Hi there!
Every now and then at this point of the season I take the time to address our parents and fans individually to remind everyone what our program is about in the midst of the ever improving play of our kids. More and more they are looking like football players and we all get excited.
In the final game of the round robin portion of the season schedule last Wednesday, we continued to see improvements among our kids in the areas of tackling and blocking. It’s this time of the season that we see fans put emphasis on winning. But it’s important to remember what this program is about. “All” players in the league are all on the same team….they are ALL Bulldogs. The fall program’s primary objective is to show kids that are new to the game how much fun it is. The emphasis is on seeing all players have fun developing their football skills far more so than the game’s score.
Parents, fans, coaches and veteran players have a role to play in helping all these new kids develop. If there were no youth Bulldogs program many of these kids would get together at a field and ‘split up into teams’ and play football because it’s fun. Our program is similar but we add some good coaching, teaching some good football skills, team work values and our game days are tests to see how they learned.
Our games are more like scrimmages than games and the real objective is to see all the kids get better and have fun doing so. Believe it or not it starts with parents and fans supporting our objective with the kids. We all get excited and hope our kids and their team does well….that is completely natural. However, it is important to remember that there are no rivalries between Youth Bulldogs teams and we don’t encourage any between these kids, as they are teammates. It’s also important to remember that all these kids are very impressionable young kids 13 years old and younger.
The focus is on learning new skills and executing them, not on who they are playing. This program prepares our kids to be leading performers at high school and in our summer program where we compete provincially. We ask our parents, fans and coaches to help us foster this one team (Bulldogs family) approach as we head through the home stretch of the 2015 season.
Thanks and we sincerely hope you will continue to enjoy watching yours and all our kids develop into skilled football players. Wednesday October 14th we’ve matched up the Eskimos and the Riders at 6 pm and then the Ti-Cats will play the Stamps at 7:15 pm and the Argos will play the Lions at 8:30 pm in the last game under the lights of the year.
See ya on the field
Coach Mathon
