LAST SEASON OUR team went undefeated and won the Washington 3A state championship. It was a great feeling of accomplishment for everyone involved in our program and was the culmination of lots of hard work and year-round dedication.

The following are 24 lessons that we learned throughout the incredibly tough journey through the preseason, regular season and post season.

Preseason
1  Establish A Year-Round Strength Program. You must have a year-round strength and conditioning program in place. You need to set standards for leg lifts and upper-body lifts, explosive lifts and speed times by position that your players must reach.

2  Set Expectations For Your Players. Don’t be afraid to draw a line in the sand and have your players step up to your expectations. For example, we asked our players to attend 85 off-season conditioning sessions. We had about 40 players complete this requirement. Holding players accountable is the key, not the 85 training sessions. Sacrifice is contagious.

A significant number of our players attended over 100 sessions. Even athletes who were playing other sports attended these workouts. It really helped both the staff and each player know who was committed and who wasn’t.

3 Critically Evaluate Your Program. You must honestly evaluate your strengths and weaknesses. Our coaching staff meets in early January to decide what areas of our team have to improve. Each coach has to improve his area of responsibility and we make a list of offense, defense, special teams, game coaching and everything else about our program that we can think of. Nothing is off limits and every coach gives his honest, no-holds-barred opinion. Nothing leaves the room, but there is always some finger pointing and arguing.

Last season, all our coaches felt early on that we had a chance to be win the state championship and we decided in January that any extra effort on the little things could be the difference between winning it all or not.

Out of this meeting, one of the things we decided to work on was to improve fakes by the offensive backs. The following season, in a playoff game, we ran a simple fullback trap for a 40-yard touchdown because all four backs looked like they were carrying the ball. The fakes were so good that even though I knew who was getting the ball, I couldn’t tell who had it!

4 Expand Your Horizons As A Coach. In the off-season, I tried to find out all I could about goal-line defense and determined that even though all good defensive coaches declared it a priority, there’s very little written about how to develop a great goal-line defense. I spent countless off-season hours studying and developing an attacking goal-line defense that actually worked. As a result, this aspect of our defense improved substantially in the championship year.
If there’s an area of the game that you’re not as knowledgeable as you’d like to be, take the extra time to study it — it’ll pay big dividends for your team.

5 Work With Your Future Players. We started a separate sophomore team last season. Not only did this get more players more playing time, but they became a second scout team for both offense and defense in the post season. We doubled our practice time by using a tag-team session for defense and offense in the post season. Everyone benefited — our starters got more reps and the younger players got to go against better competition.

This also helped us get a good look at some of the future players for our program, as well as giving our lower-level coaches a real role in the post season.

Regular Season

6 Spend Quality Time And Work Your Bench Players. All players are important and the more you get out of your reserves, the better your chance of winning. Take substantial time and trouble to develop great scout squads. In our practices, every time our scout team stopped the offense or moved the ball on our defense, the coaches couldn’t praise them enough. This builds your roster two-deep at almost every position. Depth is a critical factor if you’re going to win it all.

7 Get Everyone Involved. Always remember the big picture and make sure you’re not coaching for big stats for a certain player or for your unit. I’m certain that we could have shut out six or seven opponents last season, but we got only three because we pulled our starters early.

Our starters had a lot of hard feelings initially, and I must admit it bothered me when we pulled out players as early as the start of the third quarter. But the effect on the overall team was the key.

After the initial anger of being pulled out of the game blew over, the starters developed more ownership for their teammates’ efforts. For example, once when our starting defense shut out an opponent in the first half, the starters on defense gave way to the reserves, and almost immediately, the starters began coaching their replacements to keep the shutout going. This type of teamwork and attitude breeds loyalty, respect and team togetherness.

8 Make Your Players Develop Their Goals. Our players came up with a pyramid with the ultimate goals of winning our conference, the regional and the state championship shown at the top of the pyramid. The base of the pyramid was discipline (pride on and off the field); respect (team and coaches); composure (in the huddle and on the field) and team unity. Our motto was “Follow The Pyramid.” It was amazing to see such young players set themselves awesome goals.

9 admit Your Mistakes. Most of my defensive calls were sound last season, but I did make some poor calls or stayed with one defense too long. When it happened I accepted blame in front of my players during the game. But even when I tried to take the blame, my players often said it was equally their fault.

They pointed out that I always coached them to anticipate the worst thing that could happen based on the defensive call and to never let it happen. My own players taught me that a good team fixes its problems; it doesn’t blame others.

10 Do Something To Bond As A Team. We took our players to a camp for 5 days that included three practices a day. Throughout the season, our players often referred back to these grueling sessions with great pride when talking with others and the media.

The most important thing we did was an exercise where the players and coaches bared their souls about why they played football and their thoughts on one another. A lot of tears and true emotions flowed that night. It was our first step toward becoming a special team.

11 Rehearsals Aren’t Just For Actors. Conduct a last-minute rehearsal prior to the game inside a gym or in an isolated area prior to your pre-game drills. Walk through every offensive play you’re going to run against an opponent and review all defensive assignments. This eliminates a lot of last-minute mistakes and if your players aren’t properly focused, you’ll be able to correct it early.

