Coach to Coach: Advice & Perspectives from Fellow Football Coaches
Sometimes the best advice comes from someone who's walked in your shoes – someone who truly understands the unique pressures, challenges, and rewards of coaching American football. Learning from the shared experiences and practical wisdom of your peers is invaluable for growth and success in this demanding profession.
Welcome to American Football Monthly's Coach to Coach collection. This page gathers articles where experienced football coaches share their firsthand perspectives, practical tips, innovative ideas, and hard-earned lessons directly with their peers in the coaching community. It's a platform for connection and shared knowledge.
In these articles, you'll find relatable insights covering a wide spectrum of coaching topics, such as:
Coach to Coach: Lose Control, Gain Trust
As football coaches, we often seemed ob- Losing control for trust is an odd thing. can control thinking. This leads to over- sessed with control. Not only do we want While it seems like you are giving up a thinking and paralysis by analysis. Rather our players to control their thoughts, emo- desired outcome, you’re not. You’re just than trusting that they know how to make tions, and actions, we want to control the clearing headspace to focus on wh
Coach to Coach: Coaching Staff Self-Improvement from the Inside-Out
Self-evaluation can be incredibly important for professional development, yet so often we make evaluation sterile, boring, and too driven by numbers. I will not focus on that type of evaluation for several reasons, not the least of which is that you probably already have a way to do that type of evaluation or have easy access to such an evaluation by performing a quick internet search. I’m going to propose a different type of self-evaluation, one that I believe is superior to the
A Special Coach of the Year
There are a number of coaching awards each year but one that stands out is the Don Shula NFL High School Coach of the Year award. The award is intended to “honor exemplary high school football coaches who display the integrity, achievement and leadership demonstrated by the winningest coach in NFL history, Don Shula.”Two years ago, Steve Specht, the head coach at St. Xavier in Cincinnati, won the award and last year the winner was Mike Grant from Eden Prairie High School in Min
Coach to Coach: To Overcome Early Season Adversity, Become a Champ
Early season adversity is common in football. Whether the adversity is a devastating loss, poor team chemistry, or another issue, a pre-planned process for improvement is necessary. Here are some suggestions for overcoming adversity and becoming a CHAMP. Can DoAdversity is often hard to overcome because individuals and teams stay focused on the problem for too long. A loss or setback always stings, and it should, but moving on and not looking back is essential for improvement.
The Psychology of Football
Maybe Knute Rockne said it best, “Football is a game played with arms, legs, and shoulders but mostly from the neck up.”Every coach is trying to get an edge on the mental side of football. It could be on the best way to motivate his players or simplifying a defensive scheme so his athletes can comprehend it easier. Most psychologists say focusing on simple goals can lead a player to identify and seize more opportunities.Jared Wood is a sports psychology consultant in
Coach to Coach: Follow These Four Keys to Become a Better Coach Every Day
As coaches, we often preach to our players, “You will either get better or worse today.” In order to get better every day, players have coaches who have made practice plans for them and provide encouragement, feedback, and inspiration. But if we, as coaches, are going to get better, who and what do we have to help us? The following is an acronym for a process you can use on a daily basis to make sure you are improving in key areas of coaching effectiveness. Follow this plan each day, and
AEMA Report – The Second Football Season
By Austin Perryman, Student Equipment ManagerUniversity of Tennessee-ChattanoogaSpring football is altogether one of the most memorable seasonal sports to be involved in as both a high school player and a FCS student manager. I’ve been lucky enough to have been involved as both.Just before my last spring at Lincoln County High School in Fayetteville, TN I hurt my back doing hang-cleans. It wasn’t much at first, but as the spring went along, my back sta
Coach to Coach: Turning Up the Heat – Eight Suggestions for Creating Your Best Summer Ever
While often a challenge, the elements of summer (extreme heat, players not being in school, having too much free time, not having transportation to activities) provide a great opportunity to create a mentally and physically stronger team. Mental toughness is only built when conditions are difficult, and extreme weather, such as summer heat, creates a great opportunity to build mental toughness. Here are some tips for creating strong minds, bodies, and team chemistry this summer.Set Mo
Coach to Coach: Developing a Motivational Profile with 4 Essential Questions
When motivating student athletes, guesswork does not work. It is essential to have a framework for your efforts, and a little solid knowledge goes a long way toward getting it right. A simple, useful research-based formula for building motivation is this: Motivation = Expectations x ValuesMotivation is a combination of what one expects to happen multiplied by what he values or wants. This formula can be assessed effectively with four questions. A player’s answers
Get Organized - Having an efficient and effective play calling system can help maximize your offensive potential.
