By Jeremy McDonald

There’s an old saying out there:  “If you want to play (x-sport):  You have to try-out”.

In football, it’s like any other sport out there.  If you make the cut, you’d wear the uniform on Game Day.

But is it necessary?

Yeah, you can argue for ‘Yes, it’s part of the game’ or ‘No, let it play itself out’.

The latter is my thinking.

Why, in a sport that is so physical, so mentality straining; must limit ourselves to the top one-percent of the area (if it’s a Pop Warner team) or the school (as with Middle and High School?

But let me ask this:  Until you get to college athletics, why don’t you let the athlete’s play it out?

If you let it play out in the secondary and primary levels, through the summer workout programs and the two-a-days in August, then the natural process of the game would eliminate those out of the sport.  Thus leaving the coaching staff to determine their depth charts from who is left.

It might be easier to say, “I want to run a spread offense and a quick defense, so let’s hold try-outs for fast and quick people” or “I want to run a power offense and defense, let’s hold try-outs for power and hard-nose people.”

They’re hard to find within a school unless you recruit outside of the school (which is frown upon in most of the schools in America), and yeah it’s easier to try to hold try-outs and hope your philosophy works with what is at your school.

The benefits of letting it play out is that if your able to do a spread offense with what is left, more power to you.  But it gives you the ability to choose how you go about it instead of walking in saying, “We’re running a power running game,” and hoping that your quick guys can run it.

Not to mention too, if you coach a smaller school (i.e. under 750-1,000 students), they’re isn’t much of a try-out process because of the small student body size and trying to make sure you fill a freshman, JV and a Varsity squad.

Going off of that as well, if a sophomore or junior isn’t up to snuff for varsity, you can put them on Junior Varsity to gain valuable experience and bulk up until they are ready for the varsity level whenever that might be.  Not to mention that additional presence come later in the regular- or post-season.

At the end of the day however, coaches will do what they wish, holding try-outs or not in football.  But at least they are still some coaches out there who still believe in letting the ‘Natural Process’ of sports play itself out.