What Are You Going To Do About It?

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.