As the offensive coordinator, there are many ways to organize your play calls. After six years as an offensive coordinator, I have experimented with several formats to find what works for me. What I have settled on is a format that is flexible in games and helpful in game planning on the weekends.When structuring my call sheet, the first thing I did was to create landmark calls. We broke the field down by zones, similar to what air raid teams do. But we decided to get more specific
Coach to Coach: The Mindset of Excellence
At the end of the 2013 season, I remember watching 15-0 North Dakota State win their third straight FCS title. An ESPN reporter got to Head Coach Craig Bohl in the end zone for the post-game interview. At the end of the interview I heard coach Bohl say, “We pursue perfection and along the way we touch excellence”. It takes an incredible attitude to push for something so unattainable that it can never be reached and the
Coach to Coach: Energy Regulation - The Pressure and the Phenom
The best quarterback on the team is a sophomore. He’s 6’2” and built like a tree. His whole life has been filled with off season camps and QB gurus. He has all the physical attributes a coach could wish for. Everybody on the team has great expectations for this phenom. Anything less than a championship by the time he’s a junior or senior will be a great disappointment. It’s game time, and he knows everyone’s watching. He can feel the pressure. His stomach doesn’t feel so good. H
Coach to Coach: The Mental Fundamentals - Attention Control and Concentration
One Play at a Time It takes consistent practice in order to concentrate and focus on the proper things. Our defense in high school had a motto on every break of the huddle. The Mike linebacker would call the defense and yell “HIT!” and everyone would follow with “HARD!” HIT.....HARD! It seems so simple but that was over 25 years ago and it still gets me fired up. It served as a great verbal trigger to focus on the next play and it describes what we were about
Coach to Coach: The Mental Fundamentals – Motor Programming
The ball is in the air. It’s a perfect spiral flying straight into a pair of hands. He drops it! It’s like his hands exploded from the speed of the ball. The coach yells “catch the ball, you gotta make that catch” or something similar, as if the player didn’t want to catch the ball in the first place. Why waste your breath on stating the obvious? What kind of receiver doesn’t want to make the catch? Chances are, the reason he missed the catch is because he hasn’t done
Coach to Coach: The Mental Fundamentals: Goal Setting
Building Perspective The first game is just around the corner, so we call a team meeting to assess our direction for the season and set some goals. When I ask the kids what their goals are for the season they seem to reply with the same answer every year, “win league, win state and beat our rivals.” Winning seems to be the theme for every goal. Even the coaches I’ve worked with base all of their goals around winning. It reminds me of that famous Lombardi quote
A Lifetime in the Game – Troy Vincent has transitioned from collegiate All-American to All-Pro to player’s association president to top NFL executive
If you’re a Wisconsin Badger fan, you likely remember him as the 1990 Big 10 Defensive Player of the Year as a defensive back who doubled as an electric, record-setting return man under Barry Alvarez. You probably also recall with pride his selection by the Miami Dolphins in the 1992 NFL Draft as the 7th overall pick.If you’re a Philadelphia Eagles follower, you saw him at the peak of his 15-year NFL career. His eight years with the team as one of the leagues most dependable co
Coach to Coach: The Mental Fundamentals
The yellow flag is thrown and the coach’s voice is rising. It’s obviously a bad call. Everyone can smell the home cooking. “That score would have put us on top and now it’s called back. The ref has literally taken points away from us.” The coach is livid and walking the tightrope to ejection. The lack of composure is reflected in the players when the clock dwindles and the cheap shots fly. This game will be lost in more ways than one.Building mental toughness starts with
Coach to Coach: Thanks for the Memories
In 2010, I wrote my first article for American Football Monthly. In that article I told the story of how Hall of Fame Coach George Allen returned to coaching at the age of 72 to coach my college football team at Long Beach State University. The experience of writing that article and the positive response that I received from coaches around the country far exceeded any expectations I may have had about the joy of writing and sharing my ideas. What was supposed to be one article has turne
Letter from AFM – Coach, Writer, Friend
When we first met Bryon Hamilton in 2007, he was an up-and-coming high school head coach in Northern California. His innovative offensive system, the Shotgun Zone Fly, was the cover story subject in our December issue. The SZF was putting up record numbers with its potent inside-outside running attack, which was a precursor of the misdirection run game employed by Gus Malzahn at Auburn in last season’s run to the championship game. The feature proved to be very popular with AFM readers and
Coach to Coach: An Efficient and Effective Play Calling System
Last year at this time, I wrote an article on the use of tempo as a weapon. I stated then that tempo was being used by many successful teams and that extremely fast-paced offenses were going to be a standard of football for years to come. Today, the use of the fast-paced, no- huddle offense is becoming more the norm than the exception.Webster’s Dictionary defines the word tempo as the “rate of motion or activity”. In today’s football terminology, the word tempo refers to how qu
Coach to Coach: The Turnaround
Prior to the season, If you would have told any rational Auburn fan or even most returning players that they would be playing for the 2013 national title, I think most would have been skeptical at best. There was excitement within the football program at the University of Auburn last off-season when they hired Gus Malzahn as their head coach. Malzahn had been instrumental in Auburn’s success during the 2010 National Title season. But the team had only won 3 games in 2012 and was
Coach to Coach: Preparing Your Athletes to Succeed at the 4-Year Level
It’s been said that it’s the Willies and the Joes not the Xs and Os that make college football teams and programs great. There is no doubt that a surplus of talent usually translates to wins on Saturday. Every 4-year college coach in the nation is trying to identify high school and junior college athletes who can successfully transition into great college football players. Identifying talent, however, is only part of the equation that determines success. Every year there are extremely tal
Coach to Coach: Enjoy the Ride
It had been a long time since I’d been on a college sideline as a coach. After 10 years of being a high school head coach, I was excited to be back and I was relieved to see the clock tick to zeros in a 45-13 season opening win. The entire coaching staff and every player had put tremendous effort into preparing for our opener and the final score reflected a great night for us all. As I walked off the field, I couldn’t help but notice the smiling fans, the players chatting with friends and
Coach to Coach: The Class of 2013
Last month I enjoyed watching one of the greatest golf tournaments in the world, The British Open. While some find golf boring to watch, I find it to be an intriguing display of both the internal and external struggles of sport. I love the tradition of golf, the variety of skills required and the individual pressure that accompanies every shot. I love the fact that golfers are paid entirely on the merits of their immediate accomplishments and not on the wishful expectations of future events.
Coach to Coach – Upset Alert: 5 Ways to Plan Against Superior Opponents.
On October 6th 2007, the Stanford Cardinals arrived at the LA Coliseum for a football game against the University of Southern California Trojans. USC was riding a 35-game home winning streak and was one of the more dominant football teams and programs in the modern era. The Cardinal, who were coming off a 1-11 2006 campaign, were being led to the expected slaughter by first- year coach Jim Harbaugh, who would be starting a backup quarterback with a total of three passes on his resume.
Coach to Coach – College Coach or High School Coach: Comparing the Two
As I wrote in May, I recently resigned from my decade long head coaching position at Foothill High School and accepted the associate head coach and offense coordinator job at Shasta College in nearby Redding. The transition from high school head coach to college assistant coach has actually been easier than expected. It certainly helps that I am familiar with both the college assistant role and the Shasta College program as I previously spent six seasons (1997-2002) as an assistant coach ther
Coach to Coach – Change of Season
Last year, I wrote an article describing the ever-expanding coaching carousel that all of us in this profession encounter. The article described some of the challenges of change within the coaching profession. I received a lot of emails regarding this article. It seems that all of us in coaching are presented with change or the opportunity for change on a continual basis. Some of this change is welcomed and, unfortunately, some of it is not. Deciding to change jobs is often one of the most di
Coach to Coach – The Check With Me Passing Series
There are three passing concepts from our “Check With Me” passing series that have been very successful for me and my quarterbacks. These plays are called by our QBs from the line of scrimmage and they are very effective in attacking coverage schemes.Here are three Check With Me passing concepts: 1. Check QuickThis “check with me” quick pass concept allows the quarterback to call a specific route combination based primarily on the pre-snap coverage read. Thi
Coach to Coach – Four Strategies in Preparing Your Quarterback for Success
At the start of the 2012 season, there were a lot of questions from coaches, players, fans and the local sportswriters regarding the state of our quarterback position. We had graduated a MVP quarterback in 2011 and the heir apparent was an undersized junior without any varsity experience. The questions regarding the position were legitimate and I knew that in order for our team to make another championship run, it was imperative that we continue to have great play at the quarterback position.
