Greater Cleveland Football Association

The Coaching Difference

We know that our greatest resource is our incredible volunteer coaches. We hold regular coaches meetings during the off season, attend annual coaching clinics, and host football skills and drills camps all in an effort to become better coaches. Our coaches focus on teaching the fundamentals, at it's core football is blocking and tackling, so we spend A LOT of time teaching and practicing these fundamentals. The structure that EWFL provides allows for our coaches to coach all the players from age 6-13 the exact same way when it comes to the fundamental techniques of tackling and blocking. We use our tackling circuit to teach the players the technique and all of them go through it every day in practice together, they rotate from station to station and each are taught the exact same way. We do this for teaching blocking as well. The advantage of this format is that every player is taught a uniform way to execute the technique and as the players move up through the organization year to year they are not having to learn a new way or from a different coach, this allows for the player to play faster because the technique becomes second nature.

Cleveland Panthers Tackling

Greater Cleveland Football Association is a USA Heads Up Football organization. We take seriously the responsibility of teaching our players how to tackle with the safest possible technique. Heads Up Tackling deals with straight ahead tackling also known as profile tackling we teach how to take your head out of that tackle to protect yourself, these type of tackles account for about 10% of all tackles in a game. We teach the shoulder leverage tackling technique also known as the Hawk Tackling technique for angle tackles, this teaches players the proper technique to take their head out of the tackle on angle tackles which accounts for around 90% of tackles in the game. Watch the videos below to see these techniques and how we teach them.

We use tackle rings to teach these techniques, these are specialized equipment needed to give players the most realistic practice against dummies instead of live player to player contact which builds player confidence.

We use a progression model for teaching our tackling technique, the following video shows the progression that we utilize in teaching the fundamental techniques of tackling and blocking.

Heads Up Blocking

Blocking is just as important as tackling. Lineman are making contact on every play, the USA Football Heads Up blocking technique teaches players the proper technique to keep their head out of the play. The following video shows the blocking technique we teach our players.