(Originally posted on January 30, 2009)
Most youth coaches coach their sons for a couple of seasons and are done with it. They move on into other things; take the promotion at work, change to a different job, whatever.
A rare few, however, can't find an antidote for the coaching bug. There are meetings where you can confess alcoholism, but so far I've yet to find a gathering of people in sweats and ball caps where you can stand up and say, "My name is Derek and I love teaching young people to tackle each other."
For those coaches, taking over a program is inevitable at some point in their careers. They'll either move from youth to a school program, (possibly vice versa), start a new organization from scratch, or otherwise find a way to bring decades of experience and study to a program that desperately needs it.
Sadly, a large number of those programs will be bad ones at the start. They'll have seemingly intractable problems. Remember, unless he's moving to a better job somewhere, most coaches don't leave willingly. If he's enjoying even modest success, the average coach would rather hang out where he is than go on a job search and move his family around.
Which means you're going to be walking into a difficult situation, and there's no easy way to untangle the Gordian Knot you're facing. The previous coach might have been beloved, especially if he left behind a good program, and you have to fill some large shoes. You can expect to hear someone use the phrase, "That's not how we did it last year," at least once per week for the first season.
This blog is specifically written with an eye towards taking over a school program that has not been more than moderately successful in recent years. You already know that you need to win the trust and respect of your players. Remember that anything you tell them they are accountable for, you have to hold them accountable for, or you'll lose their trust. There's a saying from the Armed Forces: "The enlisted man will forgive his officers any indiscretion save two: cowardice and inconsistency." It applies to football, too.
To begin with, I would look up the students that played football last season as sophomores and juniors, and I would also put some focus on the junior highs that feed into your program (or on the youth programs that feed into your junior high program).
One situation that drives me insane is youth programs and junior highs competing for the same players. I don't think that many football players have the physical ability to play for two teams at once, and most school coaches seem to have it in for the youth programs. I've been told twice by high school programs that they aren't interested in letting me coach any of their freshmen. Personally, I think this is a little dumb. At large high schools, some of those freshmen that could start for the youth program (or at least be guaranteed a certain number of plays because of the Minimum Play Rules) spend entire seasons sitting on the bench. Many of them quit after that one year, and never really get better at football. (It may or may not be relevant, but both school programs had losing traditions.)
If you're the school coach, consider what is best for the player, not your program. More often than not, if you encourage a younger player to play for his youth program, he's going to have more success, stay in football longer, and may even turn into a good player for you down the stretch. If you've taken the time to respectfully work with the local youth programs as I mentioned in a previous blog, you should have no problem with the idea of letting another coach develop your younger talent.
When it comes to the lower levels, junior highs if you're a high school coach and youth programs if you're a middle school coach, I would be campaigning harder than Hillary to make sure that every player who even walks past a football at Wal-Mart comes out for the new team. (In fact, that's a good recruiting tool, especially for youth football. Ask the manager of the local sporting goods and department stores if you can hang a flier on their rack of footballs advertising your program. Also put up fliers in the local gyms, on bulletin boards at grocery stores and coffee shops, and the like. You can also make sandwich boards like real estate agents use for open houses quite cheaply. Get permission to put them up in front of community events, like town meetings, high school plays, farmer's markets, and things like that. Be creative. Radio stations and cable access channels are required to offer Public Service Announcement time-- go to the stations and ask if you can put together a thirty second commercial for your program. Make sure there is a sign for your program on each of the main roads into your town. Stuff post office boxes with mailers. There are dozens, if not hundreds of things you can do, most quite cheaply or even free with a little work.)
A rare few, however, can't find an antidote for the coaching bug. There are meetings where you can confess alcoholism, but so far I've yet to find a gathering of people in sweats and ball caps where you can stand up and say, "My name is Derek and I love teaching young people to tackle each other."
For those coaches, taking over a program is inevitable at some point in their careers. They'll either move from youth to a school program, (possibly vice versa), start a new organization from scratch, or otherwise find a way to bring decades of experience and study to a program that desperately needs it.
Sadly, a large number of those programs will be bad ones at the start. They'll have seemingly intractable problems. Remember, unless he's moving to a better job somewhere, most coaches don't leave willingly. If he's enjoying even modest success, the average coach would rather hang out where he is than go on a job search and move his family around.
Which means you're going to be walking into a difficult situation, and there's no easy way to untangle the Gordian Knot you're facing. The previous coach might have been beloved, especially if he left behind a good program, and you have to fill some large shoes. You can expect to hear someone use the phrase, "That's not how we did it last year," at least once per week for the first season.
This blog is specifically written with an eye towards taking over a school program that has not been more than moderately successful in recent years. You already know that you need to win the trust and respect of your players. Remember that anything you tell them they are accountable for, you have to hold them accountable for, or you'll lose their trust. There's a saying from the Armed Forces: "The enlisted man will forgive his officers any indiscretion save two: cowardice and inconsistency." It applies to football, too.