Coach to Coach – Want to Use a Faster Tempo as a Weapon? Be Creative in Deciding How
NCAA bowl games started on December 15th and finished on January 7th, and, like many of you, I watched almost every game. Of all the current football trends on display, there was one that seemed to present itself in almost every game - the no-huddle, up-tempo offense. Spread offenses have been a football standard for many seasons. However, the pace at which teams are executing their schemes is becoming more and more of a key factor in their offensive philosophy and identity.In today’
Coach to Coach Dealing with Discipline
I was having dinner on a Saturday night with my family when the doorbell rang. Upon opening the door, I was a little shocked to see a former player that I had not seen in almost ten years standing in front of me. Having past members of my teams stop by to say hello is not an uncommon occurrence but this was different. This young man, who was a part of my first varsity team at Foothill High School, had the distinctive “honor” of being the first player that I had ever dismissed from m
Coach to Coach – Summer Session (Part II)
Using the summer months to organize and articulate your coaching philosophies and methods.In part two of using the summer months to organize and articulate your coaching philosophies and methods, I want to share with you a few methods and strategies in developing your game week schedule, practice preparation, organizing your game day, halftime responsibilities and addressing parent concerns.Game Week Schedule and PreparationsAt Foothill, we play our games on Fr
Coach to Coach – Summer Session
Using the summer months to organize and articulate your coaching philosophies and methods.Being a head football coach is a job that requires a multitude of skills. The coach that is successful over a long period of time has learned to master the art of the “tions” – motivation, delegation, innovation, articulation, dedication – all the while maintaining the most important element – passion. In order to become efficient in all of these areas, a head coach must know and be able
Coach to Coach – Underestimating the Underdog
Months would pass before I would log my first meaningful memory of Joey. I remember the howling wind and unseasonably cold weather that made it almost impossible to communicate that night as I stood outside of the visitor’s locker room in Dixon, California. Players were starting to make their way towards the field as I reviewed my play call sheet minutes before we would kickoff the 2010 season. Joey, looking more like a manager than a player, nervously approached me with tears in his eyes a
Coach to Coach – Maximizing Your Speed, Strength, and Conditioning Programs
As I write this column, March Madness is upon us, spring training is winding up and weightrooms across the country are filled with ambitious and determined football players who know that football season is right around the corner. Training the body for the demanding sport of football is nothing new. When I was playing in high school our head coach would give us a goal sheet and some basic workout instructions and send us off for the summer. We knew that he expected us to return in August in s
Coach to Coach – Maximizing Productivity: A Key Component to Success
If football had a caloric value, I would have gained fifty pounds over the last month. From high school championship games, to college bowl games, to NFL playoff games, I am fat on football. One of the factors causing my football weight gain is how I consume the product. There are no fast food meals here. The invention of the DVR has turned me into a slow and steady consumer. A three hour game can easily take me twice that long to watch. The rewind and pause features allow me to regurgitate o
Getting Your Team Connected
By Eric Slivoskey, Former Coach Seinajoki Crocodiles (Finland) How connected are you to your players? Do you merely make contact with team members to ensure that they are staying out of trouble and not reflecting poorly on the program, or do you strive to know something personal about each person on the squad. In a world that seems to be changing faster than any of us could have ever imagi
Coach to Coach – Off-Season Priorities
“The Future is Now!” was a phrase I heard often during the 1991 football season at Long Beach State. It was one of the many catch phrases that George Allen coined and is famous for. As we enter the heart of the 2012 off-season, it’s sometimes difficult to envision that the future of next football season is now. When it comes to developing a successful plan for the 2012 season, the future is indeed now. Over the past year and half, I have shared many of my ideas as they relate to the pri
Coach to Coach – My 2011 Coaches Christmas List
The Christmas season is here. Hopefully, this time of year finds you in a festive state. Regardless of how the season went or is finishing up, we all can be thankful for the opportunity and privilege of being a football coach. As I welcome the Christmas Season, I am excited about the ability to give. However, there is still that kid in me that likes to receive as well. So I began to think of things I would include on my Coaching Christmas List. What if we, as coaches, could ask for anything i
Letter from AFM - Happy Holidays
As we conclude another football season, our thoughts move ahead to next year and the things that we hope will be different and better for ourselves and for the game. We are thankful for the support of our subscribers and advertisers and especially for the generosity of those coaches that are willing to share their plays, strategies, drills and coaching advice with AFM readers. Without them, we would not have been able to serve the coaching community for over 15 years.
Coach to Coach – Offensive Game Planning: Strategies for Success
I love designing and developing offensive schemes. When I was a kid, I would sit for hours designing plays on my electric magnetic football game. Years later, I am still designing plays and offensive schemes. The challenge of designing a play and teaching players to execute it with precision in the midst of violent chaos is one of the things I love most about coaching. Once the plays and schemes have been designed and installed, the next aspect of being a successful offensive coach is putting
Coach to Coach – Principles for Becoming a Better Coach
As I write this article, we are only three weeks away from the official start of the 2011 football season. It’s the time when players and coaches alike are weary of countless off-season workouts and are ready to put the preparation and hard work to good use. With every clank of a 45-pound round, our players see the light at the end of the tunnel. It’s the calm before the storm and the season rapidly approaches.If you have read my previous articles in the Coach to Coach column, you
Coach to Coach: The Pre-Season Home Stretch
“The time will come when winter will ask what you were doing all summer.” - Senator Henry ClayTwo months and counting! It is amazing how fast the season is approaching. By the start of June, our players have completed countless workouts, 10 days of spring ball and now are preparing for summer camp at the University of Nevada. We have spent the last few months training and preparing ourselves for the 2011 season. June is the start of the final phase of the so called off-season.
