What equipment should youth football teams have?
by John T. Reed

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Copyright John T. Reed

Here are the items of equipment I recommend for a youth football team following my books. I have deliberately tried to keep the amount of equipment you buy to a minimum. Most of my recommendations are for what not to buy.

Buy:

• 8 Half-round dummies per team. Rogers has a typical size 14 inches wide by 52 inches high. Use for landing pads in tackling and kick blocking drills and as “boards” to keep linemen’s legs spread when practicing blocking.
• 3 round dummies per team. 14 inches in diameter by 52 inches high. Use as hurdle to lift ball carrier over in tackling drills and as target of gang-tackling drills.
• Scrimmage line. Good for practicing offensive backfield without line. Must be customized to your team’s line splits and body widths. May be crucial for triple-option teams. Some teams use old fire hoses for this purpose. Whatever you use must be heavy enough to lie flat in spite of wind and player traffic and must be customized to your team. A reader told me, “I found a cheap and durable method: use the drainage hose from pools used to backwash the sand filters. Go down to local pool supply and buy the blue thick vinyl hose, which is usually wound in a coil so the hose is flattened.  Then cut to length, mark with permanent marker, and voila, your own durable line for relatively inexpensive cost.  From a 50 LFT coil, you can make two or more.”
• Day-glo rings. Good to mark boundaries of drills, turning points, alleys, locations of players, and so forth.
• Ball-throwing/kicking machine. Needs electricity. Enables receivers and defensive backs to get many reps practicing catching without wearing out arms of players or coaches. God must have loved wide receivers because he made so many of them. These machines enable coaches to balance the need to give reps to many receivers with the fact that there are far fewer people available to throw passes.
• Dial-a-Down. Usually required and should be. Use at practice.
• Chains. Usually required and should be. Use at practice.
• Score board with game clock, down, distance, period, ball on, time outs left, score. Should have one for practice field, too, if you do not practice on your game field.
• Play clock (if allowed in your league) You have difficulty running a proper slowdown if you do not have a visible play clock.
• Field yard line stencils. These provide additional landmarks for alignment of players and pass patterns.
• Protective plastic cup chin straps.
• Scouting software—if you are going to use it.
• Ball bag for each team.
• Kickoff and field goal tees.
• Wrist play/assignment holders for each player (Warning, they are expensive. We never head them.)
• Equipment manager repair kit for each team.
• Ball pump.
• Helmet pump.
• Gridlids. Colored caps that fit over helmets to distinguish teams in scrimmage. St. Mary’s college told me they considered them to be too expensive and made their own from control top panty hose.

Do NOT buy:

• Sleds. One college coach told me he only uses them as hitting surfaces. He never lets his players push them around. Another college assistant said he noticed his team never hit their sleds. He asked the head coach why. “They are a waste of time. Defenders never let you push them around like that.” “So why do we have them?” asked the assistant. “Because the alumni complain if they don’t see them around the practice field,” was the answer.
• Popsicle sled. This is a one-man sled which is used for tackling. Problem is it is easiest to get the thing down the higher you tackle. The higher you go, the more leverage you get against the heavy base. But tackling high is the opposite of what you want in games. Use a round dummy for this purpose instead of the sled.
• Power blast. This is a frame with 16 arms that ball carriers run through. It is often called the “nut cracker” because the players get hit in the testicles when using it. If you already have one, I would use it maybe once or twice a season. We put a stop watch on the time it took players to get through, thereby triggering their competitive juices. I might use it for remedial purposes on a ball carrier who showed poor finish-the-run technique when encountering bad guys during a scrimmage. But I would not buy one if I did not already have one. If possible, adjust the arms so they do not hit your players in the testicles.
• Open-field tackling machine or hanging dummy. Use players to practice this. A dummy is far from realistic.
• Defensive reaction sled. A round dummy or live player will do nicely.
• Chutes. I have always found I can just tell the players to get lower. Once, we had two people hold a dummy at about crotch high and made tacklers go under it. You could do the same using waiting players or coaches. One of our coaches made chutes out of PVC. That may be dangerous because of the possibility of splintering the pipe. High school chutes are generally adjusted too high to be of value to youth players. I might use proper height chutes if I had them to correct a too-high charge, but I would not buy them.
• Shields. Kids have pillow fights with them. Supposedly, they enable scout team players who move, like linebackers to make their normal movements carrying the light shields with them. 52-inch high dummies are so heavy they retard the scout team member’s movement. True. But I would just use the player with no shield as the blocking target. The blocker needs to learn fundamentals like getting to the defender’s breast plate. Shields interfere with that.
• Agility ropes. As far as I know, no study has ever shown that running ropes (or tires in the old days) makes you more agile or a better football player. It’s one of those drills that seems logical, but has no evidence to back it up. I would neither buy an agility rope frame nor use one that I already had. I think agility drills are a prime example of the filler that most coaches are guilty of.
• Cones. Don’t get the ones with a tall cone shape. A player could fall on them and injure himself. Get the kind that have no height. They are more like day-glo donuts than cones.
• Agility pads. These are generally identical to half-round dummies except that they are trapezoidal in shape rather that round and cylindrical. Why? Damned if I know. Use the half-round dummies for this purpose, or, better yet, don’t don’t do agility drills at all.
• Portable kicking net. Only useful for during game kicks. I was a kicker. Never saw the need.
• Skelly obstacle. This is an obstacle that simulates the raised arms of on-rushing defensive linemen. You pass over it. Dousn’t seem lealistic to me. I would rather the passer work aganist a live pass rush.
• Head-sets. You’re watching too much TV.
• Shiver ball. Looks like fun, but I don’t see the point. Used to practice avoiding being cut blocked. Cut blocks are illegal in youth football.
• Net to hang from goal post. There are plenty of players to retrieve balls.
• Weight room equipment.
• Snapping machine. Let one of the centers do it. They need all the practice they can get. Also, the machine is not allowed in the game.

Interesting:

• Rogers Impact! Pad. Measures reaction time and force of blocker. Competition is always a great motivator. I have not tried the pad. I would wonder how durable such instrumentation was.
• Trap chute. This is a five-foot wide, 25-foot long roof over your line area. I like the idea but have never used one.
• Landing mat. Great if you have them, but we always used half-round dummies for that purpose. Why spend extra money on landing mats which can only be used for one purpose? Half-round dummies are multi-purpose.
• Portable goal post. If you have a kicking game, you need some sort of target to aim at. I would try to accomplish the purpose with something cheaper like a gym wall or bleacher. But if a portable goal post is all you can find, get one. You need to practice your kicks against a target.
• Eagle cam. Remote control video camera on a tall pole.
• Practice segment timer. Nice to have, but not necessary.

Equipment that should be provided and owned by parents:

• Stopwatch. My $17.95 wrist watch has one.
• Video camera.
• VCR with slow motion and dubbing (duplicating) capability.
• Penalty flag.
• Personal protective pads for forearms, hands.
• Receiver gloves.
• Whistle.
• Play diagramming software—nice to have, but not crucial.
• Kitchen countdown timer. To time practice segments.