FSM Feature: You Are Athlete Youth Football Camp 2025

FSM Feature: You Are Athlete – Youth Football Camp

www.FranchiseSportsMedia.com

The You Are Athlete Youth Football Camp took place at Pinecrest Academy – Sloan in Henderson last weekend. Franchise Sports Media was there to support our Las Vegas High School football players, but we left with a lot more.

The importance of youth football camps:

Youth football camps have always been one of the pillars of the sport’s development. Nothing teaches fundamentals and technique better than one-on-one interaction with better coaches and better players than a young player is accustomed to within the season. Over the process of a football season, whether it be school or club, young players learn about camaraderie, team building, and what it takes to be successful and unsuccessful, for that matter. By the time the football season is over, you have a pretty good idea of what areas you need to work on and where you need to improve. Let’s be honest: by the end of the year, it’s been you and your team without much outside influence for the better part of four or five months or more.

When the season is over, it’s time to refresh and rest, but soon enough, it’s your responsibility, if you’re serious about the game, to figure out how to get better. That’s where the right camp comes in.

For skill positions, as well as the trenches, a good set of coaches and a rise in the level of competition can make you better if you have what it takes. Iron sharpens iron, as it always has and always will. Every year, there are hundreds of camps around the nation. Because of how lucrative youth sports are in general, some are much better than others. Some are more of a money grab, and some can be the catalyst behind a young player becoming a beast over the course of an off-season.

Last weekend in Las Vegas, I had the opportunity to cover one of the best youth football camps in the nation.

You Are Athlete : Pinecrest Sloan Academy, Henderson, Nevada .

Coach Lo Wood (@coachlo4life) is known in youth football circles as “The Kamp King.” With Franchise Sports Media, I’ve covered camps and seven-on-seven tournaments every year that we’ve covered Las Vegas high school football. I must say that this was one of the best I’ve ever experienced. Coach Wood has been running new camps for 30 years, and on a yearly basis, he covers over 30 camps nationally. Before You Are Athlete, I didn’t know the man, and I had never heard of him. After watching him work yesterday, I realized there is a standard that I will look for going forward.

Kids who play football most of the time want to be adults who play football.

Youth football camp is about education. We’ve always looked at it as a showcase of skills, but with the changing landscape in high school and college football, it has become much more. What struck me about the You Are Athlete Camp is the focus that Coach Lo put on these changes. NIL and the transfer portal have brought about the age of free agency in what we used to call amateur sports. College football is no longer an amateur sport, and for those with the opportunity to play at the next level, information is almost as important as being one of the best on the field. As of this writing, there are over 8000 players in the transfer portal for football alone.

Let’s do some math. The majority of these players will remain in the portal without a place to play next season. It’s the sad truth, and it’s not being driven home to our student-athletes. Let’s be real: the portal has its purposes, and sometimes those purposes serve the way they were supposed to. Sometimes, players, teams, and coaches just don’t work out. Being a recording artist for as many years as I have, I remember being signed to labels when the regime that brought me in ended up getting fired or leaving. A new regime came in and didn’t see the vision, or I didn’t see theirs, and the whole situation became a bad fit. This happens in college athletics all the time. Sometimes, the best reaction to these changes is to try your luck somewhere else, and I fully understand when those decisions have to be made.

At the same time, in what is now the free market, money is often the reason players enter the portal. But walking away from a college scholarship in this climate is the equivalent of taking your hard-earned money to the casino. You just never know how you return home; the overwhelming majority of our student-athletes return empty-handed or in a worse situation than they were when they entered the portal.

This educational aspect of the You Are Athlete Youth Football Camp was the most important part of the event, in this writer’s opinion. Coach Lo began the camp, speaking to the athletes and parents about his own experience with his own children. He explained how it started relatively easy with talent and grades, as his oldest son played at Notre Dame. It evolved into something extremely difficult with his daughter, who had suffered multiple injuries while playing volleyball in college. He wanted to start the camp by sharing his own experiences as a parent and a coach to the participants. The information was so vital that I pulled Coach Wood to the side to interview him for Franchise Sports Media and our Las Vegas student-athletes who were in attendance. This is what made this camp different from any other that I had covered up until this point.

