Feeder Frenzy
High Schools are beginning to connect with their middle and intermediate schools to help build their future by using the Feeder System
by: Richard Scott©
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No one would have predicted it. No one in Elizabethtown, Ky., in 1998 and ‘99 would have looked at the seventh and eighth graders playing for T.K. Stone Middle School and guessed they would someday reach the 2003 state championship game as high school seniors.
“I don’t remember their record but they were pretty much a .500 team in seventh and eighth grade,” former Elizabethtown High School coach Brett Burnett said. “But that was a group of kids that really bought into what we did, stuck with it and worked hard. We didn’t have a lot of outstanding athletes but we had a lot of blue-collar kids and they came up through the program and played for a state championship their senior year.”
Today, Burnett is preparing for his first season at Pelham High School in suburban Birmingham, Ala. Part of his plan to build a winning program is to construct a bridge to connect the high school football program with the middle, intermediate and elementary schools that feed students – and athletes – to Pelham High.
Those bridges are one part of what often makes a high school football program successful. Check out any high school program that has worked hard to establish a thriving feeder system and usually you’ll find a program that wins more than it loses on a consistent basis.
If it’s that obvious, why isn’t everyone doing it? Some coaches simply don’t care about sharing their time, energy or expertise with their middle school coaches and players, let alone the local youth programs. Others simply don’t realize the importance of the feeder system. It can be difficult for many private schools to build bridges with specific junior highs and middle schools, simply because they often draw from so many schools. In lower socio-economic areas, it’s difficult just to get and keep players and coaches committed to the junior high and middle school programs.
In school districts where students are allowed to choose their own high school, the athletes often gravitate toward the established winners instead of the nearest high school. That’s the challenge John Wrenn faced when he left a successful program in Illinois seven years ago to start a program from scratch at Hamilton High in Chandler, Ariz.
“The biggest problem we had is in Arizona we have open enrollment so the eighth graders can go wherever they want,” Wrenn said. “We didn’t worry about recruiting kids from other schools. What we wanted to do was just keep the kids we had, the one’s who are supposed to go to our school.” Wrenn and his staff did that by making their presence known at their local junior high, especially at athletic events. “We just made sure we showed interest in them,” Wrenn said.
The high school also holds an athletic open house for interested eighth graders, giving the students and their parents a chance to meet the coaches from every sport and ask questions.
While Wrenn actively seeks out the athletes in their own district, he’s not as interested as some coaches are in passing down his offensive and defensive systems to the junior high teams.
“I just believe you’ve got to coach what you know,” Wrenn said. “I’m more concerned with the kids being fundamentally sound. I want them to be able to block and tackle and that kind of stuff. We’ve got good coaches at our junior high so they can coach what they want as long as they coach the fundamentals.”
The plan is obviously working because Hamilton has won back-to-back state championships in both football and baseball. The area also produced a Little League World Series team two years ago and those players will be ninth graders in the 2005-06 academic year. “The biggest thing is not losing your own kids,” Wrenn said. “But now our success has carried over to the point where we’re getting kids from other schools.”
That’s a difficult thing to do in Cincinnati, where the public schools have to face the popularity and tradition of success established by private schools such as St. Xavier, Elder and Moeller.
“When we got here in ‘91 we were losing a fair amount of kids on an annual basis,” Colerain High School coach Kerry Coombs said. “So we made a commitment to recruiting our own players. In other words, we were going to go to our middle schools and treat those kids as if they were coming from another school system – basically the same way other schools were treating them.
“We needed to put our own best foot forward with our own people. We decided if we could just keep our own we would be in good shape. That’s the first thing we did, and I can tell you that since ‘97 we haven’t lost one. It took six years, but over that time we got to where kids from our schools pretty much expect to go to our high school and that’s been important for us.”
The Colerain coaches, as well as the school administrators, also made a commitment to reach kids from all five feeder elementary schools. “We made a conscious effort at the elementary level of involving students in our program,” Coombs said. “I’m not talking about just potential football players. We do an elementary assembly every year as part of elementary week in which we go to all the elementary schools in the district. We invite them to a game, give them free tickets and a free tailgate party before the game. They form a huge tunnel on the field before the game, with about 1,500 kids.
“We bring the cheerleaders and band members and football players who went to that elementary school and we talk about setting goals and having a vision for their future. They might be in second grade but we tell them some day you can come to Colerain High School and participate in one of our activities. It doesn’t have to be football.”
