If you don’t trust your team, how can your team trust you? Football is a very team-reliant sport and during a game, the team must make split-second decisions on the field to perform their best while collaborating.

Being a football coach on the Athens Drive Football Team is one of the best ways to gain insight into the team’s mindset and observe how each player performs based on their actions and play style. Knowing the style of the whole team and the individual players is very important to making smart plays. This is crucial when determining which players work well together and which don’t.

“The team is only as good as the collaboration of the players, you have to be willing to put your trust in the other guy to throw you the ball,” said Rich Fountain, former Athens Drive football coach.

All the positions on the field rely on each other depending on their position and need to be ready to change their playstyle based on the other team’s strong suits. When going up against a team with a better defense like Cardinal Gibbons, the offense must adjust accordingly. Suffering a 57-7 loss was most likely due to the overwhelming defense of the opposing team. Quarterbacks must rely on their linemen(who protect the quarterback) to stop the opposing team from sacking them and give them as much time as possible to find a player in the field to make a pass to. Wide receivers need to rely on the quarterback to make catchable passes and quarterbacks need to rely on their wide receivers to get open and available to throw to. If this relationship is countered, it becomes much harder to get points on the board.

¨Knowing the limits and capabilities of your players helps make safe and reliable plays that allow your team to safely, make their way down the field, “said Fountain, “Being able to confidently hand the ball off to your running back to reset and get that first down is the best way to slowly break through the team’s defense”.

The perspective changes when you’re on the field and it can be much harder to communicate with the team. A lot of responsibility is required from the players on the field and can increase depending on the position you play. Some positions have the power to change the fate of the game all in one play and even out the score. Every single position has the power to do this and one position does not overpower the other.

Semaj Latta, an Athens Drive Football player, has experience cooperating with a team. “Every position is crucial. Without one, the team doesn’t work. ” said Latta, “Having a good relationship with your team is important because the people on your team become your brothers and you wanna have a good relationship with them because you need to be able to trust them on the field”.

Each position on the field has a different role they need to play to help the rest of the team get to the other team’s endzone and just as easily as team collaboration can be built, it can be broken. The entire team needs to have a basic knowledge of how each of them thinks and acts under pressure.

¨If your team can’t act together, they can’t act at all,¨said Fountain, ¨The whole team needs to be in each other’s mind.¨