Football’s Secret Language The difference between the classified groups as jocks, nerds, bandies, gangs, clubs, preps, and the gamers are they all have their own type of lingo. Not all people can fit into their groups so they find it annoying when other people using their lingo. There all tons of types of languages. Many people that don’t participate in sports may not know that there is a language in sports. In sports, they use codes and certain sayings that have meanings the other team doesn’t understand. They use the codes so they can communicate a plan they want to do without giving the other team a hint what they are about to do. It can be either a saying or a hand signal. I’m not familiar with all the languages in sports but quite familiar in the game of football. I’ve been playing football since I was 6 years old. The language has changed every time I moved up to a higher level. We get older so they expect us to be able to learn them easier and have to make it harder for the opposing team. When I played pee wee football everything was simple. It had to be that way, because we were so young and it would make it easy for us to know what we are doing out on the field. We only had one major code in pee wee and it was called “special”, when the coach yelled that out we did this play that we thought would get us a touchdown. Once I moved up into junior high football, it started to get a little more difficult. Both the offense and defense were completely different. We had to learn how line up in one play and shift into another play on the same down. The quarterback would yell shift after everyone was already lined up then we would have to go line up in a different spot to run a different play. The reason teams shift into a play is so they can confuse the other team or they know the play they called isn’t going to work by seeing how the other team is lined up. That was the only big major language difference from pee wee other than the plays. Last few years in high school, the language has made a jump from junior high. We had the shift too but we also added audible, hot routes, and hand signals. When we would audible the quarterback would yell out a code, for an example “31” which means we were changing the play from the line of scrimmage. The whole team had wristbands with numbers on it, whatever number was called we would look at the wristband and the run the play. When we wanted to do a hot route, we would communicate with the quarterback and he would say red, which means a deep go route. We use a hot route if we are confident if our player is going to beat the player on the opposite team. Handle signals were used on both offense and defense. The coach would send hand signals to our middle linebacker and whatever signal he got, he would call in the defensive huddle. On the offense side of the ball, hand signals were used by tapping the leg, helmet, or the face mask. All 3 of them meant different routes. The leg meant go route, helmet meant slant, and the face mask meant a hitch. Now that I am in college, I find the language way different and very difficult. When I first came up here I was completely lost in the type of language they have. There are many different signals and codes. There are some that I still don’t know to this day. I’m still learning the new stuff since that I am only a freshman. Even though we are a team, we make sure that our defense doesn’t even know our signals. The reason we do that is because when we do our two minutes offense, Coach Ianello gives the quarterback the signals so we can run our plays without huddling so we don’t waste a lot of time. The signals and are similar to high school in a way. They both have the hot routes, signals, and audibles. The difference is there are way more and more difficult so they are hard to get down quick. I might not be familiar with all the other lingos I mentioned in the introduction, but I could say I am quite confident in understanding the football lingo. Football players don’t get mad if we see people using our lingo unless they aren’t on our team, if they’re not on the team they shouldn’t have to be using it. With this writing, I hope you learned a little more about the things that go on during the game of football. | | |