Say hello to the Marana Thunder Youth Football 12U team, the 2025 Division 3 national champions of the American Youth Football League.
The team defeated the Woodbridge Raiders of Delaware with a score of 40–19 on Dec. 13, 2025, at the American Youth Football National Championship tournament in Naples, Florida.
Although the score seems like the Thunder dominated the game, Head Coach Phillip Britt said that the score belies how hard the opposing team fought.
If this is the winter, it must be football playoff season and that includes youth football. As with any team, professional or otherwise, teams don’t win as a fluke. They work for it. This year Marana’s hard work took them to the top.
It turns out Marana and in fact all of Arizona is in the Desert Mountain Region, so the Thunder had to defeat all the Arizona teams. Then they went on to upset the rest of the region, which includes teams from Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, West Texas, Utah and Wyoming.
On this Arizona team there were 28 boys on the roster and 24 of them went to Florida. Division 3 is for boys ages 12 and younger. There are still a couple of more seasons the boys can play on American Youth Football teams but when they start high school they’ve officially aged out because now they are eligible to play high school football.
Getting to the finals is no small accomplishment but winning took some building.
Britt attributes the team’s success to a number of factors, beginning with the strong connection teammates have to each other, the support of the team members’ families and the support of Marana in general. Plus, many of the team members have been playing beside each other for years.
“We’ve had these kids since they were 6 and 7; we started with flag before they could even get to tackle,” he said. “We’ve had the same core group of kids, not all of them but the core group has been with us the last six years.”
Part of winning is correcting mistakes, something the coaches worked to do.
“It’s always been about really developing these kids,” Britt added. “We started doing exit interviews about three seasons ago as the boys started to understand what they could do if they just worked harder at it or set a goal. We have accomplished 98% of those goals just because of the power of community, the power of accountability.”
Britt found the strategy worked well.
“The first time we played a Phoenix team, man, those guys were big,” he said. “They were just huge kids. They were faster and we came back that off-season and said, ‘All right. This is what we’re going to do.’ Next year we got a little bit better. Then we played our first team out of the state; it was a West Texas team. It was like ‘Holy smokes! These guys are even bigger than the (Phoenix) guys.”
Once again, they came back in the off-season to figure out what they could and needed to do to improve.
Then there’s the attitude that Thunder’s coaches try to instill: Everyone, every contribution, matters.
“We have a big, ‘Hey, no one’s bigger than the team,’ (approach),” Britt said. “That’s how we run it. Everything has got a team focus in mind and if it doesn’t benefit the team we’re not going to do it.”
This is not an inexperienced team, which also accounts in part for their success. They’ve been to the Florida tournament once before. Last season the team went to the championship and came in third, losing in double overtime to the same team they defeated this year, the Woodbridge Raiders.
Two players of note, Britt said, are Princeton Britt, who was named MVP of his age division. The other is Ammon Anderson, the team’s kicker.
“Last year we lost due to extra points,” Britt said. “We were the only team in our division this year that actually kicked a PAT (point after touchdown) and … Ammon was definitely a reason why we had as much success as we had this year. … We don’t win the way we did without a special kid like him.”
Britt talks about their success with some amount of pride, noting that Marana isn’t the biggest fish in the pond.
“We’re not in a big area,” he said. “We’re not a Phoenix area team. We’re not a Scottdale. We’re not even central Tucson. We’re Marana.”
Although Britt is the head coach, he could not have taken his team to victory without the assistant coaches. They are Aaron Uhe, Desi Rodriguez, Dennis Yauch, Dermain Linen, Justin Medlin and Emery Goodin.
Since he’s been back, Britt has had time to reflect on his team and their accomplishments. He knows what’s most important.
“This group represents who we are and what we stand for,” he said. “Win, lose, or draw, we show up the right way — with effort, accountability and love for one another. The championship is special, but the character of these young men matters even more.”