all the fun they were having in the neighborhood back yard game. 

Now add in practice, parents work schedules, sibling events, maybe getting driven all over town to various fields, a cool new movie or video game, nutrition, etc. I’m still flabbergasted by the amount of time the kids spend talking about Prime! It’s a sports drink! How is this a cool thing now? Am I the grumpy old man that yells at the clouds? 

Back to performance. When kids struggle with these mental abilities such as distractions, focus, energy and attention to detail, you are bound to have a couple terrible practices and probably a game that is in no way representative of your full talent. It’s part of coaching kids. By that I mean no number of lectures on what they should do or what the greats did will make up for a basic lack of psychological skills. You can plant the seed, but just as blocking takes time and reps, the ability to leave the rest of your life behind for 90 minutes and just focus on playing a football game takes practice. Sometimes it takes years to develop. 

Like all things, it’s going to be challenging. Maturity matters a ton and fixes most of your issues, but you need patience to develop it. We still plant seeds. We water them, give them sun and hope our coaching cultivates the soil. Just know, the bloom might not be until the next few seasons.   

So, you’re going to have a couple lackluster games, just like the one we had or the team that was on fire against us had one the very next time they took the field. I have the feeling one of our opponents will be on the receiving end of one of those games at some point, and we likely could have another one ourselves. Consistency. Focus. Attention to detail. Those are not attributes we often use to describe nine- and ten-year-olds in life, much less sport. 

Team update: We played much harder! The other team didn’t have great speed, so I’ll hold back on saying we played faster, but we did play with better effort. We had some big tackles. We sprang a long touchdown run off a great lead block and really got after their quarterback. 

We also had one of my favorite football moments. The ones I have been most thrilled about over the last two years: When a player makes their first tackle in a game.   

We had one of our first-year kids make a really nice, simple, but solid one-on-one tackle. It was actually a completed pass, and I think they got the first down so by all accounts a normal, unassuming play. Still, this player made his first tackle as part of the team to help us win. He has tackled in practice but in the game, in front of fans and opponents, he did it.  Every time that happens and a youngster breaks that barrier, I couldn’t be more proud!