To begin with, I would look up the students that played football last season as sophomores and juniors, and I would also put some focus on the junior highs that feed into your program (or on the youth programs that feed into your junior high program).
One situation that drives me insane is youth programs and junior highs competing for the same players. I don't think that many football players have the physical ability to play for two teams at once, and most school coaches seem to have it in for the youth programs. I've been told twice by high school programs that they aren't interested in letting me coach any of their freshmen. Personally, I think this is a little dumb. At large high schools, some of those freshmen that could start for the youth program (or at least be guaranteed a certain number of plays because of the Minimum Play Rules) spend entire seasons sitting on the bench. Many of them quit after that one year, and never really get better at football. (It may or may not be relevant, but both school programs had losing traditions.)
If you're the school coach, consider what is best for the player, not your program. More often than not, if you encourage a younger player to play for his youth program, he's going to have more success, stay in football longer, and may even turn into a good player for you down the stretch. If you've taken the time to respectfully work with the local youth programs as I mentioned in a previous blog, you should have no problem with the idea of letting another coach develop your younger talent.
When it comes to the lower levels, junior highs if you're a high school coach and youth programs if you're a middle school coach, I would be campaigning harder than Hillary to make sure that every player who even walks past a football at Wal-Mart comes out for the new team. (In fact, that's a good recruiting tool, especially for youth football. Ask the manager of the local sporting goods and department stores if you can hang a flier on their rack of footballs advertising your program. Also put up fliers in the local gyms, on bulletin boards at grocery stores and coffee shops, and the like. You can also make sandwich boards like real estate agents use for open houses quite cheaply. Get permission to put them up in front of community events, like town meetings, high school plays, farmer's markets, and things like that. Be creative. Radio stations and cable access channels are required to offer Public Service Announcement time-- go to the stations and ask if you can put together a thirty second commercial for your program. Make sure there is a sign for your program on each of the main roads into your town. Stuff post office boxes with mailers. There are dozens, if not hundreds of things you can do, most quite cheaply or even free with a little work.)
Your goal should be to increase your roster size by a minimum of 5%. Losing programs tend to hemmorrhage players. You need to get them back, or better yet, don't lose them in the first place.
The very instant you are given the handshake promise that you have the position, you need to schedule a meeting with the upper-classmen that played this season and will be playing for you next year. For a middle school, this means seeking out the 6th and 7th graders and getting them into a classroom with you for a few minutes. At the high school level, this means finding the sophomores and juniors that will make up your varsity team. (Do not neglect your junior varsity program! It is very tempting to rape the JV of players during a difficult season. Resist that temptation at all costs. The longer you let those JV players work together, the more success they have as a team at the JV level, the more likely it is that they will grow accustomed to that success and bring it out at the varsity level next year.)
I have some very high expectations for my players in the off-season. My football players do not just succeed, they excel. (Note that there is a difference between a goal and an expectation. A goal is something you hope your players will reach. An expectation is something you require your players to reach.) My expectations start with this:
1. GPA of 2.8, minimum. No excuses. Season GPA requirement is 2.5 to play, 2.8 to start. All other things being equal, the higher GPA wins the slot.
If you're a school coach, you might consider asking for a few minutes at the staff meeting to discuss your academic goals. I've noticed a bit of a division between academicians and athletes in schools, and it's best to nip that in the bud by reminding your colleagues that athletics teaches as much as academics, and that you are in this thing together for the good of the students.
2. At the high school level I require 75 Weight room log ins from December before you get your helmet for practice. (There are about 38 weeks from December to August, so that's less than two per week.) At the junior high/middle school level I would require about 35 log ins, or one per week.
3. You must play at least one sport other than football unless you a) Work a job more than 15 hours per week, or b) have a GPA of 3.5. (For middle schoolers this stays the same. I especially encourage wrestling, basketball, and track as sports that condition and teach toughness, footwork, and running form.)
4. High School players are required to perform ten hours of community volunteering to be done from December to opening weekend. (Talk with the local Boy Scout Troop, they have lists of stuff that needs volunteers.) Middle Schoolers are required to perform just as much, however this might involve some creativity since most of them don't drive. You might have to do more organization to get your team out as a group doing stuff like building picnic tables for the local parks, picking up trash along the roads, helping out at the senior center, and the like. (High school players have it easy-- they can always volunteer to help coach the local youth sports teams!)
