Lessons from Our First Football Game, Part One

Whether you already had your first football game or it is coming soon, let's go over some important steps to be ready for your first, or your next football game! This is a reflection of a team I coached in their first year with a program in many years and my first year as their coach when I had a brand new team. I only had two athletes on my team that have ever cheered on a sideline.

My team worked so hard all summer to be able to do what they did at the first game, and I'm so proud of how well they did. There are several things that I feel like we did really well and several things that I want to work on. Part One will focus on what we did well. 

Watch on YouTube!

If you want to watch Coach Gina's video reflection, you can find it on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ozmzs6wWOw0&t=13s

Cheers on Video

I am glad I continued with what I have done throughout the years by putting all of the cheers on video.  You can do this as a coach, or have your seniors make a video.  With my team being a new program, the team did not start with a list of cheers. First, I had them learn the sideline cheers on the  www.cheercoachacademy.com website. I also had them learn all of the cheers included in Season One, a program from Cheer Coach Academy with 15 cheers as well as dances.  (You can also check out the newer versions: Season Two and Season Three.) I also had additional cheers that I recorded. They learned the cheers on video throughout the summer, but then we reviewed them at practice. At the end of the summer, if they knew the cheers by a certain day, we had a ice cream sundae social. This gave a little bit of a motivation for the team to learn all the cheers.

Crowd Pleasing Stunts and Cheers

We made sure that we had some really fun things that the crowd we knew would really love during quarters and timeouts as well as at halftime. 

Practice Game-time Situations

We practiced on the track and football field for a couple of weeks leading up to the game. They even practiced moving to their formations and their stunts for timeouts and quarters, just so they would be comfortable and move quickly to their formations. The practice paid off because they looked like a veteran team and that they had done this before. 

Captains Binder

We prepared a binder for the captains and for me as the coach.  Inside we have all of the cheers in the following sections:

• General sidelines
• Cheers with no motions. 
• Cheers with signs and stunts 
• Football cheers
• Offense/defense cheers
• Performance cheers

The next section has a football game plan. The game plan has the basic information: location, date, time, uniform, and hair. It includes what to bring such as their warm-up jacket and pants, and poms. The game plan lists:

• First quarter cheer 
• Halftime
• Third quarter 
• Time outs list 

Having the binder with the cheers and the game plan will help give the captains confidence when calling cheers!

Sideline Communication

The captains communicated the cheers well, making sure the cheers were passed down the line. They were also prepared to adjust, such as when we were doing an offense cheer and then the ball got turned over, they quickly called a defense cheer. 

Parent Assignments

Another thing that I did that I hadn't really done before is I had some assignments for my parents these included:

• Photography
• Videography
• Playing music in the sound booth

These were great ways to get the parents involved and I had great pictures and videos that I typically don’t get at games.  

Overall the first game was a success, but there were some areas I identified for growth. Check out Part Two to see the lessons learned!