Offensive Line- Cross Blocking in Youth Football
Cross blocking in youth football is a very underrated blocking tactic. Cross blocking (“X”) will give your offensive linemen better blocking angles. It will also help your offensive line block bigger defensive linemen because it will generate blocking angles. It will actually slow down their rush because they won’t know who is going to block them.
This is a two linemen blocking combination. The outside linemen steps down (first), blocking down on the first defender inside of him. The inside linemen then steps outside (behind down blocking linemen), blocking the first defender outside of him. This is used with tackle /guard combination or the tackle /tight end combination. This is an extremely effective block in youth football. This has the same nature as a trap block. This works really well against disciplined gap defenses.
Blocking angles are probably the most overlooked aspect of the offensive line. Coaches tend to have just a base blocking scheme (one on one). Taking advantage of blocking angles on the defensive linemen (crack, down, cross, and kick out) will make for much easier/effective blocks for linemen. The cross block is very easy to execute; works well against all types of defenses.
You can also do a tight-end & offensive tackle cross block. The TE and OT cross block is what we utilize the most. We will utilize cross blocking almost every time when we run belly to the TE side. “X” is our call when we want our kids to cross block. “X” is easy to implement and doesn’t take a lot of practice time for the kids to get down. We will practice our X block with our offensive line when we are in our individual position practice session and when we practice our “team” offense.