By Ryan C. Christiansen

If you’re from the area and you’re a Baby Boomer, you probably had to wait until you were in high school to play organized football. If you’re in one of the younger generations, say Generation X or the Millennials, you had to wait until fourth grade before you could join a team. Nowadays, however, even kindergarteners play in football leagues, and area youth programs are helping kids to learn the basics.

Around the time when most of this year’s kindergarteners were born (or maybe when they were still just gleams in their fathers’ eyes) the park districts in Fargo and West Fargo, N.D., began offering organized flag football for kids in kindergarten through third grade.

On the Fargo side, the impetus for the program began when an emigrant from Texas (where football is often the dominant social and leisure activity for all ages) approached the Park Board about starting a football program for kids in the youngest school-aged groups. “He couldn’t believe that we didn’t have one already,” said Clay Whittlesey, Director of Recreation for the Fargo Park District. “A lot of our ideas come from the community,” he said, “and so we started with 70 kids, and then it grew to 140 and 280, and there seems to be no end in sight.” The program now has 700 kids, across 50 teams, he said.

In West Fargo, there are 350 kids enrolled in flag football, “and that’s up 100 kids from last year,” said Lance Belisle, Recreation Manager for the West Fargo Park District.

The programs are funded through registrations and subsidized by the park districts.

In both cities, kindergarteners and first graders play together, but in Fargo, second graders and third graders play in their own classes. (In West Fargo, kids in second and third grades play together.) The seasons are eight weeks long.

In Fargo, kids practice once a week at places and at times determined by their coaches. They also play one game each week at the Tharaldson Baseball Complex, either on Mondays, Tuesdays, or Thursdays, depending on grade level.

In West Fargo, the kids will have five practices before they play their first game, and then they play six or seven games. Practices are Tuesdays and/or Thursdays at the Scheels Soccer Complex or South Elmwood Park, and games are played Thursdays and /or Saturdays at the South or North Elmwood Parks.

Some boys are known to play in both Fargo and West Fargo leagues, Belisle said.

Girls can play, too, and there is no physical contact between players, except for incidental contact or when players hike or hand-off the ball. The kids wear mouth guards and athletic shoes, and blocking involves putting a body in front of another body. “It’s a game of speed,” Belisle said, “and a lot of spinning to get away from the defense.”

The games are played seven-on-seven and there are approximately 14 kids on each team, which means the coaches can swap out an entire squad to play offense or defense. The games are fifty minutes to an hour long with a running clock, which sounds like a long time, “but early on, it takes about a minute just to get the kids lined up between plays,” Whittlesey said. “The kids don’t really run a lot of plays during the course of a game until they get older.”

All of the coaches are volunteers, typically parents, many of whom have a football background. “This is one of the activities where I don’t have trouble finding volunteers to coach,” Belisle said.

The goal is to have fun, and along the way, to learn basic football skills. Teaching the youngest kids football is pretty challenging, Whittlesey said, because it’s a lot for them to grasp. Belisle agrees. “At this young age,” he said, “it’s the first time they get any kind of experience playing football.” Kids learn how to hike, run, and pass, and where to stand. “We just have fun and introduce them to the game,” he said.

“It gets progressively more advanced as they get older,” Whittlesey said, “and, hopefully, by the time they are in fourth grade, they will be ready for F-M Athletics.”

If there is a granddaddy of youth football programs in the area, that designation goes to F-M Athletics, a non-profit organization that formed in 1972 to help promote youth football in the Fargo-Moorhead area. And while Gen Xers and Millenials in F-M didn’t have organized flag football opportunities growing up, they could play tackle football with helmets and pads as early as fourth grade. The league is in its forty-first season this year with over 1,500 players and 63 teams serving kids in fourth through eighth grades, with most kids playing in fifth and sixth grades, and not only in Fargo and Moorhead, Minn., but in West Fargo, Casselton, and Kindred, N.D., and Dilworth, Glyndon, Lake Park, Barnesville, Detroit Lakes, and Hawley, Minn.

