nstanley

Sorry for being late to the party. I'll link a presentation I did on the topic a few years ago. I haven't coached in three seasons (I'm an administrator now) so I only pop in every once in a while as it can be hard to read the great things you guys share and not be able to incorporate them.

No but I saw it online the other day and was wondering if it was any good.

I'm currently reading Atomic Habits by James Clear. It is really interesting and I'm trying to read it through the lens of a football coach. I have the Kindle version which allows you to highlight the text and then copy and paste all of the highlights into a Google Doc that I refer to when needed. James Clear has a blog that I think you'd find a great read and introduction into his work.

Great stuff again Jim. I know several years ago, you ran Power and then I believe went away from it. You do a great job of cycling through plays (rocket, power, belly sweep, option, etc.) from season to season which I assume keeps the opposition having to adjust their plan to defend you. How are you making that decision on what you add back in and what you take out? Is is personnel? Other factors?

Good stuff.

When I was the D-line coach for a team that two platooned, we did this every Wednesday. We had the big hoops and we would do figure 8's with them, then we'd do what we call "NASCAR" and have them race one another. We'd race until we had an overall champion each week. Lots of strategy and shoving, bumping, running and come from behind wins. We'd then do Sumo (we call it ring of fire). The one way o-linemen wanted to come over and compete too. It was a lot of fun and the kids and coaches looked forward to it.

In his book Win Forever, Pete Carroll talks about how he tries to, "fascinate his players every day." My buddy who is a Texas HS FB coach uses this as a cornerstone of his program and has been very effective in turning around programs with it. I thought I'd start a thread for coaches to share ideas of how they capture the imagination, hearts, minds, etc., of their players. In looking at the declining participation numbers around my area, I think that many coaches are stuck in a paradigm where they only focus on the tactical/technical part of the game and kids are looking for something else and leaving the game. Regardless of the reason, I'm hoping others will share ideas on how they improve their practices/meetings/workouts. One thing we did was play tag. We did this both during our pre-season workouts and occasionally for conditioning at the start of a practice. I got the idea from Dale Mueller of Highlands HS in Northern Kentucky who coached something like 10 state championship teams. The basic idea is that your linemen chase, and the backs/receivers run. The "skill players" are cutting, decelerating, accelerating and being "athletes," whereas the linemen are trying to keep the faster, more athletic player in front of them. It's very applicable to the skills we're trying to teach and the kids don't view it as work. We would do 1 on 1, 2 on 1, 3 on 2 and 4 on 3, keep away, etc.

We used a full slide which is simple enough it shouldn't matter if they flip or flop. We used another protection where we manned the front side and the fanned the back side. We didn't have too many issues w/ kids and protection in those instance. Keep in mind we were unbalanced and so our fan side included our Center.

Coach, In 2013, we had a team with about 50% sophomores starting, with the rest being Juniors or Seniors who were not returning varsity players. We had a rough year but we were leading in almost every game. I think that it is a good indicator that the offense is a great equalizer. Over the course of the game, we "regressed to the mean" but, I think those early leads showed that it was a tough offense to defend and took some time to adjust to, even with superior personnel.

No.

I was just trying to describe Magic Boot to a friend last night!

I managed that with when I called the play. If we were shifting, I'd call the play on the ready for play whistle. If we were going to just snap the football and run the play, I'd wait a few seconds before calling the play. We muddle huddled so it's not like it was a long journey to the LOS. Note: If we were in run-the-clock mode with a lead late in the game, I always made the QB come to me and get the play. I'd never give the call before the ready for play whistle blew. This almost always gets you to about 5 seconds left on the play clock. Otherwise you can teach your QB to start his cadence when the back judge put his hand up with 5 seconds left on the play clock. All of this is dependent on NFHS rules and referee mechanics in your association.

Coach, We had this issue in 2016. I went to taking every second off of the clock that I could and spending as much time as possible in between plays, including change of possessions. When we started doing that we went from 0-3 (and scoring a lot of points) to a play from the league title and another play from the state semi-finals. Shortening the game was good for us and took away from the rhythm of all the spread offenses we played against but the actual rest we gave kids really helped as well. We also spent a lot of time moving kids around with shifts and motions to hide tendencies. We also used tendencies to set up teams. For example, one shift we used had the TE line up at X and vice versa. When teams reconized this and were getting ready for us to shift, we'd run Power on first sound and really mess with kids.

Really enjoying following the team. Please keep posting.

