Soph Starting Varsity and JV

This is a situation that we encounter often, being a small 2A school (second smallest in 8 classes). Our philosophy is basically what Coach Easton said - if the kid is good enough to start varsity, he will play varsity, but if he is only going to see spot/situational duty, he will play frosh-soph.

We have a kid who will be a sophomore next and will probably start for us on the offensive line on the varsity team. However, he is a good linebacker, too, but not good enough to be a varsity starter. Right now, our plan is to play him on defense in the Frosh-Soph game and to play him on offense in the varsity game.

Another concern for us is that we will only have about 19 varsity players (juniors and seniors) next year. Does anyone else have experience with running practices with such small numbers of kids? How do you run practices when you don't even have enough players to scrimmage against?

I agree with the other two posts. I say if the kid is going to play less than half of the snaps of the game, put him on JV and let him play there. There is no substitute for actually playing the game, whether it is on a lower level or not. Playing is the best tool for improvement. Now this doesn't have to be written in stone. If he plays on the lower level and is just absolutely wrecking the competition and you don't feel he is getting anything out of it, move him up and let him get into the game. You never know, he may wind up displacing whoever was in front of him on the varsity. I'm not a huge fan of shuttling a kid back and forth between teams. While the varsity and JV may be running essentially the same plays, sets, etc., coaches always put thier own spin on things. He would benefit more from steadily being on one team or the other. In the case of small numbers being a problem, I'd have the varsity and JV work together on a lot of things, esp. in positional periods. This would help develop kids on both levels. The varsity kids could help with the JV and the JV would benefit from working with guys who are on a higher level.

Just my opinion on the situation. I could be wrong. Hope it helps.

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Originally posted by: TIGER ONE
THE WAY I HAVE ALWAYS DONE IT, IS TO JUST GO HALF LINE IF YOU ARE FORCED TO WORK WITH OUT AT LEAST 22 PLAYERS. (HALF LINE IS TO WORK FROM THE CENTER OVER TO ONE SIDE OR THE OTHER) YOU SHOULD HAVE ENOUGH TO GO 9 ON 9 (WHICH IS BETTER THAN 7 ON 7) IN THE PASSING GAME WORK. I'M SURE YOU KNOW THAT EACH PLAYER HAS TO HAVE AN OFFENSIVE, DEFENSIVE AND SPECIAL TEAMS ASSIGNMENT WITH THAT FEW PLAYERS.

Coach Easton

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Coach -

When you go 9 on 9, which positions would you not use? We are predominately a single-back/spread team.

I like the half-line stuff. It's a good way to get quality scout team personal that will give your starters a good look.

During my soph. year we had small #'s, and even fewer the next year, so there were a lot of us soph's playing varsity and JV. We had our JV games either on mon. or tues. each week for 6 weeks, we practiced with the varsity and saw a lot of time on the scrub team going against the other varsity players. On saturday mornings we had a JV walk through practice. Our JV coaches were our varsity position coaches as well. It was tough either playing in a game or going against the starting varsity every day as a soph. but I believe it paid off dividends in the years to come. I played WLB on the varsity level and MLB on the JV team. I also played WR and QB, but saw sparce reps at WR in the JV games.

Thanks for all of the opinions guys. I got 6 full quality pages from your opinions and my own as well. I'm sure my prof. will be very pleased, as the requirement for the essay was 2-3 pages! I didn't think about this before, but there are a lot of variables that must be looked at when considering the decision to play the soph. on varsity as well, so I think it would be wrong to have a definite set policy of either playing or not playing any particular soph. on the varsity team. You must really look at all of the variables involved. Thanks again!