5. Match up the varsity players with an incoming JV player from the local junior highs. Varsity players are required to call them a minimum of one time per week from January to the start of practice. Middle school/junior high players are required to call members of the local youth feeder program once per week. This is just a simple, five minute phone call, "Hi. How are you doing? Are your grades keeping up? Looking forward to football? How's your basketball team doing right now? Did you see that game on TV last night? I know! We better not do a sack dance like that or Coach Wade will run us until he's tired! Okay, I've got some homework to do, but I just wanted to see how you were doing. Get studying for that history test!"
6. No hazing. No bullshit. We are ALL Braves/Lions/Spartans, etc. We do not abuse the underclassmen, we lead them. If they do not respect you, that is YOUR fault, not theirs. I absolutely do not bend on this one, and my policy goes beyond zero-tolerance. My players are the elite, to be looked up to by the entire school. They are not thugs or abusers. Given the choice by school administration, I do not remove players from the team for hazing. Removing a player means that they no longer get to learn the lessons that our sport can teach. (I'm not a big fan of kicking a student out of my classes, either.) I do, however, make damn sure that they don't continue the hazing. We start with a thousand yards of bellies and a thousand yards of bear crawls at each practice for the next two weeks and a demotion to the bench.
One of the things that offends me the most about hazing is what it tells you about your team. They obviously are not pulling together and making a coherent unit. Even if the varsity is a tightly knit group, abusing the underclassmen means that a) those younger players aren't having fun playing football, and aren't as likely to play next year, b) those underclassmen are not going to "fit in" to the team when they move to varsity if they stay, and possibly worst of all, 3) those underclassmen will someday be upperclassmen who will think that hazing is normal, accepted, and enjoyable. That establishes a long-term precedent of cancer in your program. Kill it immediately before it spreads.
I would visit the junior highs at least once a month from about February until school ends to hold meetings with the incoming players. Just like the upperclassmen phone call, this is a quick little meeting for five or ten minutes to tell them about some exciting stuff they'll be doing, and to get involved in their lives. Players are more likely to want to play for a coach who takes an interest in them, remembers their names and the stuff they are involved in, and comes to see them. It's going to take time out of your day, but it's worth it. Trust me. Come to the basketball games and wrestling meets for the junior highs and cheer until you can't talk. The players will know that you support them and will want to play for you. (I once tripped over a garbage can celebrating a home run at a player's baseball game. The audience got a good laugh-- and several freshmen who had not played football that year came out the next year as sophomores. One told me it was because he thought it was cool that I got right back up and started cheering again. Maybe it wasn't the whole reason, but it certainly didn't hurt!)
If you're a middle school or junior high coach this is going to be more difficult. Obviously you can, and should, drop by the local youth practice fields every so often to say high to the players and talk to them (with permission of their coaches, of course. I never set foot on a practice field without the consent of the coach in charge.) You want to avoid disrupting elementary school classrooms, but you can still approach the teachers about meeting with their students here and there throughout the school year. Failing all else, talk to the elementary P.E. teacher. Ask for five minutes a month to talk to their students about playing for you next season.
One thing I want to caution you about when you talk to coaches of programs younger than yours. Don't say a word about what you run unless they ask. Ask them how you can help them do what they do better. Ask them to consider teaching only your blocking and tackling progression, not your schemes or playbooks. You already know the contempt I have for high school coaches that try to shove their ill-advised systems down the throats of middle school and youth teams. Those teams belong to their coaches, and they have the right to coach them with systems they have developed, even if you think they could do better with the stuff you give them.
When it comes to working with lower levels, I take a line from Terry Pratchett's Guards! Guards! "She was a kind-hearted woman out for all she could give." You need to have the same approach. I continually talk up the feeder programs. I'll give them anything I can give them, time on my fields, extra equipment, any help I can possibly spare, and even players that are not necessarily going to spend much time on my fields. Remember that your future players are on those teams, and the more successful you can make them, the more success you are going to have, because those young men are going to stay in football, keep playing, and keep expecting to have success. (You had better, by the way, meet those expectations!)
One thing you should notice is that this entire, lengthy blog hasn't really covered anything about what weights to lift, when you should start practicing, putting together a summer contact camp (You should have two: one for your team, and one for the lower levels where your players actually coach the youth/middle school teams). The whole point of this blog is to remind you that a program isn't just a bunch of called plays on game day. It's not a jersey color or a clipboard or a cool mascot name like Raptors. A program starts at the earliest age you can get a young person involved in sports, and it lasts only as long as you can keep him interested in participation. Don't ask your players to specialize in football. It's not good for them physically, can cause repetitive stress injuries, and it leads to burnout. Yeah, you might lose a good athlete to an unscrupulous basketball coach who wants him to join a year-round traveling team, but that's not going to happen very often, and odds are the respect you show the other programs will come back to you when your season begins and they're encouraging their basketball players to put on some pads. (Respect, by the way ALWAYS goes out before it comes back.)
It goes without saying that your program will, too.
~D.
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