Customer Reviews

Developing a Successful Football Program: From A to Z and X's to O's

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book contains principals and drills that can be applied to any level program. This book was in a coaching manual form and was distributed for a Football Program in my area. The success from one year to the next was dramatic. Now that this manual has been detailed and formatted into a book with schematics it is even more comprehensive. There is something for everyone. I used the manual and now have read the book. Coaches new and old will find things that are encouraging and useful. The book is filled with passion and identifies important coaching points for each drill. I have given my old manual copy to a coach at another program and he is now buying the book. I wish this book was available when I started.

This book is possibly one of the best youth football books out there. It is geared toward youth football but at the sametime is in depth. Where as a typical youth football book is extremely vanilla and extremely basic this book has in depth X's and O's but at the sametime can still be applied at the youth level.It also has detailed explanation of how to play each positon along with drills. This is a must buy.

Overall the book is pretty good. It has some great advice concerning practice planning and organization plus a lot of good drills. It covers all the areas I think should be covered when developing a program. However there are quite a few typographical errors and a couple of the illustrations don't match the description in the text. Naturally that can lead to some confusion. It would also be a much better book with some good photos. There aren't any photos in the book and some techniques are very difficult to understand without a visual reference.

Everything in this book is good, solid information. I would have liked to have seen a few more, "out of the box" ideas, but for coaches or athletic directors, this book would be a useful resource.

The book has a bloated writing style that makes reading it much slower than ideal. It's almost as if the author wants to make a fat book rather than a crisp concise hard hitting book. Here's just an example from page 29.

"Motion is the movement of a running back during the snap of the play. Motion is used to change formations and confuse the defense. Terminology varies greatly from offense to offense but the types of motion are similar. The most important thing to remember is that the back cannot be moving forward at the time of the snap. Only one player can be moving at the same time. If two players move at once they must reset in their stance along with the rest of the team before the snap. This would be considered a shift, not motion. Motion can begin after a shift as long as the entire team is set for at least one second."

PLEASE! The author should assume the reader knows the basic rules and not insult us with having to wade through that to read his section on motion! Now did that passage just quoted really say anything worth the time spent reading it? This is the type of thing that Lewis Carol in "Alice In Wonderland" aimed at: to say a lot of words but not mean anything clearly. The whole book is filled with this sort of verbage.

Now this is way too basic for a book entitled "Developing a Successful Football Program". The book seems to have been written for the entry youth coach but then the author decided to try to aim for a higher level. He doesn't reach it. This book is okay for a youth coach. Don't use it for "building" a higher level program. It's way too basic and isn't comprehensive at higher levels of play. How many 4-4 defenses do you see in the largest high schools in the nation?

The book would be far better if edited to about 30 to 50% of its current size. Get rid of the fat. The reader doesnt' have time to wade through it all to get to the meat. If you searching for high quality, keep looking.