Letter from AFM - Last Call for Fall Prep
With the school year coming to a close, the next major event on the football calendar will be the start of pre-season practice. Every coach would likely agree that the weeks leading up to the season opener are critical times for conditioning, learning the playbook and fine-tuning offensive and defensive units. For many coaches, putting together a plan for pre-season practice is a no-brainer. If they’ve been successful in recent years, especially in their openin
Coach to Coach – Coaching to Make a Difference
The longer I coach and the more time I spend witnessing kids transform into young men, the more I realize that in this profession we have the opportunity and the responsibility to be more than just a coach. Coaching allows all of us the unique opportunity to leave a lasting imprint on the lives of our players. Our profession is one of only a few that will mold and shape future business leaders, politicians, husbands, fathers, clergy, infantry and military leaders. One of my favorite maxims co
Coach to Coach: Football Clinics – The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly
If you are like me, your email has been full of invitations and promotions to the many football coaching clinics being held across the country. As a coach with 19 seasons under my belt, I have attended many clinics, have had the opportunity to speak at many clinics, and I host the Shotgun Zone Fly Summit. Clinics provide us with a great opportunity to learn from some of the most successful people in the business. They are also a great excuse to get a “hall pass” for a w
Coach to Coach: The Art of Effective Motivation
I was watching the Baltimore Ravens dominate the Pittsburgh Steelers in the first half of a playoff game this weekend with my dad. I was surprised at the lack of energy and focus that Pittsburgh team had displayed for the entire first half. On the first possession of the second half, sure-handed Baltimore running back Ray Rice fumbled and the Steelers recovered. The home fans were filled with a rush of excitement and the Pittsburgh players, despite a two touchdown deficit, displayed a renewed
Coach to Coach: Making Your Off-Season Count, Part II
Last month, I wrote about some simple steps in evaluating a season that does not meet expectations. I touched on a few of the areas that I feel are critical in assessing these types of seasons. The areas include communication, off season training programs and evaluating returning players’ strengths and weaknesses and adjusting schemes accordingly. But what about the seasons that exceed our expectations? The seasons when things went right. Seasons when players and coaches came together to pr
Coach to Coach: Making Your Off-Season Count, Part I
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 ev
How Do You Measure Success?
By the time you receive this issue of AFM, there will be 333 high school teams which have completed their seasons as state champions in various divisions. Champions in the FCS, D-II, D-III and NAIA will have been crowned and the BCS National Championship will be right around the corner. Coaches on all of these teams would likely say that success is measured by championships, trophies and undefeated records. They would be right. No one would deny that these championship coaches and their playe
Coach to Coach
When I was an offensive coordinator at the junior/community college level for six seasons, my football life consisted of recruiting, installing our schemes, game planning and calling the game on Saturdays. A full plate for sure, but it was 100% football. I definitely had ideas of what I would do if and when I became a head coach, but all of the peripheral things associated with running the entire program were in the hands of the head coach and the athletic director. In those days I thought th
Letter from AFM
Our mission at AFM is to help coaches to be more successful on and off the field. Naturally, for most coaches, success means winning more games. So our focus has always been to provide the tools to win, whether they’re innovative offensive systems, position drills, defensive techniques or special teams strategy. But virtually every coach, at some point in his career, has endured a season where the losses have outnumbered the wins. After all, for every team that puts together a win
Coach to Coach
* Getting more done in less time is always a great model for success. Be organized and get the most out of your time with your players and staff. Wasted time is one thing that you can never get back. I have worked with coaches that must have had a different watch than I did. 3:30 meant 4:00 and a one-hour meeting always meant two hours. The one thing that all of us have in common is that we each have 24 hours in each day. I read recently that 25% of American worker
Coach to Coach
The 2010 season will be my 20th as a Head Coach and/or Offensive Coordinator at both the high school and college levels. I have coached a lot of games in that stretch and held ten times as many practices. I started playing football in 1976 and haven’t missed a season since. I guess you could say that I am addicted to this great game. In those 34 years, I have learned some important lessons that have played a huge role in my coaching life. As we head into the 2010 season, I want to share some k
Letter from AFM
Before St. Thomas Aquinas’ trip to Ohio to play in the annual Kirk Herbstreit event last season, Head Coach George Smith wanted to be prepared. So he flew to Columbus and walked through his team’s itinerary – from the moment they would land right through game time – and checked out everything from bus arrangements to the pregame menu. His preparation paid off as Aquinas routed Upper Arlington, 52-7. Smith is planning another scouting mission prior to the Raiders’
- More Solutions to Problem #10
Continued from: 32 Solutions for the 12 Biggest Problems You\'ll Face this Season Problem 10: Poor personnel management from the sideline; penalties for not lining up properly, offside penalties, and your athletes\' running onto the field late. Is it the coaches\' or the players\' fault or both? Our philosophy is simple: what you see on t
Gear
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The Speed Report: Preparing for Football Performance: Proper Warm Ups
One of the more important aspects of practice or game performance is being ready to function mentally and physically. Whether your team is warming up for a practice or a game, certain aspects of readiness (prepared for action) must be applied. When elite athletes perform they are very good at mentally processing variable psychomotor movement activities. When a team takes the field to warm up for practice or a competition, they should approach it with a good mental focus each time. Prac
Correcting Mistakes: Effective halftime defensive adjustments
Fifteen minutes. A short amount of time, especially when you’re trying to sum up how your defense performed during the first 30 minutes and determining how to approach the next 30. Despite the short amount of time, halftime strategies vary from coach to coach. But Mickey Andrews, the long-time defensive coordinator at Florida State, looks at it another way. “Each football game is like a test in the classroom,” he said, “but there you don’t get to go in, take 30 minutes on
On the Circuit
At the University of North Dakota, we have one major goal for our defense to attain each season. That goal is to lead the North Central Conference in fewest points allowed. This is not an easy task in one of the most balanced and powerful Division II conferences in the country. Yet we have reached our goal of allowing the fewest points in our league in six of the last nine seasons. During six of the last seven seasons, we have also been first or second in our conference in total defense. While w
Cover Too
It may come as a surprise to some that computers have been helping high school and college coaches build game plans for nearly 20 years. Starting with the early Apple II and IBM personal computers, technology that had previously been available only to larger colleges and professional teams began working its way into the high school and small college ranks. Innovative coaches, facing many obstacles, began to integrate computers into their game planning processes during the mid-1980s. C
Welcome to American Football Monthly's Coach to Coach collection. This page gathers articles where experienced football coaches share their firsthand perspectives, practical tips, innovative ideas, and hard-earned lessons directly with their peers in the coaching community. It's a platform for connection and shared knowledge.
In these articles, you'll find relatable insights covering a wide spectrum of coaching topics, such as:
- Game Planning & Strategy: Real-world adjustments and tactical insights.
