[Do-double-gg]

What makes Belfry so much better isn't that they just have a bunch of D1 guys out there who are just head and shoulders athletically better than everybody else's players. Yes, you will see a couple kids from Belfry go to a small D1 school or go to UPIKE or Cumberlands but very few of them do and even less than that actually stick it out the whole 4 years. I don't know if anyone other than us Belfry fans rememeber Coach Steve Mickey. He coached at Belfry for over 30 years. He was there before Coach Haywood was and just retired at the end of the 2008 football season. Well he is the guy who is over the little league programs for Belfry. They have 4 3rd-4th grade teams and 4 5th-6th grade teams. They only play each other and can only run the offense that the high school runs. That is how the middle school program is ran as well. Almost all of the coaches are former players who played for Coach Haywood so they know what they're talking about because they've ran this offense when they played and they run the same offense they will see when they get in high school. So kids who come in as freshman have been learning and running the same exact offense for the past 6 years of playing football. This is what I think makes Belfry so much better than all of the other mountain schools.

That right there is what I would love to see more people doing in this area. I'm not calling any coaches out or anything, but I think we have a few in this area who just for one reason or another don't want to go all in. Some people don't take the football in the lower grades serious. At a lot of schools the grade school and middle school programs are just a cluster. You have every coach on every team doing their own thing so you have kids who by the time they become freshman they have ran 5 or 6 different offenses and defenses and they are so confused and now they got to learn the High school stuff. They don't always teach the kids good sound fundamentals either. So then you got high school coaches who are taking valuabel time away from the starters to get the freshman up to speed and teach em the system. IMO if you got to teach kids at the high school level the fundamental of this game then you have problems and need to make some changes to your lower leagues. You will also have some little league coaches (and you know I'm right) who start thinking they are some big time coach and think so much about winning that they forget that their main job is to teach the kids how to play the game and get em ready for the next level and if some wins come along with that then good for the kids. I hear a lot of people talk about Belfry and Bell and Johnson Central and when they get beat by those teams they have all the usual lame excuses. That team is just so good because they recruit is probably the #1 lame excuse. People never want to take the time to see how a good program like this does things. If you are doing good things and having success then you don't need to recruit because the talent will come and find you and you will also get the hidden talent that is right in your back yard, kids that would never usually even go out for football. This is all just my own personal opinion and you have the right to disagree, but programs like Belfry are doing something right that the rest of us arent doing and I don't think it is just in the water.