Over the years we have heard some fairly novel and innovative methods in training high school football teams to prepare to play the game in an upcoming Fall. We don’t know any method which is both tried and true and “the way to do it.” One might go ask the teams which are winning championships and see what they are doing. Their methods are obviously effective.
Some people use the conventional method of lifting and running until the team is strong, explosive, powerful, and well-conditioned. Some, we have learned, are employing ancient methods of meditation chiefly aimed at uniting the human spirit with the Divine.
Coach Darell Keith, himself a 29-year veteran of the United States Army who retired a Master Sergeant and former Drill Instructor believes he has found an interesting way to help condition his team. He is using the martial art of Jiu-Jitsu.
He hasn’t abandoned heavy lifting and running, the man isn’t crazy. He has added Jiu-Jitsu to other more established methods of football training to give his team added “Dog.”
We read an on-line article from BrazilianJiu-JitsuHeroes.com and, according to this article, Jiu-Jitsu is a martial art and combat sport system which focuses on grappling. The art emphasizes ground fighting. Kind of sounds similar to football, doesn’t it?
Jiu-Jitsu was founded on the concept that even smaller, weaker people can successfully defend themselves against a bigger, stronger, heavier opponent by using sound technique, leverage, and taking the fight to the ground. Once on the ground the Jiu-Jitsu combatant applies joint-locks and chokeholds to subdue, and then defeat, his opponent.
Football has alway taught a similar tactic. Football coaches, since the dawn of the sport, have preached that the player who wins the leverage battle, wins the encounter. You may have heard this expressed as “Low man wins.” The expression, “Low man wins” is almost always concluded, by these same football coaches, with the words “every time.”
Utilizing what amounts to a Brazilian form of wrestling to train for football really isn’t novel at all. Having before coached football, we always encouraged our kids to wrestle on the high school team as a method of football training. We knew as coaches, when we got them back from the wrestling coach, we would have a player more adept at using leverage to his advantage on the football field as well as the wrestling mat.
Jiu-Jitsu carries the leverage equation a step farther than even wrestling. A Jiu-Jitsu martial artist also incorporates a variety of “strikes” which teach, in addition to leverage, punch and “quick-twitch” muscle-fiber developing explosive movement. Plus, Jiu-Jitsu is a fight, football is a fight, and on Friday night it isn’t necessarily the size of the dog in the fight, as much as it is the size of the fight in the dog.
Here it is, in a Brazilian nut-shell. No matter what your high school coaching experience may be, no body in all of Kentucky football, knows even a scintilla as much about preparing men for battle than retired Master Sergeant and Head Coach Darell Keith at Todd County Central.
In the end, the game of football isn’t a dance, isn’t a play, it isn’t even a game of tossing discs around a park. Football is a battle.
So go ahead and trollop around the dew-soaked, mossy woods, putting on Shakespeare in the Park versions of A Mid-Summer Nights’ Dream if you think it will get your team ready for August. Hell, give each other mani-pedis if you want.
Coach Keith and the Todd County Rebels won’t be doing any of that mess. The Rebels will be getting ready for battle by honing the skills actually used in battle.
This is Coach HB Lyon, reporting for KPGFootball, and we’re JUST CALLING IT LIKE WE SEE IT!
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