- Practice Organization & Efficiency: Tips for making the most of your time on the field.
- Player Motivation & Team Building: Strategies for fostering culture and inspiring athletes.
- Leadership Philosophies: Different approaches to leading a team and staff.
- Handling Adversity: Perspectives on navigating tough losses, injuries, and off-field issues.
- Program Management: Insights into building and sustaining a successful program.
- Work-Life Balance: Candid advice on managing the demands of the job.
Coach to Coach Search Results
Coach to Coach: The Point of Culture – By Jared Wood, Sports Psychology CoachCoach to Coach: Lose Control, Gain Trust
As football coaches, we often seemed ob- Losing control for trust is an odd thing. can control thinking. This leads to over- sessed with control. Not only do we want While it seems like you are giving up a thinking and paralysis by analysis. Rather our players to control their thoughts, emo- desired outcome, you’re not. You’re just than trusting that they know how to make tions, and actions, we want to control the clearing headspace to focus on wh
Coach to Coach: Coaching Staff Self-Improvement from the Inside-Out
Self-evaluation can be incredibly important for professional development, yet so often we make evaluation sterile, boring, and too driven by numbers. I will not focus on that type of evaluation for several reasons, not the least of which is that you probably already have a way to do that type of evaluation or have easy access to such an evaluation by performing a quick internet search. I’m going to propose a different type of self-evaluation, one that I believe is superior to the
A Special Coach of the Year
There are a number of coaching awards each year but one that stands out is the Don Shula NFL High School Coach of the Year award. The award is intended to “honor exemplary high school football coaches who display the integrity, achievement and leadership demonstrated by the winningest coach in NFL history, Don Shula.”Two years ago, Steve Specht, the head coach at St. Xavier in Cincinnati, won the award and last year the winner was Mike Grant from Eden Prairie High School in Min
Coach to Coach: To Overcome Early Season Adversity, Become a Champ
Early season adversity is common in football. Whether the adversity is a devastating loss, poor team chemistry, or another issue, a pre-planned process for improvement is necessary. Here are some suggestions for overcoming adversity and becoming a CHAMP. Can DoAdversity is often hard to overcome because individuals and teams stay focused on the problem for too long. A loss or setback always stings, and it should, but moving on and not looking back is essential for improvement.
The Psychology of Football
Maybe Knute Rockne said it best, “Football is a game played with arms, legs, and shoulders but mostly from the neck up.”Every coach is trying to get an edge on the mental side of football. It could be on the best way to motivate his players or simplifying a defensive scheme so his athletes can comprehend it easier. Most psychologists say focusing on simple goals can lead a player to identify and seize more opportunities.Jared Wood is a sports psychology consultant in
Coach to Coach: Follow These Four Keys to Become a Better Coach Every Day
As coaches, we often preach to our players, “You will either get better or worse today.” In order to get better every day, players have coaches who have made practice plans for them and provide encouragement, feedback, and inspiration. But if we, as coaches, are going to get better, who and what do we have to help us? The following is an acronym for a process you can use on a daily basis to make sure you are improving in key areas of coaching effectiveness. Follow this plan each day, and
AEMA Report – The Second Football Season
By Austin Perryman, Student Equipment ManagerUniversity of Tennessee-ChattanoogaSpring football is altogether one of the most memorable seasonal sports to be involved in as both a high school player and a FCS student manager. I’ve been lucky enough to have been involved as both.Just before my last spring at Lincoln County High School in Fayetteville, TN I hurt my back doing hang-cleans. It wasn’t much at first, but as the spring went along, my back sta
Coach to Coach: Turning Up the Heat – Eight Suggestions for Creating Your Best Summer Ever
While often a challenge, the elements of summer (extreme heat, players not being in school, having too much free time, not having transportation to activities) provide a great opportunity to create a mentally and physically stronger team. Mental toughness is only built when conditions are difficult, and extreme weather, such as summer heat, creates a great opportunity to build mental toughness. Here are some tips for creating strong minds, bodies, and team chemistry this summer.Set Mo
Coach to Coach: Developing a Motivational Profile with 4 Essential Questions
When motivating student athletes, guesswork does not work. It is essential to have a framework for your efforts, and a little solid knowledge goes a long way toward getting it right. A simple, useful research-based formula for building motivation is this: Motivation = Expectations x ValuesMotivation is a combination of what one expects to happen multiplied by what he values or wants. This formula can be assessed effectively with four questions. A player’s answers
Get Organized - Having an efficient and effective play calling system can help maximize your offensive potential.