Youth Football Camp: This is the way.

“As a Raiders Reporter, seeing kids compete tells me who to keep an eye on. You see the holes in the Raiders’ roster or people who may be retiring/leaving soon, and while these guys are years away from being in the NFL, you can see their skills today and hear where they may be heading for college ball. It’s good to know who you want to look out for and then follow their journey as they improve and get ready for the NFL.”

-Bryson Doughty – Senior Raiders Writer – Franchise Sports Media

I believe that the NCAA as a whole is full of shit and has been pretty much since its inception. The audacity to exploit players, their name, their image, and their likeness for billions of dollars every year and not share the revenue with them is a crime. To say that this exploitation is in exchange for education is a bigger crime, so when the new deal changed and student-athletes were able to be paid to play, I was all for it. Now, after a couple of years, I see a big glob of toothpaste that’s not going back into the tube. I believe that some regulation is necessary, but information is the key. You Are Athlete gave valuable information to parents and student-athletes before any of the kids took the field, and to me, this was the most important part of the day.

The Art of Recruiting.

Coach Wood gave way to Coach Paul Putnam, who heads up the NCSA, a national recruiting service that helped more than 30,000 student-athletes commit to play their sport in college last year alone. Coach Putnam followed with some valuable information about recruiting and the importance of getting on the field. If you don’t play, no one will know if you can. He spoke about the difference between a five-star recruit going to the University of Alabama and sitting on the bench for four years, as opposed to going to a smaller school, be it Division II, III, NAIA, or JUCO. His point was to get on the field at all costs. The goal is to be paid to play football, but the numbers are as they are, and the odds are stacked against the average ball player. A free education, a degree, and a skill should be the bare minimum that you leave this pursuit with.

This is nothing new. The overwhelming majority of student-athletes will never make it to the professional level. With the inception of the transfer portal and NIL, even fewer athletes will make it to the D1 level because of the reduction in the number of players that teams can carry. No middle, high school, or college player wants to hear that, but the truth of the matter is that something to fall back on is just an ace in the hole at this point.

You don’t have to leave empty-handed.

“Football has not only evolved from a competitive aspect but from a monetary and recruiting aspect. NIL Deals, transfer portal, and politics have become more impactful factors when it comes to young athletes and their future in football. The You Are Athlete Football Camp is a space where young athletes can compete, train, and showcase their talent against other top players in the nation. Coach Wood emphasizes the culture of being a student before an athlete. Specifically, how athletes need to remember that football can help them in their education as well as becoming a better young man… or woman!”

– Hannah Sequina – Girls Flag Football Reporter for Franchise Sports Media, and Green Valley High School JV Flag Football Coach.

The You Are Athlete camp had a great group of coaches whose enthusiasm was led by Coach Wood all day, and you could see that enthusiasm infect the student-athletes who started coming in at six in the morning. Trust me, it was absolutely freezing. Some were from California, Utah, Arizona, and other places, all with the same goal: to show up and show out. The best of the best received invitations to a national camp to showcase their skills against the best in the nation. It was a great event, and I recommend it to any parents in Las Vegas when it returns.

I ask each of our readers to follow Coach Lo Wood, “The Camp King,” You Are Athlete, Coach Paul Putnam, and the NCSA. If you have any questions or or need any of these contacts, please hit me up in the DM‘s at TQtheTrojan or Franchise Sports Media, and let me know. They’re pretty good about getting back, but this is the height of the camp season, and I know Coach Wood has his hands full.

Don’t trip. I’ll bug him for you. Franchise Sports Media is here for Las Vegas student-athletes, and you know this, man.

Shout out to Coach Lo Wood, Coach Paul Putnam, all of the coaches who devoted their time to the camp, and my man, Josh Hall, and You Are Athlete. You guys put on a hell of an event, and we’re glad that we could be a part of it.

Franchise Sports Media. Las Vegas sports news about Las Vegas Sports teams.

Written by TQ – Franchise Sports Media

Follow TQ on Instagram: @tqthetrojan

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