As a 46 year-old football coach that teaches special-education, enjoys being involved in church, is married, and has a child in elementary school, high school and college, often times when the season ends I can get caught up in what I have not been doing for my family during the fall, and fall into the trap of removing myself from football.
Nothing is wrong with this if you are working on increasing time with your family, or re-energizing your faith, but sometimes that amount of time can begin to extend into laziness and comfort, which does not lead you to being the best version of yourself, or even worse, help you in the long run.
And in reality, all this is going to do is put pressure on you and your staff during the summer, and therefore make the next season more difficult.
When this happens, more people than just you are negatively impacted. If you are feeling this way, which we all run into at different times in our coaching careers, there is no better time than the present to create an off-season plan.
If you do, you and your staff can work at a steady pace to ensure you are ready for the next season, while not burning the candle at both ends. Your assistants will be ready to work! They simply need to be empowered with clear tasks that will benefit both them and the team.
To stop this from happening on our end, we have come up with areas we must address each off-season to ensure we are prepared for the next. The high-level areas we have broken down, and will discuss in more detail within this article, are as follows:
- Ensure the offense is updated for our next group of players
- Ensure our coaches are prepared to coach their positions better than last season
- Ensure we have the culture pieces in place for clarity and discipline
- Ensure we are prepared for next year’s opponents
- Ensure we continue to progress with our Saturday game-planning for consistency, clarity, and optimal planning without wasting time
- Ensure we have the kids in the right positions so they can begin learning in the spring
UPDATE YOUR OFFENSE
I believe in 2021 that offenses have to be multiple.
I have not been in a single coaching situation in which we were able to run the exact same offense each year, as every year we have a new crop of players whose size, speed, and skill sets are different than the previous year.
It would be great to be able to do that, but I imagine the majority of the coaches reading this article are in the same boat as us.
Now, I do not believe you can change offenses from year-to-year because cohesiveness and improvement only comes through doing the same things over and over, but I do believe in slight changes, which is why I used the words “updated” and “multiple”.
What I mean by this, is that you have to be able to run and call your plays out of different sets so the kids do not have to learn many new concepts.
If you can find a way to run the same plays out of both 12 personnel and an empty set, you are going to be multiple enough to run the same offense from year-to-year, but also dynamic enough to meet the skill sets of your current players.
You can run power hybrids, buck sweep hybrids, counter hybrids, inside zone, outside zone, and even quarterback runs from empty, 10 and 12 personnel, so why not plan your offense for it.
It may take time today, but will set you up for so much more of a dynamic offense, as well as the ability to make only slight changes from year to year based upon your personnel.
And in the passing game, I have seen empty teams run four-verticals, as well as teams that run the T.
It is possible, you just have to create standard rules within your system and teach entire concepts to the kids, not just routes they run within the concepts.
To conclude this section, the most exciting part about making your offense multiple, is you come to the realization that you can be multiple not only from season to season, but within the same game.
Nothing is better than going fast in a game, running a pro-set one play, then lining up in Quads the next.
It frustrates defenses and makes playing offense much more fun for the kids.
Most defenses are not built to stop both, and if you are able to run both, you will realize early in the game which style gives you an advantage, because your OLine continues to block the same, no matter what.
COACH PREPARATION
Oftentimes during the off-season, this can be what seems like the most frustrating part.
But in reality, your coaches not moving at the pace you want them to move stems from you not giving them clear instructions.
Very few coaches I have run into are anti-work during the off-season, but simply need a plan to follow.
If they have nothing to go with, they sometimes feel lost.
And depending upon the personality of that coach, they may just sit on their hands waiting to be told what to do.
This is why we as leaders need to put something in place, which we call GROWTH PLANS, to ensure things are moving forward with the offense, and they continue in their personal improvement.
Both of those areas need to be addressed in your growth plan, so the personalities of the coaches are touched upon, no matter what tasks you require of them.
Some coaches are all about the team, and will just do what you ask.
Others ask themselves internally how it will impact them, and based upon their answer to that question determine whether or not the task will be completed to your liking.
Make sure you hit both areas. This will greatly increase your chances of having the tasks completed, and completed well.
