At this point your season has ended, and unless you won a championship, chances are your season didn't end the way you wanted. Every year around this time I would visit with my dad who was a retired coach. I would tell him all the things that went wrong, and he would always say the same thing. "What are you doing to do about it?" He didn't phrase it as a question, as much as a declaration that you need to grow and adapt.
As you come out of your holiday break, there is something very important every coach needs to do. You need to take a very deep dive into your program, and decide what you need to do to make it become the best it can be. You need to do this without pride. You need to look at things without letting your emotions or your ego get in the way.
At the end of each season, I made a list of things that kept us from being our best. This list focused on the following areas:
- On the field
- Schematics, Personnel, Situational Awareness, Play Calling
- Were we putting guys in a position to be successful?
- Were we prepared for the situations we faced?
- Practice
- Organization, Practice Schedules, Install Schedules, Scripts, Time on Field
- Game Day Operations
- Travel, Itinerary, Pre-Game, Pre-Game Warm-Ups, Coach to Coach and Coach to Player Communication, Box Logistics, Workflow, Half-Time Operations, In-Game Adjustments
- Off-Season
- Program, Logistics, Set-up, Strengths, Weaknesses
- Are we getting guys out of their comfort zone?
- Are we getting stronger, faster, and more explosive?
- Spring Ball
- Organization, Set-Up, Practice Schedules, Install Schedules, Field Set-Up
- Returning Personnel
- Evaluate Personnel, Rate On Board, Who Are Dudes, Who Could Be Dudes, Best Leaders, Position Changes
- Character, Leadership, and Program Culture
- Define our current culture, character level of athletes, how will we improve leadership?
The hardest part of this process was looking at things and not justifying mediocrity. Ultimately, this is how you find the weaknesses in your program that are holding back the success of your team. This brings us back to the question, "What are you going to do about it?"
Once you identify areas of weakness, you need to build a plan to attack these areas of weakness. Depending on where you are as a program, you may have several weaknesses. It is difficult to attack them all. One thing to caution is to be careful that you don't treat the symptoms without treating the disease. During the season you are often going to apply band-aids to stop the bleeding. The off-season is the time when you can go through chemotherapy and treat the actual disease that impedes development.
What I mean is this... Often there is a deeper issue that causes problems within multiple areas of your program. Poor leadership can affect the effort and attitude of your players. This affects their learning. You might focus on improving your meetings and how you teach concepts, but this will only treat the symptom. You have to find the disease within your program. If you treat the disease, the symptoms will go away.
Many of the issues you face within your program deal with your character, leadership, and culture. If these are flawed, everything else will be flawed. Your culture is being built every day. Are you building it by intent, or leaving it to chance? As a coaching staff you influence the character of your team. Are you investing into their character? Do you have strong leadership? Are you developing leaders?
These are all very important questions to ask before you look at anything on the field. If you take care of the issues that affect your program off the field, you will make improvements on the field. It starts and ends with the intentionality you go about building a plan to improve. You are only limited by yourself, and nothing else.
As you build your plan, I would suggest you write down specific areas you want to research. Then, look at what staffs you could visit and what clinics you could attend to find more information on the areas you want to improve. Assign each coach on your staff a different aspect of what you want to improve. Have the coaches report back to you with their findings. Have them not only research what other people have done, but have them provide you with what you can do in your program. This will gain buy-in from each of your coaches.
I will be speaking at the Glazier Clinics in Minneapolis, Orlando, and Atlantic City this February and March. I will be talking about Building Character and Culture, and I would encourage you to attend. If there is ever anything I can do, reach out to me and I will help you any way I can.
I wish you the best as you begin to prepare for the upcoming season. If you are looking for some resources that will help you in your preparation, I have put together some things that coaches at all level of football are using with their programs. Not only will these help you be more organized, they will save you valuable time on the weekends.
A few years ago I was speaking at a clinic about our game planning and an FBS coordinator asked me after the talk to go through what we do. I shared with him our offensive game planning resource and he used it through the spring. He emailed me back that it was a game changer. It was an honor to have him use these documents. After speaking at clinics and hearing that more coaches didn't know where to start, I decided to make these available. Over 50 state championship coaches use these resources with their programs.
Here is a link to my offensive game planning documents: https://sellfy.com/p/AndN/
It includes everything from a scouting report template, to practice plans, to a two-sided color call sheet, and more! Each of the nine documents are fully editable and customizable! Order today and start preparing for your first game right now for less than $13.
Here are a couple of screen shots to show you what our call sheet looks like:
This shows you a small portion of it. It is a fully editable, customizable two sided call sheet. It gives you the ability to better organize and be prepared on game day. It helped us to be better play callers on game day. There are eight other fully customizable documents! Some of the top high school programs in the country use this, as do several college programs!
When I was a defensive coordinator we adapted this to our defensive preparation!
Here is a link to the defensive game planning documents. It includes 12 fully editable and customizable documents.
https://sellfy.com/p/AY1u/ These are what we used to post 6 shutouts when I was a defensive coordinator. Defensive coordinators at all levels of football are using this. Again, it is less than $13 right now!
And finally, I put together a special teams resource. This has everything you need, included drill tape, practice tape, and game footage. It includes teaching presentations and scouting forms just for special teams!
https://sellfy.com/p/tJwz/ This helped us to build dominating special teams!
I wanted these to be available at a very reasonable cost. These can help you to be more successful on the field and more efficient in the office!
All three of these courses are detailed, with everything you need to be more explosive and to score more points.
The course on communication gives you a detailed approach to your gameday communication. I give you a system and a process to improve the quality of conversations, leading to improved play calling on game day. This course has received outstanding reviews from coaches at all level of football. A coach with multiple state titles told me this course helped them to be much more efficient and explosive this season.
My two RPO courses take you through a systematic process of installing RPO's into your offensive system. RPO's put the defense in conflict, forcing them to defend all 53 yards of width and all 6 skill players every single play. I not only give you a system, but I teach you the methods to develop your own RPO concepts.
New Book
Over the last several months, I have stepped out of my comfort zone and wrote a new book about faith and purpose. The book is available as a paperback on Amazon, and as an eBook for the Kindle App. The cool thing about the Kindle app is that you can read the book on any device. I invite you to read it, and discover the power you receive when you make a decision to walk with the Lord. Here is a link to the book: Finding Faith
Since publishing the book, I have received numerous texts, calls, and emails, from people who are going through similar trials and tribulations. They were feeling many of the same things I was feeling. The found comfort in the book. They also found they had a desire to change and to live better. They wanted more joy.
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