Attendance problem

Not to be overly dramatic by my previous response, but I understand where you are. I currently have 17 kids on my roster, but they are always there all the time. It's a heck lot more enjoyable coaching 17 kids who care than 30 who don't. I wish you luck and God bless. I ENVY your situation.

Coach Lou is right on.

Play with the 25. The rest will get the idea. Those 25 will know if your character holds water. If you do not play the 15 guys ( they could be great practice kids) the 25 that are doing what you require will go to the depths for each other and you. Your captains will come from that 25 and later in the season as the other 15 get the idea those captains should be involved in any change of heart on playing time.

Oldreptile brings up a good point. At my school there was never any hazing but freshmen were used as tackling bags and got beat up in practice by the varsity. As a consequence alot of kids did not come back out after thier 9th grade year, or avoided it altogether. The first thing we changed when I came in was this attitude. It has gotten better each year but the seniors still complain that "we got beat up so we are gonna beat them" and this effected our team this year b/c the kids we just graduated were not team oriented guys. They were "me" guys. Finally now I am rid of all the players that were in the program before I arrived and now all the kids are on the same page regarding philosophy. As is tradition in many schools our freshmen had to carry everything out and put all equipment away...I changed that and had each class rotate, when it was last year's seniors turn they left everything out....man I have never made a group of kids run until they puked before but that blatent act of disrespect had to be dealt with.

Coach,

Just make sure that you follow through with what you say to the kids that do not attend. Be a man of your word, but remember not to paint yourself into a corner and say something off of the cuff that you will later regret. For example : If you tell the kids that don't come that they won't start then make sure that you follow through with your word and don't start them. If you go back on your word, you'll open up another can of worms with the 25 kids that have been coming, and you don't want to lose their respect.

Good Luck.

I'm coaching at a school that has never had football before. We played a JV season last year and will be playing our first Varsity schedule in 2004. For the previous 2 summers, I have given away "Black Shirts" to players with 85% or better attendance in summer conditioning. These are the only guys eligible to be captains and they also have certain other perks. Hopefully, it will become a pride thing - at least that is my intent.

In our program all players from 10-12 practice together. We normally have all of our kids at practice, but we had a high rate of kids leaving earlly or being injured or sick on Monday but fine on Wed. This year we set an attendence policy to letter. You had to make 90% of all practices and participate in practice. Meaning that if you are injured,sick, or unable to practice you don't get credit for attendence. This is basiclly a rule for our young players we never have starters miss practice unless it is an emergency. We very rarely had a player miss practice this year and we had all of young guys there to get better as well as run the scout team stuff. It was good because it was hard to find guys standing around that weren't dressed to set up things that we had in the past. If guys don't show for practice we don't play them for a designated amount of time depending on why they missed. If a guy has a problem making practice we take his helmet so the next time he shows up we can talk to him. If it gets to that point we let them know the next missed practice they will be turing in there stuff. We don't have too many cases like that in the 10 years Ihave been with our program.

I know of a coach who makes summer weightrom manditory. if you have more then 3 unexcused absences the best you can do is play j.v. if you are a sr you have just cut yourself from the program unless you want to be a JV player. now if you get a note from your parents saying you are going to be gone that is fine. he will call your parnets aswell to findout if you are going to be gone after he gets a note.

he started out with 28 players(school of 1400) on varsity. this past season they had 80+jrs and srs.

the first year he had acouple srs. who thought they were above the summer workouts. He cut his starting tailback because the kid decided not to showup from summer conditioning. in 14 yrs this coach has 5 state championships and 3 runnerup. everyonce in awhile he has a d1 kid but year in and year out the best his kids play is d3 college football.

I know of a coach who also took over a small schools(275students total). his first year the jrs and srs thought they didnot have to work hard because they were upper classman. I mean he had like 3 srs and 6 jrs. one day he decided to start all the sophs. they had 16 of them. those sophs started fro 3 yrs. first year they sucked, the next year they were okay, there sr year they won state. they jr class won state the next season. now he routinely has 80 boys(9-12) out for football. that is alot of boys at a school of 275 total students you go to figure there is abotu 135 boys in the school. his goal is to get all the boys out for football. they only have football in the fall.