Every December we meet, and I ask the coaches to create both a list of personal deficiencies, and a list of deficiencies within their position group.
This helps us get a baseline of where we are, and then can begin figuring out how we can improve.
Sit down with your assistants and figure out what they can do to improve in both areas.
Watching CoachTube videos, visiting colleges, talking to other high school coaches that you know are masters in our areas of weakness.
If you want to learn, the information is out there, but sometimes coaches need to be led to the water.
Another task I ask of coaches is to game plan for the next season. This will be discussed in another section of this article.
Do not be afraid to put expectations on your assistant coaches.
Every coach on your staff has expectations for the players in their position group to grow one year in the off-season, but often do not make a year’s worth of growth themselves.
That is hypocritical behavior, and does not fit into the cultural values of any football program.
OFFENSIVE CULTURE
This planning piece has nothing to do with Xs & Os, but has everything to do with what you are not doing well.
Most likely this has to do with you, and what you are saying and allowing, either with your words or your body language, to the kids.
If you are allowing them to get by with things that are detrimental to their overall play and development, you need to address those within yourself and determine what changes need to be made in order to improve.
No area of your offense can be improved more than by making adjustments to the culture.
Every style of offense has been proven state-championship-worthy, but no program without discipline, or understanding of what needs to be done on a daily basis, can win.
What do you need to address within your offense that can make great improvement.
Did you have too many penalties? Not enough effort? Not enough aggression?
Are you making too many mental mistakes or having too many missed assignments?
Is the commitment of your players lacking?
These are all things to think about when coming up with cultural changes within your group. Once you figure out where you are lacking, get with your coaches and come up with key phrases you can use to ensure kids are hearing one single message over and over.
And if you are able, do not change it! Keep it from year to year.
The fewer messages the kids get, the more clarity they will have and will show discipline in more areas.
Do not be afraid to address this, as players know the behaviors that win games and lose games, so they will not argue with you holding them accountable to being more disciplined.
They want to win as badly as you do, especially the seniors. And if they do not, well….that’s a problem you may not be able to overcome.
PREPARING FOR NEXT YEAR’S OPPONENTS
If you are a coach with a family, and limited time and energy during the season, this piece is a must for many reasons.
First of all, it allows you to look at your opponents without time limitations.
This enables you to go through the plays more thoroughly, and see how they attempted to defend you the previous season.
I rarely can tell by in-season films how teams are going to defend us week-to-week, but if you are running a similar offense and they are running a similar defense, what they did to you last year is a good tell as to what to expect the following season.
This information is very important, because before you begin game-planning that week, if you look at your off-season game planning notes, you can highlight the ideas you had in the winter and spring that still hold true for your offense in the fall.
This gives you a great place to begin creating your game plan for the next week.
Another place where this benefits is creativity. I usually get to school on Saturday to game plan at around 6:30am, which gives me about six hours of sleep.
Not to mention that I have to deal with issues involving the coaching staff, our players, as well as the group of parents that are unhappy that week, which does not put me in my best mindset.
But, if you see things in the off-season they did to stop you, or ways they allow some of their positional players to play in the winter or spring, you are in a much better position to create tricks or counters that can have a major impact on your games in the fall.
This is also something I ask of the assistant coaches.
I pre-plan for all ten games, but ask them to watch and game plan for the three teams in our conference we must beat to win a championship.
This not only helps me, because we have a very bright staff, but it also helps them grow toward being an offensive coordinator themselves.
I ask them to watch each game and note it as if they were the offensive coordinator trying to beat (fill in the blank).
Doing it that way puts a little more pressure on them, but brings out the creativity and greatness within them.
Plus, they are then able to take their notes and highlight things we can use during weekend game-planning meetings, the same way I do.
EASE THE STRESS OF IN-SEASON GAME PLANNING
Again, for coaches that have families, which includes all of our coaches (we have 14 kids among the coaches on our offensive staff), anything you can do to create plans and clarity in the off-season concerning your weekend planning is a must.
Like I mentioned above, the tension and frustrations on your mind during the season are not there in the off-season, and you can do things and create templates that bring clarity to your weekend game planning.