We did.

We ran the shield punt for five years with a lot of success. What I like about the Shield is that you can easily rugby punt out of it. It also allows you to put some different types of kids on the field such as we put the biggest kids we had in the shield which was a good thing for us.

We organize everything according to schemes (gap, trap, sweep, etc) and then break down those schemes into their component parts such as down blocks, combos, doubles, pulls, etc. We take all of the schemes and skills we need to have in order to run the offense and split them up over three days. If you don't have time to drill/practice it, then it needs to be self sustaining (something you don't need to drill all the time--Dean Smith wrote about this in his book "The Carolina Way) or you need to drop it from the offense.

I know a few years back, Karjaw would hide his stud by shifting. I believe one of his favorites was "Stick" and "Stack." Basically, they would line up in the Stack I and then shift to Red or Blue or whatever to make it difficult to align away from his best back. The last season I coached, we shifted a lot to either run a play at a "pud" or away from a "stud."

Boot screen is an underused play for sure.

I've really enjoyed taking a look at this. Looking forward to seeing some video.

Last weekend I presented at the Seattle All Sports Clinic on "Practice Solutions for Wing Offenses," and in the presentation, I was going through a drill we would do on Wednesdays called, "The Drill." In that particular drill, one of the things we work on is a Post/Lead block w/ the lead blocker "chipping" to the 2nd level defender. I spent some time describing how we differentiate what we call a "double team" (post/lead) versus a "combo block" ( we stay on the double team until someone shows through the inside gap or the defender disappears--basically focusing on the first level defender w/ an eye on run-throughs). It got a lot of discussion going in the room (as did my "pro" tip for getting a trapper into the LOS). I was doing a lot of thinking about this after the fact and thought to myself how in our SW system kids had to "remember" that on counter we "comboed" but on Traps and Iso we "doubled" and how sharing the blocks in the play call like in the Edges system would be very helpful. It's really made me want to go through my books (we're just finishing a move and everything is still in boxes) and reread the Edges book.

Great stuff.

As a SW team we did several things to address the above concerns. We used several different shifts and formations to keep teams off balance. The first shift we used was shifting (flip flopping) the offensive line's strength from left to right or vice versa. We would have the guards line up preshift in their final position and everyone else would shift into the final formation. Teams first start to identify that our X is lined up as the TE and vice versa. We can do several things when this happens. First, we can have them trade places in a formation when we aren't going to shift. We could do this several times a game if we wanted to hide tendencies but really, I want to use tendencies. When a team picks up on the TE/X presnap alignment, we like to run plays on first sound as teams are waiting for us to shift before they get set. We have caught teams flat footed when they try to do this. There are other ways to mess with defenses with both change-up formations and shifts to those formations. We had two other formations that we used with the flip/flop shift: Over and On. With Over, the TE lines up in his normal position (w/ guards lined up in their post-shift position) and when the Outside and Inside Tackles shift, they cover up the TE to create a four man surface. With On, the TE lines up in a "TE" position then slides out to a nasty split (3-5 yards outside of the OT) with the X traveling all the way across the formation to align as far outside of the TE as he can draw a defender with him. We ran some "read" concepts from our spread package as well. It did help up win a play-off game a few years back but I found that we really didn't need the spread package at all. We were unbalanced even in our spread so it meant we didn't have to change much. We did tinker some with a balanced line but really the more we focused on UBSW, the better we did. The teams that beat us, outscored us meaning we got beat 36-42. Our philosophy was to try and score 25 or more every game and were able to do that with the exception of one game (our first game that season versus a school from a larger division--a 22-24 loss).

For those of you that fight coaches not wanting their athletes lifting in season or especially on a game day, if you search for Kevin Vanderbush on YouTube, you can find a very good presentation he gave at a conference where he outlines their program and the results they have had. I am trying to put in place an athletes only weight lifting period at the school where I am AD and think we will get it next year. Right now, it's all CrossFit. On 7 on 7: we played at a 7 on 7 tournament two summers ago where we (Unbalanced Single Wing) beat a Spread team that had been really good and ended up having a great season (as did we). On top of that, their head coach ended up taking great college job and doing REALLY well in the NAIA play-offs this year. What did it mean that me and my SW team beat them in skelle? NOTHING. We do it to get reps defensively and then to experiment offensively since we'll have more pass attempts in one day than we will over the course of an entire season.

We had this issue a lot both in the SW and Hybrid. Great coaching point.