By Jeff Whitten, special to the Herald

On a sweltering July evening on Rebel Field dozens of kids – many no bigger than a minute – ran through drills designed to test their speed and agility, as part of a month-long evaluation period for Effingham County Recreation and Sports Management’s Jaguars football program.

While some will go on to play on rec league teams, top players during these evaluations will fill rosters on the Jaguars 8U, 10U and 12 U teams, which compete in both the Coastal Athletic Association and Georgia Recreation and Parks Association play at the district and state level. Indeed, the Jaguars have won multiple GRPA titles, including a three-year run of state titles from 2014 to 2016 under coach Yancy Ford – better known as the superintendent of schools for Effingham County.

But while winning is among the reasons to play football at any level – the Jaguars may approach the pursuit of victory a bit differently. There’s the lack of yelling, for one thing.

ECRSM Director Jeffrey Lonon, who coaches the 12U Jaguars team, recalled watching recreation play one season and seeing “a lot of yelling and screaming and no teaching of fundamentals,” he said, with the end result some youngsters were trying out for middle school teams without knowing how to get into a three-point stance.

Bigger kids who tend to wind up on the offensive and defensive lines got less time from coaches at the younger level than did their faster, “skill kid” counterparts – who could win games with their speed and talent, Lonon said. And that wasn’t fair to the players.

The Jaguars take a more basic approach, which in part means taking the time to teach fundamentals, while also hopefully helping young players learn a love for the game that might carry them into middle school and high school competition, and even beyond. 

Lonon’s fellow Jaguars coaches, Zach Conaway and Darius Jackson, have similar coaching philosophies.

“I like competition; I do,” said Conaway, who coaches the 10U team. “I think iron sharpens iron, and the only way to get better is to play someone better than you.”
But getting better isn’t necessarily about winning, added Conaway, whose day job involves building turkey calls and buying and selling timber.

“I don’t coach to win games,” he said. “Coaching for me is more about teaching life lessons than anything else.”

Conaway grew up on sports fields in Effingham County, living a sort of idyllic childhood on baseball diamonds and football fields. And while he has three sons and part of his reason for coaching is to give them what he had as a boy, it’s not just about that, Conaway said.

In short, he’d probably still be coaching if he wasn’t a father. That’s how much he enjoys it, and how important he believes it is.

“I’ve had my time to shine, to grow up and to learn,” Conaway said. “It’s time to give back.”

He called coaching youth sports a calling, one in which the lessons imparted go far beyond the end zone.

“Football teaches family, it teaches unity, it teaches discipline, and it teaches you when you face some adversity that you can’t just turn around and run away from it,” Conaway said. “It teaches you to hold your ground and hold it strong, and that’s something the world doesn’t teach youth today.”

Jackson, the 8U coach, is by day a social worker who has probably seen enough bad in the world to make the good even better. A former college football player, Jackson got into volunteer coaching because his dad coached kids in rec sports for 20 years and he wanted to give back in the same way.

 Now a father himself with four kids, Jackson is in his third year with the Jaguars and also finds the game a path through which kids learn things beyond box scores.

““Through sports you can teach kids everything, sports teaches them perseverance, it teaches them how to deal with adversity, how to deal with success and even how to deal with not so much success,” he said.

Getting those messages across starts with fundamentals, the foundation on which any sport is built. And the younger the kid, the more you have to focus what you teach.

“What I’ve found teaching kids at that age group is you have to be intentional, and the drills have to be focused, because when you’re 8 your attention span is short as a snap, and then you’re on to something else,” Jackson said. “You don’t want to overload then with too much information.”

It can also be taught without the “screaming and yelling,” as Lonon put it. Jackson said he takes kid aside to talk to them one-on-one when he needs to correct a mistake.

“You can’t yell at them, or you’ll lose them,” he said. “Some kids may be able to handle it, but most kids can’t, and you want kids to enjoy the experience.

“Yes, we want to be competitive, but the goal for me is that for each kid I encounter, they leave me with a better understanding of the game than they had when they got here,” Jackson said.

For some young players, it’s the first step on the ladder.

“You get kids out here who are timid in the beginning,” Conaway said. “To see them overcome getting put on their butt during a drill over and over again and realize that if ‘I listen to Coach Zach because Coach Zach believes in me and believes I can do this,’ and see it when they begin to believe in themselves to realize that if they hold their ground they can compete. That’s special for me.”

Like most sports, the game of football offers its rewards in ways not always found in line scores. Many of those who play for the Jaguars will find friendships that last into their adulthood, Lonon said, all because of what they experience as kids on playing fields.

“It all starts on fields like this one,” he said.

[Jeff Whitten is the former editor of Bryan County News and a freelance writer in Effingham County.]