The first thing we need to do is applaud you for volunteering to coach kindergarten-aged kids to play football. You’re one of the few, the proud, the kindergarten football coaches. Parenting kindergarten-aged child is not easy, as you know, and coaching/teaching kindergarten-aged kids is even harder. They’re learn-as-you-go jobs, but they can be rewarding and fun. In their own ways, these kids appreciate what we’re doing for them. Most of them want to play football, and if you do it right, some of them will be receptive to what you’re saying, some of the times. If you dress it up as a game, they’ll want to play the game their parents and siblings talk about so often. 

I made tons of errors my first year, learned from them my second year, and I developed a few rules, based upon trial and error. Two quick notes before we continue: These are tidbits and observations, nothing more and nothing less. I have no level of expertise, and those with more experience coaching kids might correct everything I write here. I will also use the term “tackle” throughout this article to describe the act of pulling a flag, as this discussion focuses on flag football.  

• Lower Your Expectations before you step on the field. In the beginning, I thought if I had high expectations of myself that might translate to them developing high expectations. My oldest child was a kindergarten-aged child, so I had elevated expectations of the team…in the beginning. People with multiple children learn to lower their expectations of kindergarten-aged children, but I didn’t have that luxury. If you walk in with high expectations, you’ll learn, and you’ll probably look back and realize how foolish it was for you to have high expectations of kindergarten-aged children. The best mindset to have is one of lowered expectations. By doing so, you’ll be surprised by everything they do correctly, and they’ll hear that surprise in your voice. 
• Be a Coach with a Plan, then prepare to edit, revise, and completely scrap everything you planned for the season. I walked in with a plan, and after the first game, I revised it down to a few bullet points, or talking points, that I wanted the team members to know by season’s end. These bullet points should focus on teaching the kids some of the fundamentals of playing football. Walk into your first meeting with the team thinking that if you can teach them a couple of things that stick, your season will be a success. Accomplishing this, of course, requires repetition. My advice is to watch some YouTube videos on “coaching kindergarten flag football”. Some of these videos provide some very helpful hints, talking points, and drills a coach can run in practice, and they offer some simple plays to run. Some of these plays involve simple fakes, reverses, and some simple passes. This leads us to rule#3:
• Keep it simple. If this is your first season with a fresh group of youngsters, you’ll witness more organized teams pull better fakes and more complicated plays. I don’t know if those teams practice more often, or if they stick together for years, but in my experience, it’s best to keep all plays as simple as possible. Again, the best thing you can do, as a kindergarten coach, is teach them the basics of the game.
• Keep your practices simple, active, and highly participatory. Some leagues suggest one mid-week practice. I followed that suggestion in week one, and I immediately abandoned that idea and focused on the practice that was allowed 20 minutes before each game.  If you are a born leader with a commanding presence, and your team is largely comprised of good kids, they might behave 51% of the time, but those who enter into this with the idea that they can manage adults, and they have a well-behaved child, might be in for a shock when they try to corral 6-to-7 other peoples’ kids at the same time. They’re not bad kids, but they are kids, kindergarten-aged kids. My advice is to try to diminish the chaos is try to develop drills and activities that don’t allow any of them to stand idle. Focus on group activities. If there are some individual drills you think you need to run, develop an activity for those standing in line waiting for their turn to arrive. (Some examples are jumping jacks and other forms of running in place. Whatever we do, we want to keep them moving.) My advice is to avoid any individual drills however. If you’re lucky, another parent will volunteer to assist you. If that’s the case, divide the team into offense and defense for drills, then switch, so they’re not doing the same thing too often, then finish those drills with a scrimmage. Kids will also run around and pull each others’ flags off. A rule we incorporated was, if you pull someone’s flag, while playing around, you have to put it back on. (Kids don’t enjoy doing that for some reason, as it almost undermines their reason for doing it in the first place. 
