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AFM Magazine


Coach to Coach: Making Your Off-Season Count, Part I

by: Bryon Hamilton
Head Coach, Foothill High School, Palo Cedro (CA)
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The end of another season is here. It’s time to decompress and reintroduce myself to my wife and three children. It’s time to take a few weeks off and recharge the battery. The end of the football season is also the introduction of the Holiday Season and I’m looking forward to a great Christmas and New Year. I like the idea of the New Year. It’s a chance to evaluate our lives, our work and our relationships. The New Year presents us with the opportunity to alter our course or maybe even change it all together; a chance to clean the slate and get a fresh start. This holds true for our football lives as well. Hopefully you had a great season, one that met or even exceeded your expectations. Those seasons are the ones that make all of the work seem worthwhile. Perhaps you didn’t have such a great year. Maybe you knew going in that things were going to be a little rough or maybe you had high hopes, great expectations, but for whatever reason, things just didn’t pan out the way you had envisioned. Those are the tough seasons, the ones that take their toll on us and have us longing to reach or be back on top. If you coach for any length of time you will undoubtedly experience both ends of the spectrum. As I write this, the University of Florida has a 7-5 record, the Dallas Cowboys have won three games and dropped eight. On the flip side, the University of Nevada Reno just beat Boise State to go 11-1 and the Atlanta Falcons have one of the best records in the NFL. Disappointing seasons, incredibly successful seasons – they both provide a great opportunity to evaluate the cause and effect of the situation and, at the end of the day, both scenarios can make us better coaches.   

Seasons That Do Not Meet Expectations

    Have you ever sat on a bus or a plane after a game and wondered what the heck happened? You ask yourself a hundred times why and how did things go so poorly? Sometimes the answers are simple. Injuries to key players or team discipline issues might have sent your team off course. Perhaps it was more subtle. Maybe the offense just never seemed to fire on all cylinders or the defense seemed to always give up the big play at the most inopportune times. I don’t know your situation, but I do know that all coaches experience tough losses and disappointing seasons. The truth of the matter is that adversity is often necessary to chisel out the imperfections that may be hindering us and our team from being great.

    The greatest achievements in our society have often been forged from epic failures that have destroyed the weak but, more importantly, set the jaw of the undeterred. One of my favorite quotes is from Theodore Roosevelt,  “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.” 

    As we approach the New Year, I want to offer three areas of focus that I re-visit in the wake of disappointing seasons. My desire is that you will be encouraged, that new ideas may be sparked and that you will “set your jaw” and forge ahead towards a successful 2011. 

Communication: “If there is any great secret of success in life, it lies in the ability to put yourself in the other person’s place and to see things from his point of view – as well as your own.”- Henry Ford

    How do you think your players or fellow coaches would rate you as a communicator? Sometimes the way we envision ourselves is not how others, who are vital to our success, perceive us. Often what we say is not what others hear. One of the mistakes that I made as a young coach was that I assumed everyone gathered and processed information in the same way that I did. I believed that everyone saw things from the same perspective as I. The difference between failure and success is often simply the lack of effective communication and the resulting gap between teacher and student. “Lost in translation” and the assumption that what was said is what was heard is a dilemma that can plague coaches at all levels. Coaches who excel in the area of communication understand one important truth, it’s not what we know that matters, it’s what our players learn and can effectively apply in the midst of a chaotic battle that does. Here are three key indicators that there may be problems in your communications style. 

1. What you practiced and taught all week is consistently absent from the game film.

2. Your team captains or key position players do not approach you to discuss issues that are effecting the team in a negative way.

3. Your opinions or ideas are never challenged or discussed by other coaches on staff.

    Excellent communication is one of the most important ingredients to being a great coach and having a successful team. You can take simple steps to make sure you are communicating effectively. Start with your coaches. Ask them to give you honest feedback regarding your communication style. Schedule a meeting with the team captains and key players and ask the simple question, “How can the communication between our coaches and players improve?” and then sit back and listen. And finally, identify people who you consider to be excellent communicators and model yourself after the traits that you find effective. 

Off Season Preparation: “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”- Thomas Edison

    We are all familiar with the cliché “Championships are won in the off-season”. To some extent, the cliché is true. However, many well-intentioned coaches have put in a ton of hours in their off-season preparation only to see their teams suffer defeat after defeat in the Fall. Certainly hard work is required, but work that is efficient and focused will have far greater impact on your success. In 2009, after a disappointing 7-5 season, I introduced a complete overhaul of our off-season program. The areas that I wanted to specifically target were areas that I felt cost us games throughout the previous season. The following is what I wrote in my coaching journal.

1. Too many preventable injuries cost players game time (Strength and flexibility).

2. Execution and productivity significantly declined in the second half of games (Physical and mental conditioning).

3. Team speed and quickness was lacking and had not been developed to reach the fullest potential (Strength and speed development).

4. Team lacked leadership and unity (Team bonding activities and leadership development).

    By identifying these areas, I was to able address each one in a very specific way. Our off-season program did not require that we work harder, it mandated that we work smarter. I hired a new strength coach who focused on overall strength, flexibility and nutrition in a mixture of familiar and unorthodox ways. I assigned each assistant coach, with the help of their position players, the task of planning one team-building activity. These were very popular and they went a long way toward bringing our players closer. Finally, we developed overall team endurance and individual speed by implementing a speed and conditioning circuit that challenged our players but produced great results.  As a result of these changes, our off season football program was the most productive that we have every held. These changes were vital in us winning 10 games, a conference title and making it to the 2010 NSCIF Championship Game. 

    I encourage you to identify some key reasons you lost games this year. Pay special attention to those that you can control. Address each of these issues in your off-season program. Do not wait until August to chart a new course or improve the course you are on. By implementing a great off season program, you and your team will get a jump start toward a successful fall. 

Know what your team is capable of: “Build upon strengths, and weaknesses will gradually take care of themselves.”- Joyce C. Lock

    All good coaches have a good scheme and a good plan, but great coaches have the ability to adapt their schemes and plans to match the strengths of their players. In the aftermath of a disappointing season, one area that deserves our keenest evaluation is the extent to which we are allowing our players to do what they are capable of doing best. This does not mean that we should make wholesale changes to our schemes every season, but we should find areas within our schemes that fit the strengths of our personnel. One of the most important things you can do in the off-season is to thoroughly get to know your incoming athletes and identify their strengths and weaknesses. By tailoring your schemes to match the strengths of your players, you will foster confidence of your team. Disappointing seasons can often be avoided if we are able to adapt our schemes and philosophies to best suit the strengths of the athletes we have. Use this off-season to evaluate your talent, scrutinize your schemes and bring them together to get the very best out of your team. 






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