When Hand-Madison coach Steve Filippone was with high school coaches at the American Football Coaches Association convention in Indianapolis in January, a topic of conversation was 7-on-7 football.
That football would find its way into summer was inevitable, given that AAU basketball and soccer have long given high school players opportunities in those months.
Sometimes referred to as summer passing leagues, 7-on-7 football is played without linemen. On offense there is the quarterback, wide receivers, running backs and a tight end. On defense, there are linebackers and defensive backs. There is no tackling, no running. Quarterbacks have four seconds to get rid of the ball or the play is whistled dead. Teams start from the opponent’s 40-yard line. It is a fast-paced game. Some critics, of course, say it is not all that beneficial because it is not the real game; others see it as an opportunity to develop a quarterback and passing game and sharpen pass defense skills.
New Canaan recently held its seventh annual 7-on-7 Grip It & Rip It tournament, which is increasing in popularity and this year featured 38 teams, 28 from Connecticut. Hand has a team that plays in a league in Guilford in which a small number of teams compete on Mondays, but what worries Filippone is the proliferation of 7-on-7 regional and national events with high school athletes competing for coaches who are not their high school coaches.
“If you have a kid and he goes to play in that kind of environment with that kind of attention and that kind of celebrity status, they have to be a special kid to be able to come back to their high school and behave like another member of their team,” said Filippone, who was named 2014 football coach of the year by the National High School Athletic Coaches Association.
Filippone’s second concern is “having third-party representation. And a lot of times the third party is the same guy who got them to go play in these elite games. And now all of a sudden the NCAA people are talking about our college coaches going onto a high school campus and the first guy they see is the kid’s private trainer/coach and they’ve got to get by him before they can get to his high school coach.”
“In Connecticut I don’t think it’s a huge issue, but in Texas and Florida and other places where there are a large number of Division I-type talent, it is a problem. “
It can be a problem for a college coach anywhere when it comes to recruiting.
“I’m one of those who has an issue with it,” UConn coach Bob Diaco said. “I’m not for anything that separates high school players from their high school coaches. The high school coaches are the best chance for [high school players] to succeed on the football field or the other sports fields, and in scholastic endeavors. When you extract the high school players from that component, you’re extracting them from culture, you’re extracting them from team. You are empowering someone else to be another voice in the ear of a young person when there’s already too many voices.”
There also is concern about the toll on a player’s body.
“By the time you get done with the rigors of summer, competing, driving in a bus from state to state to state competing in daylong tournaments … if you can make it through that without an ankle [injury] knee or a shoulder, good luck,” Diaco said.
Filippone also worries about parental involvement, wondering what would happen if a player came back from a national tournament and wasn’t the starter on his high school team.
“What if you had good players at the same position … and this kid had to split time with him?” Filippone said. “I guarantee you mom and dad are coming in saying, ‘My son played in the Under Armour or whatever elite championship game and he can’t start for Hand? Are you kidding me, what’s wrong with you?’ “
It’s all about exposure for traveling players, but Cincinnati coach Tommy Tuberville said the 7-on-7 competition was initially created to keep players involved in football during the summer because the sport was losing players to AAU basketball.
“My son was a 7-on-7 player and they qualified for the state championship and I take him to Texas A&M and it was unbelievable,” Tuberville said. ” … A lot of kids were playing football in the summer. I think it keeps the interest up, but the one thing we don’t want to do is see it get out of control. I know in Texas high school coaches can’t coach the team. It has to be a parent or someone away from the program, but then you’ve got to be careful with that.”
Why?
“Because you’ve got all these third party people coaching and they’re all tied into colleges,” Central Florida coach George O’Leary said. “I don’t like the direction they’re heading.”
Diaco agreed.
“And the more we feed that monster, the more it’s going to continue to grow,” Diaco said. “They’ve boxed out the high school coaches and they’re a conduit to the college coaches.”
Who knew football would be turning the way of basketball as all this sounds similar to criticism college basketball coaches have had about AAU basketball coaches funneling players to certain colleges.
“I think right now with all these traveling tournaments there’s just so much going on when [players] show up on campus,” O’Leary said. “I’ve seen a change in the players, it’s just their attitude about themselves. ‘What can you do for me?’ I think we have to get back to limiting how much we’re actually doing with these kids.”
At the convention in Indianapolis the high school coaches asked NCAA officials if the governing body of college sports would draft a position statement on 7-on-7.
“According to them,” Filippone said, “they can’t take a position on something they’re not empowered to regulate, so their hands are tied. They said all we can do is control the colleges putting on camps, where they bring kids in, but they can’t control any of these private organizations that put these games together.”
