The book explains the details of a ball-control offense. It is wise to keep your defense off the field in tackle football because the rules are biased in favor of the offense. That is even more true in flag football. The best way to keep your defense off the field is to drive down the field rather than rely on the big play. Virtually all flag offenses rely on the big play. Because of that, virtually all flag defenses are designed to stop the big play. That leaves them open to being eaten alive by a ball-control team. In flag, ball control is a form of the contrarian approach I advocated in Coaching Youth Football and in The Contrarian Edge for Football Offense.

Coaching Youth Flag Football covers the league tryout and draft, the first time I have discussed those topics in one of my football coaching books. The book also devotes a number of pages to the wall kick return which was not featured in my previous books. The defense section of Coaching Youth Flag Football spends some time covering defending against the shotgun, which is the most common flag offensive formation.

• 166 pages, 8 1/2 x 11 paperback, $29.95
• Table of contents
• Reader comments
• News release
• Index
• Front matter (copyright page, etc.)
• Turbo charge any offense with the warp-speed, no-huddle tempo

Flag is much more pass oriented than tackle football, so both the defense and offense sections devote much more time discussing the various ways to attack man and zone defenses and how to defend against those tactics. The discussion includes analysis of the increased number of eligible receivers in most flag rules and the area per zone defender that must be covered with various field dimensions and team sizes.

There are eleven pages covering the inside-trap play, which has been extremely successful for my teams. I now have so much experience with it that I can discuss at length the way to block it against various defenses, common mistakes your players will make, how to teach the trap block for different defender penetration patterns, how to avoid losing more than a yard if the play blows up, misdirection jab steps and head fakes, and more.

Believe it or not, flag and touch football are more dangerous than tackle in many respects. Coaching Youth Flag Football explains the dangers and how to minimize them with certain rules, techniques, and items of equipment. One key point is the need for officials who will perform their duties in a professional manner rather than the usual poorly trained and motivated teenage officials.

There are a zillion varieties of flag football in terms of number of men on the field, which players are eligible receivers, and so on. But there are apparently only a couple of books on flag football worldwide. So you probably need to rely on this book and modify it for differences between your rules and the rules in the league where I coached.

$29.95 Flag football is similar to touch football so touch coaches would probably benefit from the book as well. Coaching Youth Flag Football is a 166-page, 8 1/2 x 11, paperback book. It covers offense, defense, and special teams.

Because it covers so much it cannot get into the depth you find in my offense and defense books. When you buy 2 books at the same time, you save $2.55 on shipping to U.S. addresses. Shipping is free if you buy 3 or more books at the same time. I recommend getting all three to achieve optimum success on the field. Here are those other two books:

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