It can be very tempting to coach your kid yourself when they are a youth football player. You have watched the game – you might even have played it – but as any Texas football coach will tell you, that doesn’t make you qualified to coach your kid single handedly. The benefits of using the experience of a football coach are huge, especially if your kid shows a desire and aptitude to be a talented player from an early age. We help out kids by putting them in gifted and honors classes in school, so think of this as the same concept for their sport.

Here are five reasons why hiring a football coach for your child is a great decision.

1. Access to Equipment

Football is not a cheap sport to play. It is also not a cheap sport to train for. Being under equipped is a problem that a football coach can solve. You may have two or three footballs for your budding Tom Brady to throw. A good football coach will have bagfuls of them. This will lead to more reps and opportunities for your kid to improve. Add in that a coach will have access to venues more conducive to training than your own yard, and you will start to build a picture of why a Texas football coach is vital for your child’s football development.

2. Group Training

A good football coach can provide access to group training and 1-on-1 sessions. He or she will have the contacts and the following to take what they are teaching your child in those 1-on-1 sessions and bring them to a bigger group. Tackle training is difficult with just one player. However, as soon as there is a group of ten or more, the training options become endless. This is where a coach can begin to impart the importance of fundamentals and how being a safe, solid tackler is essential to being a defensive player. Group training will also help your kid develop as a person, with keys such as leadership, timeliness, and their ability to interact socially, helping them grow inside and out of the game.

3. Safety

We touched on this in the group training point, but the primary way a football coach will help your child is by showing them how to play the game safely. Tackle technique – both how to tackle and (importantly) how to take a tackle – is more important in football today than ever. Concussion and CTE are both front and center stories in the NFL, so teaching your kid how to tackle while entering the point of contact from all the possible angles in a football game is vital. A football coach can – and will – do this. They understand the importance of hinging at the hips while keeping your head up and your neck strong. Football coaching is about more than just Xs and Os; safety has to be the most critical trait your kid is taught.

4. Setting Goals

Training is nothing without setting and achieving goals. Goals, however, can be hard to define. A football coach will develop personal and team goals for your kid, understanding their level of play to make those goals attainable without being easy. Understanding how to use goals – learning about the strengths and weaknesses of your kid in a more objective way than you can as a parent – will set them up both on the football field, but it is also a skill they will learn to take into their own lives.

5. Improving Their Fitness

A good football coach is going to push your kid. One area where you will see an immediate payoff for their work is through their increased physical fitness. For younger kids, this will improve their cardio fitness and speed/agility/balance through fun drills that get them moving. For older kids, it will be developing a gym plan to get them more physically strong as the demands of the game start to ramp up. Good Texas football coaches understand what conditioning drills are essential for what positions on the field. With everything happening so fast on the football field, the ability to react because of outstanding physical fitness is more important than ever.

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