Coaching the Spread

Var­i­ous lit­tle league and high school coaches often request info from me regard­ing how to install a spread pass­ing game.  As such, I thought the most ben­e­fi­cial thing I could do for those inter­ested would be to com­mit a few very basic con­cepts to paper.  In turn, coaches can visit my site (as you are doing right now) and click on the pdf file under­lined above here (“Coach­ing the Spread”) for infor­ma­tion that will guide you through a short col­lec­tion of very elemetary route pack­ages and con­cepts that can get your young quar­ter­back headed in the right direc­tion in a spread system. 

Please bear in mind that I tried to sim­plify these to the “nth degree” and in doing so I removed many of the more com­plex ele­ments of the pack­ages that spread teams at the col­legeiate level  often uti­lize.  For instance, instead of imple­ment­ing an “X option” (slant, hook or fade) on the back­side of cer­tain routes, I sim­ply have the X run a basic slant.   Obviously you can feel free to take these over­all route con­cepts and tweek them or even over­haul them as much as you like.  I want want works best for you and the kids you are work­ing with.   I’m sim­ply try­ing to encour­age eager coaches to move for­ward in their desire to latch onto a spread sys­tem because I firmly believe that the many vari­a­tions of the spread have gone a long way in recent years toward mak­ing this game we love more excit­ing today than maybe at any point in history. 

A few things to con­sider when review­ing these materials:

• Rule #1: Don’t feel oblig­ated to use all of these pack­ages, only what the kids are com­fort­able with.
• The pack­ages attached above have been designed with a uni­ver­sal appli­ca­tion in mind.  In other words, the QB always has a chance to deliver the ball (and usu­ally pretty quickly) to a tar­get against most basic cov­er­age types (Zone, Man, 3, 2, 1, 0 etc.) that you will see. 
• As your QB matures, it will be your chief respon­si­bil­ity to help him learn the weak­nesses of var­i­ous cov­er­ages and along the way help him under­stand where he can go with the ball against that spe­cific cov­er­age within these packages. 
• At the youngest devel­op­men­tal lev­els of play it will often be enough to merely tell the QB before the snap what receiver (or two) to key on.  Don’t over­load him.
• Run­ning Game: Be sure to have at least one basic run­ning play for each of these spread for­ma­tions to help com­pli­ment the enclosed pass plays.  No mat­ter if you use (for exam­ple) a draw, a zone or an option, choose run­ning plays that (a) are already in your arse­nal and (b) that the kids are com­fort­able with and that © can be run from these formations. 
• An easy run­ning play to install for the 5-receivers “empty” for­ma­tion is a QB draw.
• Notice that all of these pass pack­ages either put the QB in a posi­tion to take the snap and get rid of the ball quickly, or to take the snap and find secu­rity by rolling out.  Be sure he is aware of this.
• Pass Pro: Pass pro­tec­tion schemes can get very com­plex with a con­cept for just about every sit­u­a­tion (zone pro­tec­tion, slide pro­tec­tion, man pro­tec­tion, big, 5-out, etc.).  As such, with younger kids it’s often best to sim­ply imple­ment a ver­sion of what you already use (and what they already know) into these spread schemes.  Keep it as basic as possible.

Click Here for a PDF playbook