The next piece of the puzzle was a youth football camp that brings about 350 local kids to the high school each summer. Those youth players work with the Cardinals’ coaches and players.
“It’s very low-key and we give them basic instruction and T-shirts and trophies and we want them excited about coming here to school,” Coombs said.
The final piece of the puzzle was forming a partnership with the local youth football program. Before Coombs came, the team was called the Northside K of C Rebels. Now they are the Little Cards and they wear the same helmet decals and uniforms as the high school team.
“We don’t tell them they should run the same offense or defense we do – that doesn’t matter to me,” Coombs said. “I want them to make sure kids are having fun and let them know we’re here to help.” All of the teams, from the little guys to the two middle school teams, get a chance to play on the varsity field at some point and attend special game nights in the fall where their teams get in free and receive recognition on the field before the varsity games.
“I like to think of it as a total program from a community standpoint,” Coombs said. “I like the people who are coaching the 6-year-olds to feel like they’re a part of it. I like the teacher who’s having a problem with a third-grade kid to be able to call and say, ‘this kid needs a little guidance and direction, can you help him?’”
Colerain coaches must be doing something right because the Cardinals finished 15-0 in 2004, winning the school’s first Division I title by dominating traditional Northeastern Ohio power Canton McKinley 50-10 on McKinley’s home field in the state championship game.
While Wrenn and Coombs have had time to establish feeder systems, Burnett is starting fresh at Pelham, a school that draws its students from two elementary schools and two intermediate schools in Pelham and nearby Helena, as well as Riverchase Middle School. Just four years ago Riverchase wore different school colors and called its teams the Rams, so the idea of uniting under one mascot, one color scheme and one jersey style is relatively new for the Pelham program.
“We look at the middle school program as an arm of the high school – we look at it as all part of one big family,” Burnett said. “When I was at Elizabethtown we were the Panthers, the middle school was the Panthers and the two elementary schools were the Panthers. I’m not quite sure how it is here but I want everyone to be Pelham Panthers from the time they walk into school to the time they graduate.”
Burnett has several plans to make that happen, starting with establishing a close working relationship with the coaches and players at Riverchase Middle School, Pelham’s feeder school.
“We want our middle school coaches to feel like they’re part of the coaching staff here,” Burnett said. “We don’t them to feel separated or apart from what we do. I started at the middle school level and I know what it’s like to coach middle school and I know it’s important to have that relationship between the middle school and the high school coaches. We want them to come up here as much as they want to come up here and we want to be able to go down there and help them when we can.”
Riverchase players spent the spring using the same weight and conditioning facilities as the high school team, usually following right after the high school team so the younger players can watch how the high schoolers work and respond to their coaches.
When spring practice began for the high school, Burnett invited all the middle school coaches to participate and observe the high school drills. This summer the middle school coaches and players will continue to work out with the varsity.
“We want to put together a year-around player-development plan for players at every level,” Burnett said. Burnett also paid two special visits to the middle school, one to meet with every eighth grader in a school assembly and urge any interested players to come out for the team, regardless of their experience. He also met with the parents, giving them a chance to hear his plan for the future and ask questions
Come Friday nights this fall, Burnett wants the seventh and eighth graders involved with the high school program by wearing their game jerseys to the varsity game and coming early to eat pizza and hang out with the players and coaches in the locker room before the game. The Riverchase players will also continue to play their home games at Pelham’s field and Burnett plans to have a high school coach or two at as many middle school games as possible.
“We’ll pop into some of their practices just to show our support and let them know we’re interested in what they’re doing,” Burnett said. “They need to know who we are.” Even the offensive and defensive schemes will fall in line with Burnett’s philosophies to an extent. It won’t be an exact copy of what the varsity will do this fall, so it’s more of like Introduction to Pelham Football 101.
“They can’t do everything we do at that level and obviously we’d like them to emphasize blocking, tackling and the fundamentals and terminologies we use,” Burnett said. “We want them to use a couple of plays from one package, a couple of plays from another package, a couple of our screens, but we want them to have their own identity, too and use some of their own plays. We want them to have their own identity but still be able to teach the basic stuff things we do up here.”
Burnett also hopes to get involved with the youth league Panthers. He actually helped coach his 7-year-old son’s youth league team in Elizabethtown. That will be difficult to do in his new job, but he’s looking for a way to support the youth league coaches and players.
“We just want to get involved in the community and be around the young ones,” Burnett said, “and maybe when they’re 15, 16, 17 years old they’ll want to play football for us.”
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