• No Juking. When game time rolls around, one of the most important rules we try to teach the kids is, “When you have the ball, don’t try to juke, shimmy, or shake your opponent. Just run and this will give us a chance to see how fast you are.” Most kids want to flash the abilities and accomplish their dream of becoming an NFL running back, but at this level we need to teach them that the key to scoring more touchdowns is to run straightforward as much as possible. “How difficult it is for you to pull flags when someone is running past you?” we ask them. “You have one chance, one quick chance right? The toughest flags to pull are those on someone who is running as fast as they can. When you run your fastest, it’s just as tough for the other team to tackle you, because you’re so fast.” Another reason for this bullet point is that once a kindergarten-aged child starts juking they never stop. This can result in a huge loss of yards, and more likely the child exhausting themselves by attempting to run the miraculous run that can last a minute and a half for a two-yard gain. 
• Two hands. Two eyes. “When you catch the ball, you have to use two hands and two eyes to look the ball in.” We said this so often that the kids would repeat it whenever they dropped the ball. We instituted this rule to try to prevent them from running before they caught the ball. (Once they secure the catch, we told them to run, but the actual catch happened so infrequently that we were able to get away with only preaching those first two steps for most of the season.) 
• Side Integrity. On defense, we taught the principle of “side integrity”. It might sound like a complex concept for kindergartners, but that might be why they like it. Our advice to our outside defenders (linebackers or corners), “Don’t let the ball carrier run outside of you, because if they get past you, it’s probably a touchdown.” We lined our outside defenders outside the furthest player on the other team, and we stressed that they not let the runner outside of them, even if they didn’t make the tackle. 4b) “When the other team tries to block you inside, watch the ball, and the minute it moves outside your blocker, use a spin move on the blocker to get outside of them. (Some of the kids love the idea of a spin move, as we can tell them NFL players use it to get past blockers. It also seems tricky and an advanced concept to the kids, and some of them use it quite well. They are also quite proud when they do it well, regardless if they make the tackle.) Spinning is also better than juking, because it’s quick. “Even if you don’t make the tackle,” we tell them, “You need to push the runner inside to the rest of your teammates.” We practiced this drill so often that a couple of them accomplished it a couple of times. I considered that a SUCCESS!
• Safety. We established the position of Safety as the most important position on the defense. The Safety is the defender that is at the back of the defense. The Safety should be the final defender that the offense has to get past. The Safety was the equivalent to the quarterback on defense in our kindergarten system. I made the mistake of telling the team how important the Safety position was in our system, and I write the word mistake because once I said it, every kid wanted to play Safety on our team. After the fourth kid asked me if he could play Safety for about the fourth time, I channeled that into a reward, “Whoever made the last tackle on the last play gets to play Safety on the next play. Everyone wanted to be safety, so they strove to make the tackle. (I had no idea this would be a motivator, but I learned as I went.)     
• Sharks and Minnows. When you’re done with the repetitious drills, in practice, it’s vital to developing interest, and team building that we make practice fun. We played a game, suggested on YouTube, called Sharks and Minnows. This was different from the more traditional version in the sense that we put up cones for boundaries, and the five minnows attempted to avoid the two sharks for as long as they could, while staying within the boundaries. The minnows begin by chanting, “fishy fishy come out and play,” and the sharks reply, when they’re ready, “SHARK ATTACK!” At that point, the two sharks in the middle attempt to pull as many flags off the minnows as they can. When a shark “tackles” a minnow that minnow then becomes a shark, and they join the sharks in trying to tackle the other minnows remaining, until there are only two minnows left. Those two minnows become the two sharks to start the next game. Other than teaching them how to pull flags, the game also teaches them the concept of boundaries, as we set up four-to-six cones to mark out of bounds.
• First game. Your first game will probably be a disaster, if you’re a new coach starting out with a bunch of newbies. It’s important that we do two things here. First, during the game, we need to compliment the players for every good play they make on the spot. A casual high five with a “there you go Joey!” will do wonders to lift that morale and self-esteem. When the game is over, remain enthusiastic, regardless of the outcome. You will learn some things about your team, and the game itself, after your first game, and you will need to make some necessary adjustments, but try to stick to the tenets of your game plan. At this level, if you’re in it to win it, you’re probably in it for the wrong reason.
