Former football coach Robbie Waters is spearheading a project that, if successful, could change the complexion and brighten the future of high school football in the Town of Flower Mound.
Waters, who has coached at both Marcus and Flower Mound high schools for more than a decade, said in all of his time in his adopted city, he never realized that there was a missing cog in the pipeline that connects youth football to the high school level.
“I’ve been in Flower Mound now for 13 years, and my kids are just now getting to the age where I want to play tackle football with them,” Waters said. “I had some friends that I met through little league football who said, ‘Hey, it’s time for tackle, where do we go?’ I said I didn’t know, but I would start asking.”
That was when Waters said he made the surprising discovery.
“I started calling people that I trust, and they said there is no place to play tackle football,” Waters said. “There are a few organizations here and there that are for-profit, and they go and play select tackle football and they take teams and have to go outside of the town of Flower Mound to play… and so I decided “that’s that.” This is what we’re going to do.”
Waters, a teacher at Flower Mound High School, said he texted 25 men that he trusted to meet at the Flower Mound High School field house to formulate a plan.
“We sat down and said, ‘What do we want to do?'” Waters said. “Do we want to put together a team that goes and travels and plays in different towns, or do we want to have something here? Everyone thought we should do it ourselves.”
That was six months ago.
On April 19, the Flower Mound Youth Football Academy (FMYFA) offered four spring practices to help kids stay sharp and ready for football season at no cost.
As of April 16, just three days earlier, the newly formed league had already registered 130 young athletes.
Waters said the idea is fairly simple.
“Our mission is to create a recreational experience for the youth of Flower Mound,” Waters said. “So we’re going to have Flower Mound kids. We’re not going to have kids that come in from other communities, because that’s where you start to have problems. A coach may go and grab a really fast kid from this town or a kid with really good hands from that town.
“They start chasing trophies, and they’re not chasing the fact that we are building community, building relationships and building a recreational experience that will be in line with high school coaches.”
Waters said the high school coaching staffs are on board and pointed to other local programs that already have a long history of focus on youth football that translated into perennial powerhouse status at the high school level.
“Our high school coaches want to coach home-grown kids, and they don’t get that right now,” Waters said. “You can get that in Southlake, and you can get that in Aledo, and they have very strong football communities. But you can’t get that here.”
This fall, the league will provide flag football to students from Kindergarten through second grade and tackle football for students from third grade through sixth grade.
In the spring, the league will offer flag football to K-6 and will provide a football experience for the students headed into middle school football with 7-on-7 for seventh and eighth graders.
“If you are zoned to go to Flower Mound or Marcus High School, whether they go to Liberty Christian or Coram Deo, those are the kids,” Waters said. “So to say you have to have a Flower Mound address wouldn’t be true, because kids in Highland Village and other communities go to Flower Mound schools. We are providing a youth recreational experience for kids who are zoned to Flower Mound high schools.”
The FMYFA will feature Friday night tailgating events, opportunities for players to be on the field with high school athletes and coaches to be on the field with high school coaches.
Waters, who has a total of 27 years of coaching experience in Texas, Arizona, and Oklahoma said that he and the rest of the Academy’s board want this to be a family experience and want to build it the right way.
“The experience for the kids is everything,” Waters said. “I’ve talked to the high school coaches and they say, ‘What can we do to get the kids and parents locked into what we’re doing?’ And I said, ‘First, we have to establish a great coaching community.
“We have to give dads the courage that they can get out and coach a difficult sport with difficult demands and provide an enjoyable experience for their kids’…we are providing what we believe is a turnkey football experience for students from Kindergarten through their freshman year.”
Visit www.fmyfa.net for more information.