12 Keep Your Emotions In Check During Games. Remain poised and under control on the sideline and your players will not panic. Composure is the key. Yelling and screaming is counterproductive. Emphasize performance, correct any mistakes and believe in your players.

13 Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff. Sometimes a simple mistake should just be ignored. How you react to adversity as a coach will effect how your players react. Know what to be upset about and what to laugh about. It’s just a fact of football that sometimes an opponent will make great plays. Accept it and let your team know that they made a great play.

14 Watch A Lot Of Film. Film study is critical to success. My head coach watched more film than I did as a defensive coordinator and I watched film 7 days a week. You can’t imagine the positive effect on the team when the head coach would correctly predict things that were going to happen in an upcoming game. How did he acquire these “psychic” powers? Intense study of film gave him the answers!

15 Develop Leadership. Coach team leadership and stress to your players that they need to lead by example. Last season, our middle linebacker was the unquestioned leader on the field for the defense, but I made all our defensive players accountable for their job and role.

Some players are a little sensitive to criticism. Yet often just taking a player aside and honestly explaining that he’s a leader and that you hold leaders to higher expectations, will help diffuse difficult situations.

16 Emphasize Sudden Change On Defense. Your players must learn to make stops after unexpected turnovers leave your defense with a short field and with little notice to defend it. Have your players take pride in accepting challenges and getting the ball back. Never allow anyone to point fingers at the offense or special teams for a mistake.

Post Season

17 Prepare For Possible Opponents. Before the post season begins, you must prepare for possible opponents. We anticipated we’d have to play certain teams and began to study and prepare for them 4 weeks prior to the playoffs.
If you haven’t beaten previous opponents, determine why and exactly what your team has to do to succeed. We studied any team that we’d lost to in previous years until we came up with a plan to win.

18 Beware The First-Round Game. Your first-round playoff game is often the most confusing since last-minute changes in opponents are possible. Know your system for game-plan selection inside and out and be prepared for an upset.
Last year, we wound up playing an opponent we didn’t anticipate playing since three teams had to be upset for us to play them. You guessed it — the upsets happened and we had to scramble to get some film.

Our players were really shook up over losing a day’s film session and we lost a day of effective practice. But we were able to quickly recover.

19 Keep Your Routine. Don’t make the playoff game practices so different that players feel more stress than they already do. Use the same practice routines and preparation methods that got you there in the first place, or change them as little as possible.

20 Be Bold As A Coach. In the semifinal game of the playoffs against the defending state champions, we faced our toughest test. In that game, our defense allowed 369 yards passing but zero yards on the ground.

I stood my ground with my game plan despite the success of our opponents in the air. In the third quarter, sure enough, the opposing QB threw into a disguised double coverage and we made a key interception. Four plays later we ran a fake punt, that we’d practiced all year long, for a touchdown.

Don’t panic. We’ve watched some very good teams self-destruct in the playoffs because they didn’t stay true to their game plan or successful style of play.

You must have courage in your convictions. You’re a better coach when you’ve evaluated a problem on Thursday night, with time to really think without any emotion, instead of quickly adjusting to a challenge during a pressure-packed game-time decision. If you’ve done your homework properly, stay the course!

21 Reward All Your Players. In the championship game, we got a big lead early and the game really wasn’t in doubt. We played all 55 players on our roster. Remember the team and try to play everyone when the situation warrants.

22 Keep Your Players Focused. Emphasize the things you can control and not the importance of the games. Players focus well on assignments but often will fold if they’re told that they must make every play or you’ll lose because it’s “the big game.”

This is especially true in playoff games. No matter whether we’re up or down by 24 points, my message is always the same: “Play like you’re down 24 points and make plays by executing your assignments.” Stress player assignments and it will take the pressure of the big game off your players.

Consistency by coaches make players comfortable and if you emphasized the same things all season long, continue to do so in the post season and your players will execute better. Clear minds create fast legs. Worrying about big games often results in poor performances.

23 Prepare Your Team For The Media. Be prepared in the post season for a media blitz. We had media representatives at most of our practices in the post season. One day we had four different newspaper reporters and photojournalists and two different television crews (about 25 media representatives in all) visit us before the start of practice.

We tried to make players available to the media during pre-practice time, but had problems with media members who ran long in order to get their story and it disrupted our practice schedule. Some media members will know a lot about your program, while others will know next to nothing. Some will call beforehand, but others will just show up and expect you to adjust to their schedule.

Coaches need to address what their players say to the media. How you handle the media will play big dividends for your program. Have a plan and make sure everyone knows your expectations. Be consistent and patient as it’s all part of the experience of post-season play.

24 Special Adjustments For The Championship Game. The state final will be different than any other game you’ve played because of television and control of the game by the state association. TV timeouts are a nice addition to help if you’re in trouble, but you must prepare your players for breaks in the action. The TV commercial person will identify himself or herself before the game and usually won’t break up the momentum of drives — but you must learn to roll with the punches in case it happens.

Alert your players to possible delays. Warmup time is also different since most states play multiple-level championship games in the same stadium on the same day.

We worked all week long on disruptions to mentally prepare our players. We had a plan and our players were as relaxed as possible prior to the biggest game of our collective careers.

Appreciate the moment, have fun, play with class and the post-season experience will be a cherished memory that you and your players will never forget.