As the offensive coordinator, there are many ways to organize your play calls. After six years as an offensive coordinator, I have experimented with several formats to find what works for me. What I have settled on is a format that is flexible in games and helpful in game planning on the weekends.When structuring my call sheet, the first thing I did was to create landmark calls. We broke the field down by zones, similar to what air raid teams do. But we decided to get more specific
Coach to Coach: The Mindset of Excellence
At the end of the 2013 season, I remember watching 15-0 North Dakota State win their third straight FCS title. An ESPN reporter got to Head Coach Craig Bohl in the end zone for the post-game interview. At the end of the interview I heard coach Bohl say, “We pursue perfection and along the way we touch excellence”. It takes an incredible attitude to push for something so unattainable that it can never be reached and the
Coach to Coach: Energy Regulation - The Pressure and the Phenom
The best quarterback on the team is a sophomore. He’s 6’2” and built like a tree. His whole life has been filled with off season camps and QB gurus. He has all the physical attributes a coach could wish for. Everybody on the team has great expectations for this phenom. Anything less than a championship by the time he’s a junior or senior will be a great disappointment. It’s game time, and he knows everyone’s watching. He can feel the pressure. His stomach doesn’t feel so good. H
Coach to Coach: The Mental Fundamentals - Attention Control and Concentration
One Play at a Time It takes consistent practice in order to concentrate and focus on the proper things. Our defense in high school had a motto on every break of the huddle. The Mike linebacker would call the defense and yell “HIT!” and everyone would follow with “HARD!” HIT.....HARD! It seems so simple but that was over 25 years ago and it still gets me fired up. It served as a great verbal trigger to focus on the next play and it describes what we were about
Coach to Coach: The Mental Fundamentals – Motor Programming
The ball is in the air. It’s a perfect spiral flying straight into a pair of hands. He drops it! It’s like his hands exploded from the speed of the ball. The coach yells “catch the ball, you gotta make that catch” or something similar, as if the player didn’t want to catch the ball in the first place. Why waste your breath on stating the obvious? What kind of receiver doesn’t want to make the catch? Chances are, the reason he missed the catch is because he hasn’t done
Coach to Coach: The Mental Fundamentals: Goal Setting
Building Perspective The first game is just around the corner, so we call a team meeting to assess our direction for the season and set some goals. When I ask the kids what their goals are for the season they seem to reply with the same answer every year, “win league, win state and beat our rivals.” Winning seems to be the theme for every goal. Even the coaches I’ve worked with base all of their goals around winning. It reminds me of that famous Lombardi quote
A Lifetime in the Game – Troy Vincent has transitioned from collegiate All-American to All-Pro to player’s association president to top NFL executive
If you’re a Wisconsin Badger fan, you likely remember him as the 1990 Big 10 Defensive Player of the Year as a defensive back who doubled as an electric, record-setting return man under Barry Alvarez. You probably also recall with pride his selection by the Miami Dolphins in the 1992 NFL Draft as the 7th overall pick.If you’re a Philadelphia Eagles follower, you saw him at the peak of his 15-year NFL career. His eight years with the team as one of the leagues most dependable co
Coach to Coach: The Mental Fundamentals
The yellow flag is thrown and the coach’s voice is rising. It’s obviously a bad call. Everyone can smell the home cooking. “That score would have put us on top and now it’s called back. The ref has literally taken points away from us.” The coach is livid and walking the tightrope to ejection. The lack of composure is reflected in the players when the clock dwindles and the cheap shots fly. This game will be lost in more ways than one.Building mental toughness starts with
Coach to Coach: Thanks for the Memories
In 2010, I wrote my first article for American Football Monthly. In that article I told the story of how Hall of Fame Coach George Allen returned to coaching at the age of 72 to coach my college football team at Long Beach State University. The experience of writing that article and the positive response that I received from coaches around the country far exceeded any expectations I may have had about the joy of writing and sharing my ideas. What was supposed to be one article has turne
Letter from AFM – Coach, Writer, Friend
When we first met Bryon Hamilton in 2007, he was an up-and-coming high school head coach in Northern California. His innovative offensive system, the Shotgun Zone Fly, was the cover story subject in our December issue. The SZF was putting up record numbers with its potent inside-outside running attack, which was a precursor of the misdirection run game employed by Gus Malzahn at Auburn in last season’s run to the championship game. The feature proved to be very popular with AFM readers and
Coach to Coach: An Efficient and Effective Play Calling System
Last year at this time, I wrote an article on the use of tempo as a weapon. I stated then that tempo was being used by many successful teams and that extremely fast-paced offenses were going to be a standard of football for years to come. Today, the use of the fast-paced, no- huddle offense is becoming more the norm than the exception.Webster’s Dictionary defines the word tempo as the “rate of motion or activity”. In today’s football terminology, the word tempo refers to how qu
Coach to Coach: The Turnaround
Prior to the season, If you would have told any rational Auburn fan or even most returning players that they would be playing for the 2013 national title, I think most would have been skeptical at best. There was excitement within the football program at the University of Auburn last off-season when they hired Gus Malzahn as their head coach. Malzahn had been instrumental in Auburn’s success during the 2010 National Title season. But the team had only won 3 games in 2012 and was
Coach to Coach: Preparing Your Athletes to Succeed at the 4-Year Level
It’s been said that it’s the Willies and the Joes not the Xs and Os that make college football teams and programs great. There is no doubt that a surplus of talent usually translates to wins on Saturday. Every 4-year college coach in the nation is trying to identify high school and junior college athletes who can successfully transition into great college football players. Identifying talent, however, is only part of the equation that determines success. Every year there are extremely tal
Coach to Coach: Enjoy the Ride
It had been a long time since I’d been on a college sideline as a coach. After 10 years of being a high school head coach, I was excited to be back and I was relieved to see the clock tick to zeros in a 45-13 season opening win. The entire coaching staff and every player had put tremendous effort into preparing for our opener and the final score reflected a great night for us all. As I walked off the field, I couldn’t help but notice the smiling fans, the players chatting with friends and
Coach to Coach: The Class of 2013
Last month I enjoyed watching one of the greatest golf tournaments in the world, The British Open. While some find golf boring to watch, I find it to be an intriguing display of both the internal and external struggles of sport. I love the tradition of golf, the variety of skills required and the individual pressure that accompanies every shot. I love the fact that golfers are paid entirely on the merits of their immediate accomplishments and not on the wishful expectations of future events.
Coach to Coach – Upset Alert: 5 Ways to Plan Against Superior Opponents.
On October 6th 2007, the Stanford Cardinals arrived at the LA Coliseum for a football game against the University of Southern California Trojans. USC was riding a 35-game home winning streak and was one of the more dominant football teams and programs in the modern era. The Cardinal, who were coming off a 1-11 2006 campaign, were being led to the expected slaughter by first- year coach Jim Harbaugh, who would be starting a backup quarterback with a total of three passes on his resume.
Coach to Coach – College Coach or High School Coach: Comparing the Two
As I wrote in May, I recently resigned from my decade long head coaching position at Foothill High School and accepted the associate head coach and offense coordinator job at Shasta College in nearby Redding. The transition from high school head coach to college assistant coach has actually been easier than expected. It certainly helps that I am familiar with both the college assistant role and the Shasta College program as I previously spent six seasons (1997-2002) as an assistant coach ther
Coach to Coach – Change of Season
Last year, I wrote an article describing the ever-expanding coaching carousel that all of us in this profession encounter. The article described some of the challenges of change within the coaching profession. I received a lot of emails regarding this article. It seems that all of us in coaching are presented with change or the opportunity for change on a continual basis. Some of this change is welcomed and, unfortunately, some of it is not. Deciding to change jobs is often one of the most di
Coach to Coach – The Check With Me Passing Series
There are three passing concepts from our “Check With Me” passing series that have been very successful for me and my quarterbacks. These plays are called by our QBs from the line of scrimmage and they are very effective in attacking coverage schemes.Here are three Check With Me passing concepts: 1. Check QuickThis “check with me” quick pass concept allows the quarterback to call a specific route combination based primarily on the pre-snap coverage read. Thi
Coach to Coach – Four Strategies in Preparing Your Quarterback for Success
At the start of the 2012 season, there were a lot of questions from coaches, players, fans and the local sportswriters regarding the state of our quarterback position. We had graduated a MVP quarterback in 2011 and the heir apparent was an undersized junior without any varsity experience. The questions regarding the position were legitimate and I knew that in order for our team to make another championship run, it was imperative that we continue to have great play at the quarterback position.
