Flag football plays for 6 and 7 year olds

Why a picture beats a diagram at this age

A play diagram is a piece of technical writing. It uses a bird's-eye view a six-year-old has never seen himself in, letters that stand for people, and arrows that stand for time. Each of those is an abstraction an adult reads without noticing and a first grader has to be taught separately.

Worse, a diagram shows the play as one frozen picture, and a play is not one picture — it is four or five moments in an order. The reason a kid nods at the whiteboard and then stands still at the snap is usually not that he forgot. It is that he never converted the drawing into "first this, then this".

What works instead is showing him the play happening, from about where he will be standing, and letting him watch it more than once. Repetition costs nothing and is the whole method.

The four questions, in the order he needs them

Every job on every play, for a child this age, is four answers. If a play cannot be reduced to these four, it is too complicated for the age group — that is the useful test.

1. Where do I line up? Not "split right" — a spot, relative to something he can see. "Next to Cooper." "On the line, one big step outside Ryan."
2. What do I do when the ball moves? One thing. Run, block, or hand it off.
3. Where do I go? One destination and one path to it. Not a decision tree.
4. Do I get the ball? Answer this out loud even when the answer is no, every time. A boy who does not know whether the ball is coming to him watches instead of running.

Three or four words each. If your answer to any of them needs a sentence with a comma in it, the kid is going to run the wrong way and it will not be his fault.

Five plays is a full playbook

The temptation every October is to add plays. It is almost always the wrong move. A team of seven-year-olds that runs four plays correctly beats a team that runs twelve plays badly, and the second team is not having more fun — being confused is not fun.

A reasonable book for this age is one inside run, one outside run, one misdirection, and one quarterback keep. Add a fifth when every kid can line up for the first four without being walked to his spot.

What to do at practice on Tuesday

Walk it before you run it. Put the eight kids on their spots by hand — physically, one at a time — and have them walk the play at half speed while you say each boy's job as he does it. Then run it. Then run it again with two kids swapped, because the boy who only ever plays one spot has learned a location, not a job.

Finish with the thing they will remember: run the play live, and after it, ask one kid where he was supposed to be. If he can say it, the play is in.

Or show it on your phone

Show the Play is a free app built for exactly this. Every play animates, so a kid watches his own job instead of being told it: you tap his name once and the play runs with him lit up, showing where he lines up, where he goes, and whether the ball comes to him. It works with no signal at the field, and a roster is first names and jersey numbers only.

Open Show the Play · The 8-on-8 formation, position by position