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The answer to choosing the best agent for you is simply more than getting a great contract, even though that is very important. So, what is important?

Today, a lifetime mentor as an agent is absolutely a must to be successful. What a mentor does is provide advice and wisdom with respect to decisions and life situations. Wisdom comes from a learned experience and an understanding which, in turn, comes from actual knowledge obtained and then applied. Football is the vehicle, but life is the real game. Knowing the sports business industry, understanding NFL contracts, and being skilled as a top negotiator are important, but being a life time mentor is critical. Yet, one cannot be a successful life time mentor of another if he is not successful in his own life.

Five questions can help determine if an agent will be a great life time mentor for you.

1. What questions outside of sports should the athlete ask the agent when it comes to selecting him also as a life time mentor?

2. For one, ask him more than questions but also see how this person you are now considering lives?

3. Is he married? If so, how long has he been married?

4. Does he have any children? If so, does he raise them?

5. How do his children feel about him? Meet and interview the children one on one and face to face. How successful are these children? (The apple usually does not fall that far from the tree).

These are just a few of the questions that should be asked by the young football player and/or his parents or, at the very least, the answers to these questions should be discovered before a commitment is made. The difference has a lot to do with a lot of talk compared to the real character of a man. Many people in the agent game are smooth talkers, but talk is just that – talk. You see, the agent business is much like a magic show. When the magician sawed the lady in the coffin in half, the audience originally thought that the magician had killed the lady until she later stood up for a bow. The young athlete can be fooled just like the audience was at the magic show, but in the agent business, unlike the magic show, the damage can be severe and may be irreparable.

It is a proven fact that if you want to play college football at any level, you MUST utilize a highlight video so that coaches can evaluate your ability to play. I would say that the majority of the kids that end up with scholarships or financial packages have a highlight video. Regardless of the level you want to play at, it is critically important to have your highlight video seen by decision makers early in the process.

The biggest reason this is critical is because coaches are paid huge salaries to be able to evaluate and recruit the best of the best. A recruiter may give a prospect the “thumbs up” on the eyeball test, but the proverbial saying among football coaches is “The Eye in The Sky Doesn’t Lie”. Roughly translated, your talent is what your film says it is. Mistakes in evaluating and developing talent has cost many coaches their jobs and been the ruin of many football programs.

I stress to my coaching members daily that you you have to keep all of your options open and consider smaller schools as well as big schools in your pursuit of an opportunity to play at the next level. If you are considering smaller schools, it’s just as important to have a highlight film. Before ANY school will entertain you as a serious prospect, they need to see what you can do on the field.

I recently spoke to coaches at D-II and D-III schools about this topic. Recruiters don’t have the time or desire to sit and watch game films from all of the prospects on their mailing list. They can typically tell quickly (in the first 60-90 seconds of the highlight film) if they would like to watch a complete game on a prospect.

You must ask yourself this question: Would you rather take three minutes of time from the coaches and blow them away with some of your best highlight plays from your highlight video OR would you send a full game tape and hope that they like it over a 45 – 60 minute period where their attention could easily get pulled away while you are making the best play of your high school career? One look away could cost you a scholarship.

Unless your finances are extremely tight, make an investment in your future as student athlete and get it made by a professional.

Applying some Rapid Pace Oregon Duck Offense to Your Youth Football Team

Speeding Up the Game When Coaching Youth Football

Many of us have looked in amazement at the production the Oregon Ducks have had on offense in the last few years. Chip Kelly’s Ducks have averaged nearly 50 points per game in the last two years on their way to a National Championship game in 2010 against Auburn in the Fiesta Bowl. One of the noticeable components of the Ducks high scoring offense is their no-huddle offense and the fact they don’t take much time in-between snaps. The average college football team takes about 34 seconds in-between snaps, from the time the play is called dead until the next play is run, the Ducks average just 23 seconds between plays. In a blowout win over UCLA in 2010, Oregon averaged just 14 seconds between snaps and on one series they averaged less than 9 seconds between snaps.

How does this apply to youth football? I’m not a fan of trying to catch the other team off guard by trying to catch them napping in-between snaps. However there is merit in speeding the game up a bit. The more possessions you have, the less chance an odd occurrence is going to determine the winner. The faster the game goes, the more plays each of your kids is going to get and if you have minimum play rules, more snaps make it easier to get those kids their required snaps. A faster game also helps keep the attention of your players, you see fewer problems with kids sitting on the bench or getting distracted when the game moves quickly rather than slowly.

Of course Oregon uses a no-huddle system and they have a lot more practice time than the average youth team, but there are a few simple things you can do if you want to employ some of the Duck’s methods. A very simple one is to simply repeat the play you just ran, but in hurry up no-huddle mode. You can either signal something in with hand signals or just yell out a code word like “Mayday” as soon as the play finishes. John Ward uses this with his High School teams, Mayday just means get up on the line of scrimmage immediately and run the very same play you just ran. When John calls Mayday that also means that this play will be run on first sound, so there is no need to send in or signal in a cadence.

With the exception of working side by side for an entire season with the best youth coach in your area, coaching clinics are probably the best use of your time to help prepare you for next season. It always amazes me who I see attending early morning and late night sessions at coaches clinics. It isn’t the guy in last place who lost a third of his team to defections, it’s the guys winning National Championships and league titles. While their know it all competitors are at home in front of the television, these guys are burning the midnight oil to get every bit of knowledge they can for next season by attending every single clinic session they can. Lunch, beers with the buddies at the mixer, not for a lot of these guys. Now don’t get me wrong, spending time with your coaching staff and peers is time well spent and many a great idea has been hatched on a damp cocktail napkin.

The Best Attend Clinics

Sometimes I feel, how can a guy that has played in the Pop Warner Title Game the last 2 years in a row sit though 6 hours of my presentations? In December the AYF National Coach of the Year was the first in line to my Orlando clinic and sat through 4 sessions. His teams have won 5 National Titles in the last 6 years. Do the know it all guys sitting at home in front of the tube know more than these two guys? Have they won more games than these two? Are their kids and parents as satisfied as the kids and parents that were on these guys teams? I seriously doubt it. But that’s why guys like these two win every year, no matter what and others don’t. If you haven’t attended a quality coaches clinic with youth coaches that know the game and know how to make it work at the youth level, you are really missing out.

The best youth coaches have an open mind and a humility that says, “I can always get better, I don’t know everything, I can learn from others. I want my kids to have the best experience possible.” When I speak at the big clinics for Nike or Glazier, I attend every single session I can and take extensive notes, my kids are the winners when I decide to sit in on that 8:00 pm session. I picked up two great ideas listenung to a coach from Northern Colorado talk about program development and player motivation.