Coach to Coach – Want to Use a Faster Tempo as a Weapon? Be Creative in Deciding How
NCAA bowl games started on December 15th and finished on January 7th, and, like many of you, I watched almost every game. Of all the current football trends on display, there was one that seemed to present itself in almost every game - the no-huddle, up-tempo offense. Spread offenses have been a football standard for many seasons. However, the pace at which teams are executing their schemes is becoming more and more of a key factor in their offensive philosophy and identity.In today’
Coach to Coach Dealing with Discipline
I was having dinner on a Saturday night with my family when the doorbell rang. Upon opening the door, I was a little shocked to see a former player that I had not seen in almost ten years standing in front of me. Having past members of my teams stop by to say hello is not an uncommon occurrence but this was different. This young man, who was a part of my first varsity team at Foothill High School, had the distinctive “honor” of being the first player that I had ever dismissed from m
Coach to Coach – Summer Session (Part II)
Using the summer months to organize and articulate your coaching philosophies and methods.In part two of using the summer months to organize and articulate your coaching philosophies and methods, I want to share with you a few methods and strategies in developing your game week schedule, practice preparation, organizing your game day, halftime responsibilities and addressing parent concerns.Game Week Schedule and PreparationsAt Foothill, we play our games on Fr
Coach to Coach – Summer Session
Using the summer months to organize and articulate your coaching philosophies and methods.Being a head football coach is a job that requires a multitude of skills. The coach that is successful over a long period of time has learned to master the art of the “tions” – motivation, delegation, innovation, articulation, dedication – all the while maintaining the most important element – passion. In order to become efficient in all of these areas, a head coach must know and be able
Coach to Coach – Underestimating the Underdog
Months would pass before I would log my first meaningful memory of Joey. I remember the howling wind and unseasonably cold weather that made it almost impossible to communicate that night as I stood outside of the visitor’s locker room in Dixon, California. Players were starting to make their way towards the field as I reviewed my play call sheet minutes before we would kickoff the 2010 season. Joey, looking more like a manager than a player, nervously approached me with tears in his eyes a
Coach to Coach – Maximizing Your Speed, Strength, and Conditioning Programs
As I write this column, March Madness is upon us, spring training is winding up and weightrooms across the country are filled with ambitious and determined football players who know that football season is right around the corner. Training the body for the demanding sport of football is nothing new. When I was playing in high school our head coach would give us a goal sheet and some basic workout instructions and send us off for the summer. We knew that he expected us to return in August in s
Coach to Coach – Maximizing Productivity: A Key Component to Success
If football had a caloric value, I would have gained fifty pounds over the last month. From high school championship games, to college bowl games, to NFL playoff games, I am fat on football. One of the factors causing my football weight gain is how I consume the product. There are no fast food meals here. The invention of the DVR has turned me into a slow and steady consumer. A three hour game can easily take me twice that long to watch. The rewind and pause features allow me to regurgitate o
Getting Your Team Connected
By Eric Slivoskey, Former Coach Seinajoki Crocodiles (Finland) How connected are you to your players? Do you merely make contact with team members to ensure that they are staying out of trouble and not reflecting poorly on the program, or do you strive to know something personal about each person on the squad. In a world that seems to be changing faster than any of us could have ever imagi
Coach to Coach – Off-Season Priorities
“The Future is Now!” was a phrase I heard often during the 1991 football season at Long Beach State. It was one of the many catch phrases that George Allen coined and is famous for. As we enter the heart of the 2012 off-season, it’s sometimes difficult to envision that the future of next football season is now. When it comes to developing a successful plan for the 2012 season, the future is indeed now. Over the past year and half, I have shared many of my ideas as they relate to the pri
Coach to Coach – My 2011 Coaches Christmas List
The Christmas season is here. Hopefully, this time of year finds you in a festive state. Regardless of how the season went or is finishing up, we all can be thankful for the opportunity and privilege of being a football coach. As I welcome the Christmas Season, I am excited about the ability to give. However, there is still that kid in me that likes to receive as well. So I began to think of things I would include on my Coaching Christmas List. What if we, as coaches, could ask for anything i
Letter from AFM - Happy Holidays
As we conclude another football season, our thoughts move ahead to next year and the things that we hope will be different and better for ourselves and for the game. We are thankful for the support of our subscribers and advertisers and especially for the generosity of those coaches that are willing to share their plays, strategies, drills and coaching advice with AFM readers. Without them, we would not have been able to serve the coaching community for over 15 years.
Coach to Coach – Offensive Game Planning: Strategies for Success
I love designing and developing offensive schemes. When I was a kid, I would sit for hours designing plays on my electric magnetic football game. Years later, I am still designing plays and offensive schemes. The challenge of designing a play and teaching players to execute it with precision in the midst of violent chaos is one of the things I love most about coaching. Once the plays and schemes have been designed and installed, the next aspect of being a successful offensive coach is putting
Coach to Coach – Principles for Becoming a Better Coach
As I write this article, we are only three weeks away from the official start of the 2011 football season. It’s the time when players and coaches alike are weary of countless off-season workouts and are ready to put the preparation and hard work to good use. With every clank of a 45-pound round, our players see the light at the end of the tunnel. It’s the calm before the storm and the season rapidly approaches.If you have read my previous articles in the Coach to Coach column, you
Coach to Coach: The Pre-Season Home Stretch
“The time will come when winter will ask what you were doing all summer.” - Senator Henry ClayTwo months and counting! It is amazing how fast the season is approaching. By the start of June, our players have completed countless workouts, 10 days of spring ball and now are preparing for summer camp at the University of Nevada. We have spent the last few months training and preparing ourselves for the 2011 season. June is the start of the final phase of the so called off-season.
