Overload!!

Coach,

I tend to use quite a few formations when compared to most youth teams I've seen. Formations are great for creating confusion with youth defenses provided your kids are not too confused on their assignments to take advantage of it! My rule is that I must be willing to run at least 4 plays out of a formation before I will consider adding it to our offense. If you allow yourself to run only 1 or 2 plays from any particular formation, a competent scouting job by your opponent should result in their defense having an answer for you on gameday! One other thing to consider is what alignments are you attempting to take advantage of or what adjustments are you counting on the defense to make that will create an improved opportunity for success on that play from that formation. If the formation does not improve your chance of success substantially then I would argue that you'd be better off continuing to work on executing that play better from an existing formation.

My team (10-12 age group) utilizes these formations: I / offset I (King/Queen) / Twins/ Gun Cluster (openside trips) / Gun Bunch / Gun / Single Wing. Hope this helps and I look forward to more discussions! Thanks.

Coach,

Thanks for the advice. We normally start the first week of August with a base formation. We teach 8 plays out of that formation..5 runs, three passes:

1. sweep
2. counter
3. dive
4. power(off tackle)
5. trap

6. 3 step pass
7. bootleg pass(waggle)
8. sprintout pass

Once we have those 8 plays down in our base formation then we begin to learn those plays out of similar formations. For example, if our base set is an I pro, we will learn to run these out of a twins set, two tight end set, power I, etc. We'll still run a lot of the same plays, we'll just change the look a little.

Tim