• Plays. In my first season, I flirted with the notion of plays. I drew up about seven plays that I considered simple. After the first game, I pared it down to three plays, a reverse, a running play, and a passing play. By the third game, we were about 90% run plays, and 9% pass plays, with one reverse thrown in. The more plays you throw in, the more questions you invite, and questions equals chaos. Handing the ball off on every play doesn’t teach kids the fundamentals of the game very well, but when you teach them to block (more on that later) you end up teaching them a team concept better. On the subject of plays, I don’t think it will shock the potential volunteer to learn that if you plan to have a playbook, the goal should be to as simple as possible. I thought adding a simple reverse would fall under this heading, until I witnessed one in real time. (Picture a herd of wet cats attempting to run to the source and away from it at the same time.) I also added a pass play, in which the receiver runs a simple curl route. I thought this was a simple enough play, until I saw it play out live. (If the coach is lucky, they’ll have one player who can throw and one player who can catch. It’s the coach’s job to determine who can do this with some modicum of success.) The goal here is not necessarily to achieve a good play, a touchdown, or a win. We just want to put every player in a position to succeed, and if a player doesn’t throw or catch well, they might become demoralized. The coach should also prepare for the idea that most players won’t know what they’re supposed to do on any given play, so you’ll have to provide individual instructions to each player before the snap, and you’ll have to tell them where to stand. The coach will have to accomplish this while trying to keep the referee happy by getting your players to the line and pulling off a play in time. (They had a play clock in our league. I understand the need to keep things moving to prevent the kids from getting bored, but trying to corral 6-7 kindergarten-aged kids in thirty seconds could prove stressful at times.)
• Repetition. The kindergarten coach should prepare to repeat their very specific instructions throughout the season, and answer all questions that follow. The most popular question a coach will have to answer in each huddle is, “When do I get to I score a touchdown?” My pat response is, “That team over there is not going to let you score a touchdown. You have to go get it, when it’s your turn.” The reason we must continually express the idea of turns is that once they score a touchdown, they want to do it on every play, and as many times as we express the idea, most kindergarten-age children don’t fully comprehend the idea of taking turns, or if they do, they don’t prefer it.
• One voice in the huddle. “Coach! Coach! Coach!” is something every kindergarten, flag football coach will hear in a huddle, on just about every play. When the coach responds, they are likely to hear classic gems like, “I have a new shirt,” “I felt a raindrop,” or “I have a loose tooth.” (These statements aren’t reserved for huddles, as we learned some of this information while a play was in progress.) In the huddle, we often hear, “When do I get the ball?” and “When do I get to score a touchdown?” The other comments I’ve heard are, “I don’t have a mouthpiece,” and “how come you’re not wearing sunglasses today?” Some of the kindergarten children repeat the shouts of “coach!” so often, while you’re attempting to tell the players involved in the next play how to run it that by the time we get to their question/comment, they forget what they wanted to ask/say. Once we complete that exercise, and get the kids to the line of scrimmage, ready to run the play in the time allotted by the referee, be prepared for them to forget everything you just said. Even when we keep it as simple as possible, by telling them to hand the ball off and run left, they often run right about 50% of the time. (Hint: point the direction of the play out to them. It’s okay to remind them at the line which way they should go, because chances are most of the kindergartners on the other side of the ball aren’t listening to you either.) 
• Injuries. Anytime kids are involved in a game that involves running, they will inevitably run into one another. Most volunteer coaches have no experience in such matters. The simplest thing to do is address each injury on the spot accordingly. Depending on the severity of the injury, of course, our goal should be to diffuse the minor injuries that occur in a game. Ask the injured player if they are okay, where they are hurt, and what happened. Most kids need nothing more than a couple plays off, and a drink of water, and they are okay. We might also need to address the fact that the other kid didn’t injure them on purpose. It was just a part of the game. 