A true eleven-man football league with 80- to 100-yard fields, players in F-M athletics learn the basics of helmeted football. “What we’re trying to teach is the fundamentals of blocking and tackling, the key ingredients,” said Paul “Otto” Ferrie, an F-M Athletics board member. “But we’re also teaching teamwork and the social aspects of playing team sports.”

The teams in the F-M league play according to North Dakota High School Activities Association football rules, but with many exceptions, depending on grade level, including restrictions on kick-offs, blitzing, and more. In addition, players exceeding certain weight limits according to grade level, must move up a grade, and no player over 156 pounds may carry the ball except in the case of recovered fumbles or interceptions.

And the equipment the players wear is all issued by F-M Athletics, with the exception of shoes and mouth guards, and all of it is paid for through registrations and fundraisers. “The safety of the kids is our primary concern,” Ferrie said. “We buy the best equipment that you can get. And our coaches have to take a concussion test before they can coach in F-M Athletics. The only difference between the equipment at NDSU and our equipment is that ours is sized for youth.”

The players in F-M athletics get to practice two to four times a week in various parks and on school grounds. Teams in the metro area play games at Centennial Fields in Moorhead and all teams get to play at least one game at night under the lights, and one in the Fargodome, too.

Like in the flag football leagues, most of the coaches in F-M Athletics likely played football in high school or in college. Sometimes, local high school coaches help to teach F-M coaches at an annual clinic.

But the greater Fargo-Moorhead area isn’t the only part of the region served by youth football programs. In Grand Forks, N.D., too, the YMCA offers flag football (as it does in Fargo), but it’s the Greater Grand Forks Youth Football League that helps young players to learn the basics of tackle football.

Now in its eighteenth season, the Grand Forks area program began as a response to hockey. “In the Grand Forks area, it’s no secret that hockey is king,” said Brad Westum, a long-time volunteer for GGF youth football. “Participation in hockey is very high, and when hockey players start playing at the sixth-to-ninth-grade levels, they start traveling more, and many of them will not play football during middle school because of hockey. But by the time they get to high school, they might not make the high school hockey team, and yet they are good, solid athletes, and so the football coach might recommend they go out for football instead. We don’t want them to say, ‘I’ve never played football,’ and so our goal is to expose them to football so that when they get to high school, even if they haven’t played the sport since the sixth grade, they will think back to it and remember that it was fun, and they will go out for football.”

Similar to F-M Athletics, but also different in a number of ways, the Grand Forks program serves fourth through sixth graders, with the fourth grade playing nine-man football. The program currently serves 350 kids and has teams in Grand Forks and East Grand Forks, Minn., as well as Thompson, Hillsboro, and in the Mayville-Portland N.D., community, as well. Teams play two, 20-minute halves on 80-yard fields marked at the Ulland Park Softball Complex in Grand Forks. All of the teams play using the same playbook, Westum said, “because players at that age are just trying to figure it out. We don’t allow trick plays.” Practices are Tuesdays and Thursdays, and teams play two games on Saturday mornings. The coaches are volunteers.

In all of the youth football programs, parents play an important role in helping kids to enjoy football. At the flag football level, parents can help out the coach, “because coaching fourteen kids can be challenging, just keeping their attention,” Whittlesey said. “You don’t even have to know football skills, only organizational skills.”

And “any time the parent can ask his or her child what they learned in practice, they can help them to work on the simple things, like hand-offs and short passes,” Belisle said.

And when the competition naturally heats up in tackle football, “be supportive of your kids and the coaches,” Westum said. “You might not always agree with the coach, but keep that to yourself. Don’t share it with your 10-year-old.”

But most of all, parents are reminded that the youth leagues may be their child’s only chance to play football. “If you can teach kids one thing—that football is fun—then you’ve done your job,” Westum said. “I’ve had parents say to me, ‘You know, he didn’t play football after that, but he had so much fun.’”

“The kids will remember this,” Ferrie said. “They will always remember playing football. They will say they got the chance to play.”