VIDALIA — Jody Helbling didn’t know what he was getting into, but he certainly is glad it happened.

The head coach for the Miss-Lou Youth Football League’s Russ Wood State Farm Jets helped lead a group of children to a 10-0 season. This came in spite of the fact that most of his players having little to no experience playing football — and he had never coached football.

Helbling said he didn’t know much about the Miss-Lou Youth Football League until signup day in August at the Vidalia Recreation Center.

“We got there and there are all these kids lined up, but they say, ‘We have a problem,’” Helbling said.

The league officials told parents that there weren’t enough coaches to form enough teams for each child to be able to play. That’s when Helbling was nominated for a coaching position.

“There was a lady there that knew my wife, but I didn’t know her that well. She pointed at me and said, ‘He can do it,’” Helbling said.

“I’m like, ‘What?’ I had played football before, but had never coached before.”

But Helbling relented, and he soon met Julius Wilson, who he chose to be an assistant coach for his 8-and-under team, the Jets.

“Julius and I didn’t know any one of the kids other than our sons (Kyle and Jaquan Wilson),” Helbling said.

“We got a list, and there were cases where some coaches told us, ‘These five you can scratch off the list, because we already got them.’ The Vidalia Saints had already picked their entire team at that point.”

Helbling and Wilson opted to pick as many 8-year-olds as possible that were left on the list, in hopes that they had at least some football experience. Despite that, only a few children did have that experience, Helbling said.

“We set up our first practice, and it was a hodgepodge,” he said. “We had 11 kids, and we wanted to teach them the basic fundamentals: how to tackle and block properly. We said, ‘Let’s just have fun.’”

Despite the games always being close, the Jets never lost once, and Helbling said it was fun watching his players grow and learn to play as a team.

“We were so unorganized in practice at first, but every time Saturday came around, we pulled it out,” Helbling said. “As we got later on in the year, instead of pushing each other around, we came together as a team.

“Some of the kids would call the other ones slow poke at first, but toward the end, they stopped doing that. We got tougher, and grew up a little bit.”

At Pizza Hut following the 8-year-old Superbowl last Tuesday, Helbling said it was evident just how close all the players had become.

“They signing each other’s jerseys, and several of them came up and were hugging me,” Helbling said. “I think that’s great, especially considering how we started out.”

Helbling said he wouldn’t mind coaching again, and he would select some of the younger players on his team again next season.

“I had no clue how to coach or any desire to be one, but then I had fun,” he said.