Feldman: Lessons learned — about coaching and parenting — coaching my son's pee-wee team (2024)

The most profound comment I’ve ever heard in 25 years covering college football came from Greg Schiano. “There are two things every man in America thinks he can do,” the Rutgers coach once told me. “Work a grill and coach football.”

I think I can make a pretty tasty steak. I’m also wise enough to realize I really can’t coach football. Lord knows I’ve done enough fly-on-the-wall access pieces over the years where I’ve glazed over after 45 minutes of trying to keep up in a defensive staff room. I’d been an assistant coach on my son’s teams the previous two seasons, and that’s been more about helping run practices and getting kids lined up. The head coach came up with the plays and decided which ones to call in the game.

My son, Ben, a second-grader, is obsessed with football. He devours NFL Films pieces and any game highlights he can find. And since I still haven’t gotten over my own parents forcing me to shut off Monday Night Football after the first quarter throughout my childhood, I’ve given him a lot of leeway when it comes to his football watching.

He’s played in our local 8-on-8 league for three seasons and has loved it. The league, which allows for blocking and line play, has a bunch of plays nullified by penalties or dropped snaps. When I heard there was an NFL flag league 20 minutes away that was 5-on-5 and had more passing, I wanted him to try it. We knew one kid in the league from his soccer team, and that kid’s dad said their coach was great. After trading emails, we were set to join the team. But a few days later, the league sent an email saying it needed more head coaches. I ignored it, as I did the second email, but then came a third — if the league didn’t get more coaches, it might have to drop 20 kids.

And so begins the story of a dad — me — who was a reluctant youth football coach who took a career’s worth of X’s-and-O’s lessons, mantras and rants to a pee-wee league to truly learn what I actually do — and don’t — know about the sport I cover.

I really did not want to be a head coach. It was a new league for us, with different rules. Who were the kids? Where would we find a practice field? Questions I’d let other people deal with in the past. But I offered to do it. A player draft was scheduled the following Tuesday.

A few weeks after sign-up, the league had held its combine. Similar to the NFL, the players were measured by height and weight. In the NFL, players run a 40-yard dash. In pee-wee NFL, they run a 30. How far a kid can throw a football is also tracked.

My son didn’t participate in the combine. We went, but after waiting in line for an hour, we left. My son was part of about a third of the 80 kids registered in Ben’s division of first- and second-graders without combine info. Ben had also been in a baseball league, and I knew of a half-dozen other kids signed up from that league. I jotted down another half-dozen names with fast 30 times.

I went to the draft with 11 kids circled. I met the other seven coaches. But it wasn’t really a draft like I knew. Before we started, the commissioner went around the table and asked which kids the coaches already had lined up — kids previously on their teams or, in the case of two kids on my list, who were friends with someone on their teams. One dad rattled off the numbers designating all of the baseball kids I had on my list. Suddenly, I was down to one of my 11.

That’s when the “draft” actually began. I had the third pick. I spotted a kid who had one of the eight fastest 30-yard times and was one of the heaviest kids on the list. Sold.

The commissioner pointed out that my first pick also has a brother and I would be taking him too. He was about the same weight but didn’t run nearly as fast. I assumed they were twins. The rest of the draft moved slowly. Half of the kids I picked didn’t have any measurements listed. One of the fastest players I drafted was Ava, the only girl in the league.

Driving home, it dawned on me: My first pick was the same height as my son, but 40 pounds heavier, and yet ran around what I thought my son would’ve been timed. Hmmm.

Three days later, the Pee-Wee Rams had our first practice. My first pick and his brother showed up early. They weren’t twins. My first pick was a kindergartner, the younger brother of a second-grader. I soon realized his 30-time was probably a typo. We had only six kids show up. The one other kid I knew from our previous league was out of town, but his dad said he could help coach. I didn’t realize this going in, but we had a lot of younger kids. In the other sports leagues my son has played in, it was all kids in the same grade. In this league, it was first- and second-graders … plus our kindergartener.

Half our team was in first grade or kindergarten, which meant this was the first exposure to football for most of them. We practiced flag-pulling drills and I showed them one play I had drawn up on an index card. It had three receivers on one side. One receiver would run a go-route. The inside receiver would run an out-route. The outside receiver would go last and run a slant, hopefully getting open in the defense’s confusion with the crisscrossing. For about 20 minutes, the only confusion was our players trying not to run into each other. We repped that play 30 times. We didn’t leave until we had each kid do something right that we highlighted.

