First year coach

I am not sure how qualified I am to answer your question but I will give you my 2 cents.

Pursuit is truly two things and that being angles and hustle. There are a number of good pursuit drills for both team and position and they also work well as conditioning or warm ups. You'll get the angles down doing those. The hustle part is attitude. It is letting them know they will fly to the ball..all of them will fly to the ball. You expect it of them and they should expect it of eachother. If you have to jerk a kid because he wont run then do it. They will being to understand. I would also do pursuit drills in every practice. Now your OLB question depends on a few things such as scheme and alignment. the way I teach it is get even and keep leverage. If my LB can get there and make the tackle great but if not all he has to do is stay even and keep leverage till help comes either from a corner or from inside. What he can not do is fly out to far to creat a lane between himself and the inside or jump up field with a bad angle to allow the corner.

As far as offense it all depends on your concept of exciting. Winning is exciting. If you do things right the no one cares because you are winning. We run mainly a power I with a few simpel formation adjustments. I also use a little single wing (still run my base offense) and a little gun (wrist coaches for the route packages). I will warn you that unless you have taught yourself a good deal about being a QB it has to be very very simple. Some of the worse stuff at this age group is someone teaching QBs that does not understand the position. You now only have to teach them the mechanics but also have to be able to deal with the mental part of the game. Your passing game changes with each QB.

Now if you liek a good mix and want something a little exciting and different but sound then I would look at what other teams are running that you play. Whatever they run you don't..or at least not the same formations. Formations are your friend at this level. With a little formation adjustment you can get the recevier you want open with a little movement. I coach the same age group and we get about 30 pts a game or so. Shifting and motion is not hard to teach and it gives the things some different looks while keeping teaching small. the kids like it because it looks like the NFL. If you can run no huddle (wrist coaches, hand signals, whatever) then that can be an exciting offense adjustment to run. No huddle also helsp practice in a lot of ways. Tell us what you are thinking and I am sure you can get some help.

Thanks coach! The information on the OLB was especially helpful.

An offense I like is the spread option. The wrinkle I'd like to add will be to include a TE, sometimes go with two TEs. I believe if you have a QB that can throw it a little, it should provide some match up problems. I'm still getting input from other coaches.