Letter from AFM - Last Call for Fall Prep
With the school year coming to a close, the next major event on the football calendar will be the start of pre-season practice. Every coach would likely agree that the weeks leading up to the season opener are critical times for conditioning, learning the playbook and fine-tuning offensive and defensive units. For many coaches, putting together a plan for pre-season practice is a no-brainer. If they’ve been successful in recent years, especially in their openin
Coach to Coach – Coaching to Make a Difference
The longer I coach and the more time I spend witnessing kids transform into young men, the more I realize that in this profession we have the opportunity and the responsibility to be more than just a coach. Coaching allows all of us the unique opportunity to leave a lasting imprint on the lives of our players. Our profession is one of only a few that will mold and shape future business leaders, politicians, husbands, fathers, clergy, infantry and military leaders. One of my favorite maxims co
Coach to Coach: Football Clinics – The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly
If you are like me, your email has been full of invitations and promotions to the many football coaching clinics being held across the country. As a coach with 19 seasons under my belt, I have attended many clinics, have had the opportunity to speak at many clinics, and I host the Shotgun Zone Fly Summit. Clinics provide us with a great opportunity to learn from some of the most successful people in the business. They are also a great excuse to get a “hall pass” for a w
Coach to Coach: The Art of Effective Motivation
I was watching the Baltimore Ravens dominate the Pittsburgh Steelers in the first half of a playoff game this weekend with my dad. I was surprised at the lack of energy and focus that Pittsburgh team had displayed for the entire first half. On the first possession of the second half, sure-handed Baltimore running back Ray Rice fumbled and the Steelers recovered. The home fans were filled with a rush of excitement and the Pittsburgh players, despite a two touchdown deficit, displayed a renewed
Coach to Coach: Making Your Off-Season Count, Part II
Last month, I wrote about some simple steps in evaluating a season that does not meet expectations. I touched on a few of the areas that I feel are critical in assessing these types of seasons. The areas include communication, off season training programs and evaluating returning players’ strengths and weaknesses and adjusting schemes accordingly. But what about the seasons that exceed our expectations? The seasons when things went right. Seasons when players and coaches came together to pr
Coach to Coach: Making Your Off-Season Count, Part I
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 ev
How Do You Measure Success?
By the time you receive this issue of AFM, there will be 333 high school teams which have completed their seasons as state champions in various divisions. Champions in the FCS, D-II, D-III and NAIA will have been crowned and the BCS National Championship will be right around the corner. Coaches on all of these teams would likely say that success is measured by championships, trophies and undefeated records. They would be right. No one would deny that these championship coaches and their playe
Coach to Coach
When I was an offensive coordinator at the junior/community college level for six seasons, my football life consisted of recruiting, installing our schemes, game planning and calling the game on Saturdays. A full plate for sure, but it was 100% football. I definitely had ideas of what I would do if and when I became a head coach, but all of the peripheral things associated with running the entire program were in the hands of the head coach and the athletic director. In those days I thought th
Letter from AFM
Our mission at AFM is to help coaches to be more successful on and off the field. Naturally, for most coaches, success means winning more games. So our focus has always been to provide the tools to win, whether they’re innovative offensive systems, position drills, defensive techniques or special teams strategy. But virtually every coach, at some point in his career, has endured a season where the losses have outnumbered the wins. After all, for every team that puts together a win
Coach to Coach
* Getting more done in less time is always a great model for success. Be organized and get the most out of your time with your players and staff. Wasted time is one thing that you can never get back. I have worked with coaches that must have had a different watch than I did. 3:30 meant 4:00 and a one-hour meeting always meant two hours. The one thing that all of us have in common is that we each have 24 hours in each day. I read recently that 25% of American worker
Coach to Coach
The 2010 season will be my 20th as a Head Coach and/or Offensive Coordinator at both the high school and college levels. I have coached a lot of games in that stretch and held ten times as many practices. I started playing football in 1976 and haven’t missed a season since. I guess you could say that I am addicted to this great game. In those 34 years, I have learned some important lessons that have played a huge role in my coaching life. As we head into the 2010 season, I want to share some k
Letter from AFM
Before St. Thomas Aquinas’ trip to Ohio to play in the annual Kirk Herbstreit event last season, Head Coach George Smith wanted to be prepared. So he flew to Columbus and walked through his team’s itinerary – from the moment they would land right through game time – and checked out everything from bus arrangements to the pregame menu. His preparation paid off as Aquinas routed Upper Arlington, 52-7. Smith is planning another scouting mission prior to the Raiders’
- More Solutions to Problem #10
Continued from: 32 Solutions for the 12 Biggest Problems You\'ll Face this Season Problem 10: Poor personnel management from the sideline; penalties for not lining up properly, offside penalties, and your athletes\' running onto the field late. Is it the coaches\' or the players\' fault or both? Our philosophy is simple: what you see on t
Gear
Muscle Milk Collegiate • CytoSport Developed to meet the complex nutritional needs of today’s athletes, Muscle Milk Collegiate is rapidly becoming a key addition to weight rooms and nutrition programs across the country. Muscle Milk feeds hungry muscles by combining high quality protein, carbs and custom fat structures known as MCT’s – or medium chain triglycerides – so athletes can recover more efficiently from training. Forget about the high sugar content of othe
The Speed Report: Preparing for Football Performance: Proper Warm Ups
One of the more important aspects of practice or game performance is being ready to function mentally and physically. Whether your team is warming up for a practice or a game, certain aspects of readiness (prepared for action) must be applied. When elite athletes perform they are very good at mentally processing variable psychomotor movement activities. When a team takes the field to warm up for practice or a competition, they should approach it with a good mental focus each time. Prac
Correcting Mistakes: Effective halftime defensive adjustments
Fifteen minutes. A short amount of time, especially when you’re trying to sum up how your defense performed during the first 30 minutes and determining how to approach the next 30. Despite the short amount of time, halftime strategies vary from coach to coach. But Mickey Andrews, the long-time defensive coordinator at Florida State, looks at it another way. “Each football game is like a test in the classroom,” he said, “but there you don’t get to go in, take 30 minutes on
On the Circuit
At the University of North Dakota, we have one major goal for our defense to attain each season. That goal is to lead the North Central Conference in fewest points allowed. This is not an easy task in one of the most balanced and powerful Division II conferences in the country. Yet we have reached our goal of allowing the fewest points in our league in six of the last nine seasons. During six of the last seven seasons, we have also been first or second in our conference in total defense. While w
Cover Too
It may come as a surprise to some that computers have been helping high school and college coaches build game plans for nearly 20 years. Starting with the early Apple II and IBM personal computers, technology that had previously been available only to larger colleges and professional teams began working its way into the high school and small college ranks. Innovative coaches, facing many obstacles, began to integrate computers into their game planning processes during the mid-1980s. C
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