My son was excited after practice because he ran circles around the rest of our team. But on the way home, I kept thinking we might get blown off the field by these other teams — what if my kid ends up losing his love for football? Another parent I know had told me of a bad experience his son had with a wreck of a team that seemed to gut his boy.

I thought about that all night.

I never heard from one of the kids I’d drafted, and the dad of another kid said his son wouldn’t be able to play because it was too far away. My best hope was to add another player. I knew a college coach who just moved his family to Los Angeles. I’d met his son before; he was a first-grader, but he’d grown up around football and his parents were former college athletes. I didn’t know if he’d played before, but on his mom’s Instagram, I’d seen him smashing home runs in T-ball. The next morning, I called his dad, who said check with his wife.

We were in luck. Kannon was in.

Our first game was eight days away. I figured we should get in an extra practice since the dad from the team Ben was supposed to be on told me they’d already scrimmaged another team. I Googled some youth football plays but reasoned that’s probably what a lot of the teams were running, so I thought about some of the stuff the college coaches I know did and then tried to kid-ify them.

Mike Leach’s go-to Air-Raid play “92” made sense. Years earlier, I’d co-wrote Leach’s book, “Swing Your Sword,” and in it he shared a story of staying at his buddy Peter Berg, the filmmaker’s house. Over breakfast, Berg asked Leach for help with his kid’s team. Run a bunch of crossing routes, Leach implored. “Little kids get confused easily.” Leach said Berg’s team won a championship. I was just hoping it’d help us be competitive. I also wanted to incorporate Wake Forest’s “Slow Mesh” because it gives defenses fits since it messes with their patience.

I scheduled practices on Monday and Friday. We divided practice into four segments: warm-ups (catching the ball and stretching), flag-pulling, repping a few plays that I’d drawn up and sprints.

The rules of the league: All players are eligible receivers. Only one player can rush the quarterback and that player has to start from 10 yards behind the line. The field is 40 yards by 40 yards. On the first play in our first game, against the Chiefs, we gave up a 30-yard run in part because I didn’t understand how I should align our defenders. We were 10 yards off the line. Bad idea. Our kids, though, responded by making a goal-line stand. On offense, we hit some big plays. Kannon scored twice, weaving through the defense. Then we tried the Slow Mesh. The delayed timing of it confused a few of their defenders. Our running back found an opening and ran 35 yards for another touchdown. We had an 18-12 lead late in the game, which I almost blew. An outside run I called near our own goal line turned into a safety.

Fortunately, we hung on to win, 18-14. The kids — and their parents — were downright giddy. I kept thinking my stupid play call could’ve cost us the game. Regardless, we weren’t going to be winless!

The following Sunday, we faced the 49ers. When they came out at the coin toss, I saw they had plays diagrammed on their wristbands. They all have wristbands?!

On the first play of the game, we gave up a 35-yard touchdown run because of a zone that had been vacated. Clearly, an issue, we, er, I hadn’t fixed.

Offensively, our kids understood what I was asking them to do from the play cards. We added to the Slow Mesh. My son had watched dozens of Wake Forest plays so he had a feel for it, other than the quarterback’s “Butt Block” — that would’ve been a penalty. The third time, we lined up to run it, we put Kannon next to him, figuring the defense would go right after him. Ben knew that if they did, he would have an open receiver outside. The idea of running a real run-pass option play with a 7-year-old quarterback handling post-snap reads felt a little dicey. I can’t even get Ben to use his fork all the time. Now he’s reading the cornerback?

The play unfolded how I thought it might. The defense was aggressive. Ben saw the kid he was “reading” move and threw the pass. We got a 25-yard completion. A few plays later, Ben scored the game-winning touchdown on a 10-yard run. It looked like a funky misdirection play. After the game, Kannon’s dad asked me about what I’d called.

“That was an accident,” I explained. “(Our quarterback) turned the wrong way for the handoff but had the wherewithal to backhand Ben the ball, and he just sprinted in because the defense was drawn to the opposite side.

“Yeah, I’m definitely adding that play to our offense.” It looked like the old Statue of Liberty play. We called it Spin Draw.

