While your kids are going to love offense, you as the coach need to always preach that it is defense that wins championships. Fairly quickly you are going to feel like you need to focus almost all your practice time on offense. Early in the season, particularly with kids you’ve never coached before, the offense is going to seem so much more complicated to them. You will be tempted to focus all your practice time on those fancy offensive plays. You will need to resist that urge, because ignoring practicing defense is the exact opposite of what you should be doing. Instead, pick one or two offensive plays to master, and then spend A LOT of time focusing on defense. Putting a heavy emphasis on defense will pay huge dividends for your team.
An elite, championship defensive strategy will consist of a team that can execute the key defensive fundamentals of playing a zone defense, pulling flags, catching balls, and pressuring the quarterback. If you can help your team master those fundamentals, you will be able to field a stifling defense that frustrates opposing teams every time.
Let’s explore what it means to master these three fundamental skills.
Execute a Disciplined Zone Defense
A zone defense is the best type to use as your base defense in youth flag football. In a zone defense, each defender is assigned an area of the field, known as a “zone”, and it is their responsibility to guard that entire zone. Thus, in a zone defense, the defenders line up to guard their zone, irrespective of how the offense lines up to start.
Zone is the best to use as opposed to man-to-man because with a man-to-man defense, a single mismatch can blow your whole defense. By mismatch, I mean, if the defender is a little shorter or slower than the offensive player they are covering. It is also tough for defenders to stay with their man when they cut through traffic. And a zone defense gives more opportunities for the defense to play “help” defense, where they all swarm to the ball quickly.
Read Best Defense for Youth Flag Football: zone or man-to-man? for more details.
In 5 v 5 flag football, I found that a base 1-3-1 zone worked very effectively. In 6 v 6, we tended to use a 2-3-1. Here is how each works:
In the diagram below, I have not drawn the individual offense player positions, just indicated generally where the offense is lined up. The red x’s are the defenders. The “rush line” is the line behind which a defender must start in order to rush the QB.
5 v 5 1-3-1 Defense
This is a fairly good, multi-purpose zone defense, effective against both the run or the pass. The single defender up close to the line has to try to guard the center of the field, from the line of scrimmage out to about 10 yards back. Of the three lined up in the mid-range, just at or behind the rush line, the center defender is going to be the QB rusher. The two outside defenders are responsible for their half of the field. They should guard any receivers who come into their zone. The defender the farthest back is a free safety, who needs to stay as far back as necessary to cover any deep running receivers. This defender needs to ensure that no receiver gets behind them. If the ball gets handed off to a running back, the rusher should try to get their flag in the backfield. Once they come across the line of scrimmage, every defender should swarm to the ball — don’t sit back and wait for them to come to you.
One wrinkle you can add to this is you can allow any of the 3 defenders in the middle zone to be the QB rusher. Just come up with a signal you can call out to the defense when they line up to designate who you want to be the QB rusher. If you have one of the defenders on the edge rush, make sure the middle defender knows to cover that zone.
6 v 6 2-3-1 Defense
As with the 1-3-1 for 5 v 5, this is a fairly good, multi-purpose zone defense, effective against both the run or the pass. The two defenders up close to the line will guard both the edges and the center of the field, from the line of scrimmage out to about 10 yards back. Of the three lined up in the mid-range, just at or behind the rush line, the center defender is going to be your QB rusher. The two outside defenders are responsible for their half of the field. They should guard any receivers who come into their zone. The defender the farthest back is a free safety, who needs to stay as far back as necessary to cover any deep running receivers. This defender needs to ensure that no receiver gets behind them. If the ball gets handed off to a running back, the rusher should try to get them in the backfield. Once they come across the line of scrimmage, every defender should swarm to the ball — don’t sit back and wait for them to come to you.
One wrinkle you can add to this is you can allow any of the 3 defenders in the middle zone to be the QB rusher. Just come up with a signal you can call out to the defense when they line up to designate who you want to be the QB rusher. If you have one of the defenders on the edge rush, make sure the middle defender knows to cover that zone.
Make sure your team understands how to line up in this base defense, and what everyone’s job is. Practice it again and again every time you practice as a team. If you have enough kids, you should have one half of the team run your offense, and the other half run defense.
The concept of “help defense”
In addition to each one of them learning the fundamentals at the individual level, you should preach and practice the concept of help defense. This is all about what happens when the play gets going and the ball carrier is coming toward one of your players. Once the ball carrier has crossed the line of scrimmage, the rest of the team can’t just stand there and watch as one teammate tries to pull the flag. Instead, everyone should be swarming to the ball as fast as they can.
This does two things. First, you take away maneuvering room for the ball carrier, which makes it much easier to pull their flag and limits their yard gained. Second, if the first defender misses the flag pull, there are others there to help. Notice that I said everyone should swarm to the ball once the ball carrier has crossed the line of scrimmage. Before that, there is always the possibility of a pass, so your kids will have to learn when to continue to cover their man or zone, and when to swarm to the ball.
