Ahh the begining

I have always heard the best place to start is at the begining so ill give you a brief rundown of my very first and unforgetable season.

It was june of 2006 school was about to get out, summer was comming and so was baseball. However I had just washed my hands of coaching baseball. I spent three very long seasons coaching kids aged 4-9 in everything from tee ball to coach pitch baseball. I decided that all the extra work required was just too much...between mandatory field nights and bingo nights and concessions not to mention the practices and games all the planning and teaching was for what .....a few parents who were upset when little johnny (who would rather sleep than play ball) gets placed in right field....I simply didnt want the hassel of it anymore.

With baseball out of the picture I needed to decide what sport isiah was going to play next. As luck would have it he came home with a flyer from thalia-malibu flag football. I called Jim the league president and found out the details for sigining up my son. While on the phone I was asked to coach. Given the bad taste baseball left in my mouth i was reluctant to say yes and asked if i could get back to him in a day or so. It took about an hour LOL..... Thanks to my very supportive wife we decided to take on the task one more time.....plus i got to coach the COWBOYS.

It was only supposed to be one season..... I was just gonna coach isiah in his first season to "EASE" him into the game and then cut the strings and let him move on without me. I had experience in both coaching small kids and I played football as a kid....not to mention flag football for the airforce (championship team I might add) so i knew enough to do one season right?

well after a blind draft to put the team together and a brief look at the rule book i gave the parents a call and put together the first practice. As luck would have it one of the kids who landed on my team played for me in tee ball and his dad helped me coach so I asked if he wanted to help out....he accepted but told me he wouldntbe there for 4 weeks ...that meant i would have to have the first meeting and run all of the preseason practices on my own as well as the first two games. The season was looking great already.

I remember what i said to the parents at that first meeting to this day and may be quoted on it for some time to come lol.... i told them that I do not focus on winning I want to focus on the basics of the game and hopefully we will win a couple games.....that wasnt exactly what the parents wanted to hear i guess cause I didnt get too many supportive looks lol. I got to work evaluating the kids with simple skill drills......it must have looked crazy to the parents ...here is one guy coaching 12 kids and getting them to run around cones and catch balls .....when i think about it now I cant help but laugh........

To be very honest there weren't many instances in the first season that stuck out as really good or really bad play..... I mostly just tried to coach the kids to run the plays the best they could and work as a team...so many of the kids defined themselves as players that year....wilkes was an unstobable force on both sides of the ball and deserves a lot of credit for many of our wins...however it was never a 1 man team....our QB nate threw 3 touchdown passes that year...none of them to wilkes.....we were running a shotgun formation with a team of mostly 5-6 year old kids and the qb had loads of time...the kids were holding that line...on defense i remember 2 faces above the others....Aaron who would later have rules put in place to prevent him from continuing to dominate other teams and stopping them in the backfield.....and jalen a child I dubbed "Bull". Bull earned his name because when he got going you would rather stare down a ticked off bull than try to block him....all of the kids contributed in one way or another but those were definately the ones that stood out.....

Other than a couple tight spots here and there the season was a blurr of touchdowns and flags....the Cowboys at seasons end had put together an UNDEFEATED season and every kid from our 1 veteran (wilkes) to the smallest kid in the league (josh "speedy" starr) all of them contributed in one way or another.....at that point in time I really couldn't have been more proud.....I loved that team...and still do...they brought me into the league and gae me something no other coach in the league has been abel to repeat since.....perfection.