On the drive home, I called Dave Clawson, the Wake Forest coach, and told him we’re running the Slow Mesh with our pee-wee team — “and, it’s working!” He got a kick out of that.

“You’re our first convert!” he said.

No other teams have tried to copy the Slow Mesh in college football. The Wake Forest staff has been tight-lipped, especially after “WakeyLeaks,” when a former Wake assistant got caught sharing their game-planning secrets with opposing coaches.

In the three seasons before Clawson’s offensive coordinator Warren Ruggiero came up with the Slow Mesh, Wake averaged 17 points. In the five seasons since, the Demon Deacons are averaging 36 points and are the only ACC team to average more than 30 points each year.

“Necessity is the mother of invention,” Clawson said. “When we got to Wake Forest, we installed a lot of the stuff that we ran at Bowling Green. We weren’t very good and a lot of the defensive lines in that league were so good. Any time we dropped back to throw, we were getting sacked. But one of the hardest things to do as a defensive lineman is transition from defending the run to defending the pass. When you know it’s pass, you get in that stance and take off. What we had to do in our league was to prevent the teams in our league from doing that.”

It’s hard to keep secrets in coaching. Most coaches concede that since rivals have your game film, they essentially can figure out what you’re doing. They’re adept at reverse-engineering things. Plus, coaches visit other staffs and secrets get out. In the case of Wake Forest’s Slow Mesh, opponents know what they’re doing. They just don’t know how. As Clawson told me, you can’t break down their film and evaluate it in a traditional way: “These route concepts have these built-in rules — if this happens, the ball goes here. Nobody quite knows our rules.”

Clawson, who began 13-24 in his first three seasons at Wake, changed how he operates because of WakeyLeaks: “We don’t share. We’re not open. Before WakeyLeaks, I was probably as open as any coach in the country. The amount that we were compromised and the number of games that probably cost us wasn’t worth it.”

I told him how we warm up on the far side of the stadium to avoid practicing our plays within the eyesight of the opponent and how I deleted a video of one of our plays that I’d posted online just in case someone might come across it and study it. I cringe at how ridiculous this all sounds.

“Welcome to the world of paranoid coaches,” Clawson said.

In Week 3, we beat the Ravens. They defended the Slow Mesh well because they weren’t very aggressive. The Slow Mesh wasn’t a factor the next week against the Cowboys, in what became another lopsided victory. Kannon got two pick-6s. Preston, the one kid I knew of from our old football league that we were able to draft, was everywhere on defense, pulling flags. Ben scored on a couple of long touchdown runs, the second one coming on our new Spin Draw play.

We were 4-0. My kid and his new friends were having a blast.

I felt fantastic on the ride home. For years, I’ve worried about how time was slipping away and my kids were growing up so fast. In the fall, I often was away on weekends, covering college football games and face-timing our twins at night. It eats at me at how often I’d jump up and leave the dinner table or walk out of their rooms because I’d gotten caught up chasing some news story. Sometimes, they were big stories. Most times, they weren’t, but I had gotten so wired for the chase that my ego and competitiveness were getting the worst of me. I knew I was missing out on moments I’d never get back.

I never had any common ground with my own father and a bond never took. Coaching this team didn’t just mean I was getting to share something that my son and I both loved, but also the 25-minute car rides to practices and games three times a week, where it was just us, meant me getting to see him develop and him getting to see me believe in him. I’d gotten inside my head so much about fielding a team, that the most important aspects of this had escaped me till that drive home. My wife and daughter would often come to the games but would leave early while Ben and I finished up.

When we walked through the door, my wife asked, “Hey, why’d you put Ben back in the game late in the second half?” I told her that we needed to practice that play in the game since we hadn’t run it much.

“We thought you were running up the score?” my wife said, as our babysitter nodded in agreement.

“Really?”

“Well…” said our babysitter, looking like she just got a whiff of bad air. My wife suggested I get the opinion of the dad who has been a college coach for more than 20 years.

That coach laughed when I called him and said, “You just coach the team how you see fit.”

The challenge with coaching youth sports is trying to do the best you can to help your team while remembering you’re coaching little kids. Your competitiveness tends to get in the way. For some, that might show as frustration with the referees. For others, it might show as frustration with the kids. For me, it surfaced with the angst when our team showed signs we were going to have much more success than I’d anticipated.

