The McDaid Family: Football Season

As I mentioned before, Nathan pressed to give football a try this year. Unfortunately, football is all done by grade instead of age so he's playing with 5th and 6th graders. There are six teams in the league. This is his first year of ever playing football and he's on the low end in weight but he's still having fun and improving each day. It helps that his friend Dylan is also on the team. I think he enjoys it more than I expected him to. His team has maroon jerseys with gold lettering and they voted their team name to be the Trojans (like USC). So far, he's been playing defensive guard (usually against some pretty big kids that can throw him around pretty good...but he can also use his quickness to squirt through the hole). He's also been working on a nice little spin move that he uses against some of the bigger kids. He does a nice job of tackling but we're still working on getting him comfortable (and mean) enough to really deliver a solid hit with the shoulder pads. When he gets to play offense he's usually tight end. They don't run too many plays with wideouts at this age but they do occasionally throw to the tight end.

Last weekend was scrimmages against some of the other teams and he did a nice job. He played defensive guard (his best position), offensive guard, and outside linebacker. He said he liked outside linebacker the best but he'll need to learn to deliver a hit at full speed before he'll see much playing time there. He did a great job of covering the pass plays though. Overall, the team looked pretty good. We've got some pretty impressive kids on the team that are going to be tough for the other teams to handle. Their first game is coming up in a couple days so it will be interesting to see how that goes. Coach Mattson invited the whole team over to his house after the scrimmage so the boys could play together away from football for awhile. It was a perfect day.

All of the games will be played on the Jenison High School football field (here's a cool aerial photo of the campus). It's really an amazing complex that many colleges would probably envy. The last two games they play are during the week at night under the lights. That should be pretty cool. You can see the game schedule here.

Prepping for the scrimmages. Nathan is #81. And for the Weiss boys... Yes, he WILL be getting Timmy's towel back!