When they do come in to swarm the ball, practice having them box the ball carrier in. The closest one needs to square up right in front of the ball carrier, but as others come in, they should create a “box” around the ball carrier to take away their ability to maneuver and break away. Note that the sideline is an extra defender when the play is on near it.
Train your team to be flag pulling machines
When it comes to pulling flags, one tendency that you will see in your kids is they will try to side-step an oncoming ball-carrier. Then they will try to reach out and pull their flag from the side as the runner flies by. I describe this as a matador holding out his cape and side-stepping the oncoming bull. This is really poor technique, and trust me, you will probably never fully get them out of it. I had kids play for me every spring and fall for 5 years, and they still did it sometimes.
Here are the elements of proper flag pulling that you need to drill into their heads:
- Don’t stand there and wait for the runner to come to you — close the distance
- Break down your stride into short choppy steps as you get close
- Watch their hips as you go in for the flags, not their eyes or head (they are likely to get faked out when watching the runners eyes)
- Reach for and try to grab the upper part of the flag, not the lower part. Teach your kids to grab the flag right near the top where it attaches to the belt. The flag is much easier to grab securely near the top, because it is not flapping around wildly as the offensive player runs
- Try to square up on them and reach out both hands, one to each hip, and try to pull both flags off either side, without grabbing or “tackling” the runner. Alternatively, grab one flag with both hands strongly
- Be prepared to run with the runner if you miss the flag pull
Interception focused defense
There are two basic skills that kids need to master if you are going to have success as a team: pulling flags and catching balls. At first glance you might think “sure, that makes sense. One is about offense and one is about defense.” Wrong! Pulling flags is certainly about defense, but so is catching balls. When the other team tries to throw a pass, it is the job of the defenders to go get that ball.
In youth flag football, quarterbacks are going to try to pass on you, especially if they have a coach that doesn’t know that passing is a dangerous strategy. These kids aren’t NFL caliber quarterbacks. Their passes are likely to be short, or long, or slow-arcing ducks. The opportunities for interceptions will be there many times in each game, unless your kids are just completely out of position.
There is nothing so crushing to a team’s spirit as throwing an interception. You take the ball away from their offense, taking away one of their few chances to put points on the board, and put it right back in your hands, often with good field position. You may even score a quick six points on the interception. In your drills practice pulling flags and catching balls more than anything else.
Pressuring the quarterback
One of the keys to a smothering, disruptive defense is pressuring the offense in the backfield. In most leagues, you can send in as many rushers as you want, so long as they start a certain number of yards back from the line of scrimmage (usually 7 yards back). I’ve occasionally seen teams try to blitz two players, and I’ve seen teams almost never rush the QB. I found that consistently rushing one player is the best bet.
Not rushing the quarterback at all gives the QB an enormous amount of time to sit back comfortably and pass. I don’t care how good your defenders are, if the QB has enough time, the receivers are going to run around long enough to get open, and the offense will likely complete a pass. Some leagues institute a 7 second to pass rule, where if there is no QB rush, the QB has 7 seconds from the snap to pass it or it is a penalty. But even then, 7 seconds is a very long time.
But what about when you are facing a run-heavy team? You still send in the rusher, in most cases. If you send in one of your fastest kids, and you train them right, they will watch the handoff as they are coming in, and often they will be able to pull the flag of the ball carrier right after they get the ball. Causing the offense to lose yards on a play is a great feeling. If they are close enough to their end zone, you might even be able to get a safety.
But there are some key points you have to work on with your kids so they rush the QB properly:
- Be safe — usually the center is going to be coming out on a route as they are heading in, so they need to watch out that they don’t collide with other players from the offense.
- Rush from different angles, not always from the same spot in the middle of the field. You want to keep the defense guessing about where the rush is coming from.
- Go fast, but watch carefully if there is a handoff. Be ready to go with the ball carrier if the handoff happens, or go with the QB if they fake it.
- This one is important: As you get closer to the QB, break down your stride into short choppy steps — you don’t want to fly right past the QB at full speed, because then they will have a few seconds before you can get turned around to set their feet and make a pass.
- This one is also important: Keep the QB in front of you — if you can’t get to the QB in time to pull their flag before they pass it, you can jump with your hands in the air as they pass to try to break it up, or at least make it hard for them to see where they are throwing.
- Understand which way is best to pressure the QB. If they are right-handed, then coming at them from their right side will force them to scramble to their left, and they are going to be much less comfortable rolling left and attempting a pass. If they are left-handed, then rush them from their left side.
Of the above points, the one that is most important is breaking down the stride into choppy steps as you get close to the QB. Your players will want to go 100% full speed all the way to the QB to try to get that flag. They love that feeling of getting a sack. But I can’t tell you how many times the QB manages to sidestep the rush and then the defender goes flying past them, giving them a nice break of at least 3 or 4 solid seconds to look for an open receiver. In that scenario, the rusher has taken themselves out of the play for several seconds. This is the least effective technique they can use to rush the QB, and you will need to work on the skill of breaking down and staying in front of the QB again and again so that they just do it automatically in games.
Focus on these basics, and before you know it, your team will have a smothering, disruptive defense!