I’d initially defined success to the team as: “All we’re trying to do is be the most improved team in the league. That’s all that matters.” I’d told them that repeatedly over our first month together. I’d absorbed enough coaching mantras over the years. Some resonated with me so much that I saw the value they had in real life, away from the field — control what you can control. That’s wisdom if you can be disciplined enough to not get hung up on things you don’t have any control over.

I’d heard a thousand times from coaches I cover not to lose sight of the present and muddle up the process — or The Process, as Nick Saban has always said. “Be the most improved” felt right since it was more process-focused than results-oriented. But then, in my own head, it became about having an undefeated season and winning the championship. I didn’t say that to the team. But it was hard not to think beyond the next practice or the next game.

Football is a game wrapped up in its preparation. We romanticize stories of coaches who sleep in their offices or wake up every day at 3:17 a.m. They pour over film with the lights dimmed for hours, studying upcoming opponents to flesh out tendencies or their own teams having every drill shot from a variety of angles.

In my son’s old league, the games were filmed. As it was explained to me, the reason was so you could send the link to grandma or grandpa and they could watch the game in what was condensed to 10-minute videos. The reality: Many of the dads used it as a scouting opportunity. For me, it was also a great way to teach my son more about the game. I could show him, as a cornerback, when a running play broke to the opposite side of the field, why him not turning and running at full speed with the proper angle might’ve allowed a touchdown. That visual evidence made sense to him.

The following week, that very scenario happened again. This time, he took off and was waiting for the ball carrier near the 40-yard line. The film was invaluable because there’s just so much that goes into each play in football that it’s impossible to see live.

Before the season, I talked to one of the parents about filming our games. We played early on Sundays, and by Sunday night, Nick, our assistant coach, had the film on YouTube. My son couldn’t get enough of it. He’d study where certain plays he ran “broke open” and how defenses tried to cover our pass plays. The replays showed me things I missed in real time. The first time we ran “92” — Leach’s play — and sure enough, Dane, one of the receivers running the crossing route did slap hands with Kannon, just as we’d coached him to.

Every Sunday, we won, beginning the season 7-0 with the playoffs upcoming. Our regular-season finale was against the Chiefs. I’d learned that the Chiefs had won the league title the previous season. We’d watched them a few times playing in games after ours. They had a lot of good players.

We led 18-8 and got the ball to start the second half. The game was tight and I could feel that some of our kids were pressing. Little kids definitely don’t have poker faces. We threw an interception, and then another. The more plays the Chiefs made, the louder their families cheered, and the more frazzled our kids got. The Chiefs won, 26-24.

Our team was deflated. I wasn’t sure what to tell them. I said that I was proud of them and we’d had a great season. Before we broke our huddle, I said that the playoffs were what really mattered and if we kept playing well, we’d get to play them again. Was that really what I should have been telling them?

Each of our players seemed to be wired differently. One was overly aggressive. Another was very analytical. Another was too hard on himself. Another was easily distracted. (Well, many of them were.) What would be the best way to get them settled down?

I got a call from Chris Petersen that week. The former Boise State and Washington coach had become a colleague last season. We sat in the green room watching games every Saturday. Getting to pick his brain about plays and players and everything else that’d come up while staring at 14 TV monitors was a treat. Long before he walked away from coaching, we’d have deep conversations about the books he’d been reading. When I saw his name pop up on my phone, I asked his advice about trying to push the right emotional buttons.

Petersen had left coaching to find a better work-life balance. Several months after that, he and I had a long talk about how the grind of college football was so at odds with his own preferred temperament. I heard from dozens of people, in and out of coaching, who identified with those issues. Petersen had become a resource to coaches at all levels in all sports.

Petersen asked if I’d seen the interview Masters champion Scottie Scheffler gave the day before the final round. When asked how he’s been able to remain so calm, “He said, ‘If I win this tournament, it will change my life on the golf course, but it won’t change my personal life at home. So I’m able to play freely, knowing that the rest really isn’t up to me,’” Petersen recalled, in a tone of admiration.

​​Petersen has said half-jokingly that he wanted to come back in another life as a youth football coach and would stress how no emphasis would be put on winning the games, and that so many important life lessons can be instilled at that age. Listening to him got me thinking that the counter was also likely true — that there also could be a lot of psychological damage that could be done then as well. “They truly need to be taught how to fail the right way,” he said. “Then they can understand it is a process and that is how you learn.” He explained to me a formula he’s talked through to many coaches that he picked up from a consultant named Brett Ledbetter.

