Youth Coaching Staff Assignments

One other thing I would say in calling both offense and defense is that to the extent you can make one side of the ball self-sufficient (likely the one you're not as comfortable calling on the spot), it makes things a lot easier.

For example, we have tried to make our basic defensive design very simple, so that we can add adjustments (primarily based on our opponents' formational tendancies, which we spend a lot of time breaking down in film review) on a week to week basis. We spend a significant amount of practice time on our defensive adjustments, so our players can run the show on game day. As a result, our defense runs itself for the most part, in terms of being prepared for what we expect our opponent to do, and we as coaches can concentrate on supplementary issues such as when/where we want to blitz, solidify our front against the run by reducing, drop a guy out of the box because we've forced them to throw the ball, etc.

This frees us up to spend more time during the game dealing with adjustments we need to make in the offensive game plan, blocking schemes, formation selection, creating mismatches, etc. Having a very detailed offensive game plan also helps in this because you've made your decisions as to what you want to do by down, distance, hash, time, field position, etc. during the week, when you are thinking very logically, so you don't make short-sighted emotional decisions during the game. Hope this helps.