DESPITE HAVING AN unheard of 11-year, 146-game winning streak at De La Salle High School, Bob Ladouceur remains humble about his coaching knowledge. “I know a lot less than a lot of coaches when it comes to X’s and O’s,” he says. “What I do know, is how to work with kids. I know how to develop my players and maximize their potential.”
The following are key ingredients that Ladouceur recommends for building a winning program.
- Keep It Simple. Don’t overload your players with too much material. Keep things simple and basic, yet demand flawless execution from your players. Make sure that your players become master technicians.
- Always Learn. Go to college and junior college campuses and set up appointments to meet one-on-one with position coaches. Ask them questions that relate to your situation. Adapt their answers into your coaching techniques.
- Motivate Year-Round. Getting your team to play with emotion is not a game-day ritual, it’s a year-long process. Real motivation comes from a sense of feedback from your players. Make sure your kids know what it is that they are good at doing. For example, if they know that they have a great running game, they’ll be motivated to run the ball.
- Know The Game. Coaches must try to learn the entire scheme of everything you do in your program. In a crunch, a coach should be able to coach the wide receivers and also step across the line and coach linebackers.
- Make Technique A Priority. Coach technique all-year long. You must immediately recognize when proper technique is not being used. Provide feedback to your players to get them to improve.
- Have A Serious Strength Program. The most important person in your program is your strength and conditioning coach. All of our lifting sessions are treated the same as practices. There are no chairs in our weight room and there’s no music being played. That’s not to say that players can’t have fun, but they must be aware that when they are in the weight room — whether in-season or off-season — they are working.
- Coach Relentlessly. You must coach, emphasize and teach technique on every snap, in every drill, in every lift and in every stance, all year long. It’s tedious work to constantly watch your players, but you must do it!
- Encourage Problem Solving. Teach your players to be problem solvers. If you do not know an answer, don’t fake it. Tell them you do not know. For example, if I have a game situation in which my offensive line can’t block a certain defender, I’ll tell them “We can’t block that guy,” and then I’ll say, “Hopefully our QB will see him coming and get rid of the ball.” Often, my offensive linemen come out of the game, huddle together, talk over the situation and make adjustments to solve the problem. You do not want players to become too dependent on the coach.
- Team Rules Apply Year-Round. Make sure that your team rules are adhered to at all times — not just in-season. For instance, we have a team rule against drinking alcohol, with a warning for first offenses and an automatic suspensions on second offenses. I have suspended a player in September for drinking in April.
- Make The Running Game A Priority. High school players are not skilled enough to effectively run an exclusive passing-game offense. We try to run the ball on all opponents. Even if we employ a four wide-out set, we’ll run the stretch, trap, speed option and other run plays. We never abandon our running game and, even if we’re having trouble, we feel we’ll eventually hit on something that works.