Youth football program reaping benefits for all ages

Many youth recreational football programs consider it a good year when they can field a single team at each age group and send those teams across the area to play against other teams and programs in a similar position.

At Mountain Brook Athletics, there’s a different story.

The city’s youth football program has enough kids sign up to play football every year, that multiple teams can be formed within each age group and a league created within itself.

“It’s Mountain Brook playing Mountain Brook, and what that does, that gets more people involved,” said Chris Yeager, head coach of the Mountain Brook High School football program.

Tackle football begins in the third grade for most Mountain Brook kids, and Yeager said there is not much fall off through seventh grade, when the ones still playing transition to Mountain Brook Junior High School.

“Once they get to our seventh grade, we end up with 90-plus kids a year,” Yeager said. “That’s where it all starts and people start asking questions. The only thing I can attribute it to is the way we’ve got our structure of our program.”

Levi Fingerman played for Yeager in the early 2000s, and has coached a third-grade youth team for the past few years. Family obligations are preventing him from coaching this year, but he’s noticed a trend among the coaches in the youth program.

In last year’s third-grade championship game, all four coaches, two for each team, played football at the high school.

Fingerman said alumni have been welcomed back by Yeager, are invited to practices and scrimmages and encouraged to ask questions about the younger teams they help coach.

Yeager said, “They may come to practice and they’ll say, ‘Coach, I’m trying to get my line to block (the) power (run play). Can you help me with that?’”

The strength of a self-sustained youth league is still apparent when looking at the current high school team. Out of the 502 male students at Mountain Brook High, 133 of them play football, a 26% percent participation rate. The current team also consists of more than 40 seniors.

Both of those numbers are easily some of the top in the state of Alabama, and Yeager believes that starts at the beginning.

“If the groups are very close and there’s a strong personality within that group as far as a youth league coach or parent that keeps them all together, then that group most of the time will be successful,” he said.

Will Wetzler, a senior linebacker for the Spartans who started playing in third grade, said “the bond is great” with teammates, due to how long they have competed with and against each other throughout the years.

Wetzler has also benefited a great deal from the fact that Yeager’s high school system has bled into the youth programs.

“What we do on defense and offense is extremely complex,” Yeager said. “The sooner that we can get them bits and pieces of that, the more successful they’re going to be.”

Wetzler said, “It’s helped me tremendously because you have an idea of what you’re going to do before you even talk with the coaches. You’re comfortable with it.”

Mountain Brook Athletics is online at mbathletics.org.

William Galloway contributed to this story.