The Southeast Bulloch coaches and players took a little break from their regular schedule to give back to some of the future Yellow Jackets in the community by holding a youth football came last week. 

For the second year in a row Yellow Jacket head coach Jared Zito hosted the camp at Fred Shaver field for area youngsters from kindergarten through fifth grade.

“The idea with this camp is to share some football fundamentals and have a little fun,” said Zito. “We work on drills and techniques in the start of the camp and then play some games to wrap things up. We are hoping to give them some help so they can take that back to their recreation leagues and then hopefully into middle school.” 

The kids on hand had varying degrees of experience and coaches took that into consideration breaking them into various groups. 

“For some of these kids this is their first time being introduced to football,” said Zito. “We really want to make this a positive experience for the kids so they want to continue to play. For some of the older guys we are working to get them into a better stance and you can tell those who have some experience and we are trying to build off the skills they already have.” 

The Jackets had about 56 kids attend the four-day camp and are looking for another good crowd this week as they host a camp for the middle school age players. 

“We had them all together last year but we felt like it would be a lot more productive to break them into two groups and hold it over two weeks,” said Zito. “We will get a little more into the terminology with the middle school group. We are going to introduce very basic offensive and defensive packages to them.” 

Many of the current Yellow Jacket players are helping to coach the kids on hand this week which gives them a unique opportunity to be on the other side of being coached which Zito feels really gives them a new appreciation for what the Jacket coaches have to deal with. 

“I think a lot of our players think it’s easy to coach,” said Zito. “After the first day they came up to me and said they feel exhausted. They asked if it’s this hard for us and I told them when the players aren’t listening it is exhausting. Some of these players are natural coaches and understand how to get through to the kids. I really think we have some future coaches out here this week.”