Varsity Scouts: How Team 809 Works

[tortdog 10]

Someone suggested that I explain how an effective BSA Varsity team works, so here goes. I'll explain how our team works (I'm biased).

 

The Team Scouts

 

Our Varsity team is composed of boys at least 14-years old through their 16th birthday. At any given time, there will be 5-6 boys on the team. I consider that to be a minimum and the team is trying to reach out to friends of team members to increase the size.

 

The Team Adult Leaders

 

We have one coach (similar to the scoutmaster of a troop) and two assistant coaches. The coach and assistants work along with the youth leaders to keep the team moving forward. View this as the high school varsity football coaching staff relates to the HS varsity football players. We also bring in specialists who have expertise in program areas (discussed below).

 

The Team Youth Leaders

 

The team's youth leadership comprises of a captain, a co-captain (if you have enough youth) and various program managers. The captain looks after the program managers to make sure they are doing their duties. The program managers each heads one of five program areas, including: advancement, high adventure, personal development, service, and special programs and events. We assign one adult coach/parent to each program manger so that the managers do not fail the team.

 

The Program

 

Every three months, the team is trained in one general areas, e.g., canoeing, volleyball, music, theater, and basketball. Which skill do we train on? The boys decide, and we work with other Varsity teams in the council to pick a skill together. That way we can compete against each other at the end of the three months.

 

The team finds an adult expert to dedicate 3 months to the training of the team on the chosen 3-month skill. The permanent coaches keep the team moving and work alongside that expert coach. For example, we have done basketball and brought in an adult who played ball in college to coach our team. At the end of these 3 months, those team scouts should be able to teach others about that skill, put on a tournament around that skill, etc. Service projects are formed along the lines of the skill, e.g., clean a beach while doing the canoeing program.

 

At the end of each 3-month program, we have a tournament. The invited teams are other Varsity teams in the council. We compete head to head with each other using brackets or round robin, and we include in the scoring of the tournament other individual events, community activities and ethics events. For example, in the last basketball tournament they played the games but also had an individual 3-point competition, an individual free throw competition, a team presentation on Ethics in Basketball, and each team picked an NCAA tourney bracket using CBS sportsline to score each teams picks.

 

Following the tournament, we award T-shirts to all participants, individual awards to winners of the individual events, and a "bucket" that we pass from between each tournament to the winning team. Each winning team leaves its legacy on the bucket by marking up a slab of leather attached to the handle that usually includes the members initials and a few choice remarks (think mini Woodbadge mementos).

 

Intraleauge Play

 

We are just now getting to the point where we compete during the 3-month season with other Varsity teams. In the past, we only competed once at the end of the three months. The vision now is to compete throughout the season, with the teams assigned to play other teams and join with that team's program that week. For example, say week 1 is focused on the rules of the game of basketball. Varsity Team 1 is assigned to play Varsity Team 2, so it meets at Team 2's location for training on the rules, and plays an intramural game at the end against Team 2. That win/loss is counted and we use that record to determine a bracket for the tournament. (In the past we didn't do intramural games, but play a few games during the tournament.)

 

Awards and Advancements

 

The boys still advance in Boy Scouts, usually coming in as at least Star scouts. The advancement team manager tracks each scouts progress, and at the court of honors we give out the Varsity awards as well, such as the Varsity letter and the program pins for accomplishment of each. Our goal is that every Varsity scout earn the Denali award prior to moving up to Venturing.

 

The Vision?

 

Our goal is to provide a program that provides intramural competition to Varsity teams with intense training every quarter. It is Little League/YMCA, only run by the Boy Scouts with skills as open as you want (sports, arts, etc.). Through competition, the boys do not lose interest; we help them to Eagle while pushing them further to Venturing and the Silver Award.

 

So...there it is.(This message has been edited by tortdog)(This message has been edited by tortdog)(This message has been edited by tortdog)

[scoutldr 732]

Thanks for the rundown, tort. I have to admit, I know nothing about the Varsity program. In fact, everything I know, I read here. We have only one Varsity Team in our medium-sized Council, and it's an LDS unit, I think. I'm having a hard time visualizing a tournament with only one team? I also had no idea that Varsity included things other than sports, such as theater and high adventure. Is that the norm?

[tortdog 10]

It's hard to say what the norm is, when the Varsity program is currently underutilized. However, I'd say most Varsity units I am familiar with emphasize sports and high adventure. In our program, the boys have two years in Varsity. The 2nd quarter will likely always be basketball, the 4th quarter will be high adventure (we do a survivor type event in a state/federal park where the teams compete to best each other in 6 goals over three days and two nights). That leaves us with two "free" quarters each year. One quarter will be an "art", while the other quarter is up to the boys during the summer (but likely will be another high adventure).

 

We were in a situation with only one team (though we had 10 teams in our district but the other nine were in form only). I and the other coach had our Woodbadge tickets to fill, and we had to do some form of competitive activity/tournament as part of the ticket. We ended up grabbing a Venturing crew and we competed against the Crew. (The Crew won, but we found out they cheated though they deny it to this day...) On another competitive event, we divided the 6-man Varsity team into 4 groups of 2 (we had two friends of the scouts). We scored each team of 2.

 

Later we found out there was another "active" Varsity team that enrolled in the YMCA program as a Varsity team competing against other YMCA teams.

 

So there is a way to do Varsity even with a limited number of teams. You just have to get creative. Now that the active Varsity teams in our Council are aware of each other, we are coordinating and competing.

[purcelce 11]

Very informative post.