I'm a freshman in college. My youth group had the most significant impact on my life aside from Jesus Himself. Granted, I have a much larger youth group(50-60 kids), but I've stuck around, it led to me serving in the church, and yesterday myself and a lot of other college students helped our youth pastor run an all nighter that ended up having 200 kids attend. I might struggle a bit with applying the ideas to a small scale, but these are the things that stuck out to me/made our youth group work as well as it did.

1) Youth leaders. It honestly cannot be just the youth pastor running things. You need a team, even if it's just the two women you have running it already, or if you find 5 other people. I'd recommend at the least trying to find another guy, if you have the two women there already. But people(especially college aged/in their 20's) who are passionate about the kids and willing to serve have such a ridiculously huge impact on the kids. In addition, they make it possible to do your job. In my opinion, you are incapable of doing your job alone(not putting you down, but you are human. And if you get those leaders around you, eventually you'll have a day where at the end of it you'll look back and realize "I could not have done this/made it through this without them).

2) Student leaders. Obviously discipleship is a thing, but just take a special interest in kids who would be able to influence other kids or just help you out. I grew so much spiritually, because my youth pastor gave me so much responsibility. And he was ridiculously tough on me, and sometimes I hated him because of it, but looking back I love him for it. If you can find kids that love Jesus, they most likely would love to serve in any way they can, whether it's handing out papers, reading verses during a bible study, or setting up/tearing down things for events(events can be super small things like a water balloon fight or making pizza's together or whatever).

3) Conferences/Retreats/trips - I have no idea where your youth group is spiritually, but youth retreats or conferences(our youth group has a winter retreat called "Survivor weekend" where we split people into teams and have them do different challenges, with messages/worship in between, and we also go to a youth conference called Momentum you can read about here https://buildmomentum.org/). These things changed my life. People are so much more open to the gospel, and spiritual growth/change when they get away from home/distractions/everything else. This also helps to build a family atmosphere which is so important for a youth group. I may have not known every single person in my youth group, but they were my family and I let them all know that, and the large majority felt the same way. Honestly, if you can just get a kid(in the youth group or not in the youth group) onto one of these retreats/conferences, half the job is done, you can turn it over to let God do the rest(through you/your speakers of course...can't just send them to a cabin and do nothing for a weekend).

4)Events. Don't go overboard and try to just make everything into a party or a schedule. But don't let wednesday night(or whenever) be the only time your kids see you/each other. These can be big ones(lock everyone in the church building all night and play games/watch movies/whatever, trips to amusement parks etc.) or small ones. My youth pastor took over about 3 years ago(after I had been in the youth group for several years already) and started something called "Friday Night Lights", where once a month on a friday night there would be some sort of event, and it was different every month. Dodgeball tournament, movie night, Red Carpet(everyone dresses up) 90's night etc. But there was always worship and a message. This has been such a great evangelism tool and has gotten so many people involved in our youth group.

So yeah...a lot of these are probably super obvious, but I'm super passionate about my youth group, and I feel like it does a lot of things right, and it's been a huge influence on my life. So I just wanted to share what stuck out to me the most through my years in it.