I coached kids in football for 15 years....up through Freshmen. Every play is meant to deceive and I believe, in this case, the Ref’s were made aware of the fact that a trick play was going to take place. I have run many trick plays and the kids love them. The name of the game is to win. I would tell my kids that and I told the parents that if I didn’t intend to win, I wouldn’t put my kids on the field.
Some trick plays will really throw the other team and catch them off guard. With those plays, I wouldn’t let the team run them until they had two touch downs more than the other team or if we really needed to score. The coaches on the other team would, some times, yell out “Watch out for those phony trick plays”. Those were the type of coaches I loved to play against because they couldn’t coach their kids to play the game.
Let me add one thing here. I loved all my kids and it was their team, not mine. I ran 40 kids with one assistant coach. All kids played, some more than others. I’ve had them go on to High School, College and Pro Teams. It was the best time of my life.
Let the kids play the game. As long as they go by the rules, they will never forget.
In high school, we used to run a wierd, over shifted line play, where the right guard (me) was an elgible reciever. Our coach used to coach at a school where 8 man foot ball was played and this was a variant of those plays.
The first guys to know about the play were the refs as we wanted them to count noses on the line and in the backfield correctly.