• Displays of Anger. The coach will also have to deal with the emotional aftermath of a child having their flag pulled. To us, this is part of the game. Person A runs down the field, person B pulls their flag, and the play is over. To the kindergarten mind, however, this is a humiliating condemnation of their athletic ability. They might regard it as an unfair part of the game, or the coach’s fault. At times, they will express their anger. When we experience such a display, it might be better to simply move on and let their parents handle the matter. As a voice of authority, on the field, the inclination might be to correct that child’s behavior in some way, but we have to remember that these are other people’s kids. It might embarrass us to have one of our team members act this way, but we have to respect our boundary while trying to keep control of the individual players. The best advice I provided the disappointed kids who didn’t succeed on a play was to have a short-term memory. “Do it again. See if you can do it on your next turn.” We preached this ‘next play’ philosophy so often that the kids sarcastically mocked us for saying it too often. We said things like, “Try your hardest on every play, but if you don’t succeed, do it on the ‘next play’.” Also, if they gained any yards, focus on that with them. “You just gained 12 yards on that play, and you’ve now gained 64 yards in the game so far.” (In their post game interview with their parents, I heard kids say that they gained 64 yards in that game.) This coping method requires repetition, and I developed this short-term mindset after years of playing recreational sports. It worked well for me, but it can be difficult for disappointed, kindergarten minds to comprehend. Some of them couldn’t be soothed, as all they knew was they get tackled.
• Winning and Losing. We all have egos. All coaches want their game plan to work, and we want our coaching techniques to result in wins. Two seasons of kindergarten coaching have taught me to only attempt to control what I can control. Let the players worry about winning and losing. We should also make sure we take turns giving the ball to each kid. Not only is that what they signed up for, but it helps them maintain enthusiasm and focus. I try to compliment each player on their strength and ignore any weaknesses they might have. This keeps them happy, focused and interested. The most important ingredient is to try to keep it fun for the kids. Structure is vital, of course, but we need to institute a balance of fun and structure.
• Team play. The best way to teach them one of the most vital components of sports, team play, is to teach them that they have to play their role on every given play. If the play calls for a handoff to Joey, make sure Tommy knows to block. Tommy might forget to block on a given play, and if he does, remind him that that’s the best way for Joey to score a touchdown. Tommy might not care if Joey scores, but we need to remind Tommy that if he wants to score a touchdown on his next turn, he will need to have Joey block for him. If you don’t block for Joey, he might not block for you, and you might not score a touchdown on your play. “Block for them when it’s their turn, and they’ll block for you when it’s yours,” was what we told them. Also, make sure to yell out, “Nice block Tommy!” when they accomplish a block. When Joey comes back, exhausted and satisfied with a quality touchdown, I always said, “Good job Joey, but it wouldn’t have happened without Tommy’s key block. Good job Tommy!”
• If you don’t know it now, you’ll learn it as you go, kindergarten-aged children learn through repetition. “Two eyes, two hands.” “Do it again. See if you can do it on the next play.” “One voice in the huddle,” “You have to go get touchdowns, when it’s your turn.” No juking, and side integrity are examples of things I repeated throughout our two seasons together. I also preached “Lower your expectations,” “Keep it simple,” and “Winning and losing is for the kids to talk about, not you.” After compiling my game plan and developing high expectations in the beginning, I learned to break it all down to these quotes. It kept our practices and games structured, and it helped me maintain sanity throughout.
• Dealing with Kids. After dealing with these kids one hour a day, for six weeks, I now have profound respect for anyone who chooses a career that requires them to deal with kindergarten-aged children full-time. If, at one time, I considered my son’s teachers unreasonably strict, by instituting a level of structure to try to establish some level of order, I now empathize. “Could you take care of Johnny today? I can’t deal with Johnny today,” I heard one kindergarten teacher say to their assistant. I was shocked at the time, because I thought it meant the kindergarten teacher couldn’t control her class. I now have 6-7 Johnnies that I only deal with for one hour a week, and if I could have one on-field assistant answer the questions, and tend to, just one of my Johnnies, I probably wouldn’t be writing this piece to voice my frustrations.