“Write this down,” he said. “Start with ‘C,’ then a greater than sign, and then ‘P.’ Then another greater than sign. Then ‘R.’ So, it’s C>P>R.”

The most important part, the C, stands for character. That, Petersen described, is how you are as a person, how you treat your teammates and your opponents. The P stands for process, which is in the details for how you play the game. Doing the little things right. “We don’t care about what the refs do. We support each other,” Petersen said.

“The ‘R’ is the least important thing, which everybody makes the most important part, and that is the result,” Petersen said. “It’s not where we’re focused. It just should be about how they compete. ‘We’re not gonna complain; we’re not gonna point fingers.’ Sometimes, the other team is just better than you, and that’s OK.”

I got his message. But not right away. I initially took it as the result didn’t matter. I’d be lying to myself, and to the kids, if I said that. It wasn’t until sitting down to write this story that Petersen’s formula clicked.

We beat the Raiders in our first playoff game and then beat the Bengals the following day. Nick, our assistant coach, and I stayed with our sons to watch the other semifinal to see who we’d play next. The Chiefs defeated the 49ers, so we’d face them for a third time. Nick noticed something he thought gave the Chiefs trouble. He suggested a new play, where we’d line up with trips to one side. At the snap, my son Ben would run back toward our quarterback (Nick’s son Preston), rolling out to the trips side to set up what felt like a reverse. Sometimes, Preston would hand it to Ben. Other times, he’d fake it and throw it to either of the receivers on the trips side.

I also had a couple of other plays I’d worked on that we’d practiced the week earlier. When the team gathered for our warm-up before the title game, I mentioned to Preston that we had some new plays. He glanced at what had grown to be a half-inch thick stack of index cards.

“All of them?” he said, bug-eyed.

“Uh … no,” I replied, realizing that I’d gone from three play cards to a dozen over the course of the season. “There’s just one new card.” Apparently, I have as much trouble self-editing in coaching as I do in my writing.

More than anything, we tried being encouraging with the kids. Ava was our pass rusher. She was one of our faster players, but this was her first season playing any football. We’d emphasized to her how important her role was. Most of the interceptions in the league occurred when the quarterback was rushed. All we needed her to do was to watch the snap and run fast at the quarterback.

Dane had been primarily our center. We knew he had good hands. We just hadn’t thrown the ball to him a lot. We were going to get him more involved. We figured they’d key on Kannon and Ben since they’d had several big plays when we faced the Chiefs previously. Dane also would have to play a lot at cornerback — something he hadn’t done much before, but we were missing one of our better players. Since it was the hottest day of our season, we wouldn’t use Dane in as many snaps at center because we didn’t want to wear him out.

Nick’s trips play got us our first touchdown. Ava and Dane had their best games of the season. My favorite moment of the season, though, was when Preston hauled in a deep pass up the right sideline, turning his body around before snagging it with one hand. It was a remarkable catch for anyone, much less a second-grader. Watching the game back the next day, I had chills hearing the excitement in his dad’s voice when his boy made that acrobatic play. We won, 18-6. Our kids were elated.

I can’t recall ever being so overcome with delight from any sporting event I’ve been at as I was watching our Rams and their families celebrate that Sunday in late April. My hunch is they wouldn’t have been quite so emotional if we hadn’t lost to this team a few weeks earlier. Nick had told them after the game that day that that loss would make them better. He was right.

A few weeks after we won our Super Bowl, I sat down with Clawson to talk about the Slow Mesh and the Pee-Wee Rams. I showed him our version of the Slow Mesh in the videos saved on my phone. “This is awesome,” he said, laughing.

I also showed him our play that became Spin Draw.

“That’s the same-side handoff stuff that we’re doing,” Clawson said, as he got up and began to realign some nearby wooden chairs. “Nowadays, what so many defenses do, is there’s the three-technique and there’s the five. Everybody wants to put their three-technique to the side of the back because if you’re running the traditional zone read, you want that end to play both. But if this guy is a shade, that gap gets so wide that he can’t play both …”

It was around this point of our conversation that I remembered that I really can’t coach football.