I create a Google Spreadsheet that has the tasks each staff member needs to create throughout the day, so everything we need will be worked on.
A lack of clarity in any situation opens up a wide array of options for people to choose.
Do not get frustrated with them….instead, create clarity within their task lists so you know they are going to be working on that, and that only.
Show them the list numerous times during the off-season, and get their concerns and OK well before the season starts.
That way, when the season begins, everyone is on the same page and has no question as to what is going to happen on Saturday morning.
To start this process, write down all of the things you want to have available before creating your practice plans and call sheet.
Once you have that list, you can begin to separate the items between the coaches, in the areas that match both their position group, and their strengths.
I like to have one coach work solely on the run game, and another work solely on the pass game, so people are not wasting time working on the same tasks.
Then, once those task lists are completed, put them in order of importance, or in order of the timing you need them, and start dividing them among the coaches.
Your final list will still be much larger than the others, but giving them things that they are good at, or you believe they will be good at, is a great place to start.
This will create a lot more excitement, a better weekend work pace, and again, provide clarity as to what the coaches should be doing during the day.
Nobody likes to have a job in which they have no idea what their boss wants them to do.
An idea to make this even more fun, is to create a binder for each coach.
Give them sheets where they can draw plays, write notes, document alignment to formations, chart data, and anything else you normally use to game plan.
If you are not sure how to begin, put them in the position to be successful doing what you do.
Again, a great place to start! And even better, buy a pencil pouch and fill it with pencils, different colored pens, different colored highlighters, erasers, white-out tools, and other things that will make it seem like a more professional and useful tool.
Anytime you look and feel more professional, your output is better.
CREATE A PRELIMINARY DEPTH CHART
This is an important piece in our program, because we begin to have classroom-style positional meetings in the spring.
This enables us to hit the ground running when we are able to work with the kids on football-related items.
In Ohio we do not have spring football, and can only work with groups of seven players in June, so we cannot put ourselves in a situation where we are teaching the players the basic Xs & Os of the offense on July 1st.
We need to already know that information and begin actually running the plays on air on day one.
To do that, like I mentioned earlier, we have to begin having meetings in the spring to get the kids minds back into football-mode.
We discuss the basics of the offense including formations, basic run and pass concepts, and any other important screen or RPO rules that will put us in a position to start practicing immediately.
But in order to do this without wasting time, it is very beneficial to create a preliminary depth chart before beginning to meet.
Discuss with your defensive coordinator who he is assuming will play, which will then tell you which players are playing two-ways, and which are not.
Once you figure this out, you have a better idea of who you will not have practicing with you full-time, and therefore the number of backups you will need that will play a significant amount of time on Friday nights.
Once you know this, you can begin separating the kids into positions and ask the offensive-only players to learn two spots. If you do this early enough, you give the kids months to mentally prepare before the summer practices begin.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, you can make this whatever you wish, as the more time you have, the more you can perfect things before the mad-dash of the season begins in mid-summer.
But word to the wise….make sure you have a plan that not only fits your desire to win games, but first and foremost meet the needs of your coaching staff.
Coaching continuity is better in the long-run than continuing to bring in new coaches that you believe will have more drive and availability.
As we all know, those coaches will also get married, have kids that grow up to play AAU sports, and begin to move more of their time toward the more important things in their lives.
Keep this in the forefront of your mind, otherwise, you will never be able to keep a staff for years and build something that can be repeated year after year.
If you create a plan that builds from December through May, you can be better prepared with plans and templates in place that will save you time during the season, when the school year is kicking-off, families are in transition, tensions are high, and time is limited.
And if you are a coach that does everything, STOP!
There are too many negatives in terms of what it does your staff, such as not empowering the driven coaches (which you will then lose), and allowing the undriven coaches to stay where they are (which you do not want).
This will also give you more time to work on what will keep you in coaching longer, which is the relationships and character building that as a leader you need to be involved in to make the program what it needs to be.
Besides their family structure, you may be the number one thing that creates long-term success for your player’s marriages, fatherhoods, careers, and spiritual maturity.
