PUTTING TOGETHER a coaching staff is the most critical and difficult thing that a head coach will do. Coaches, by nature, aren’t personnel or human resources people. We’re football coaches. So when it comes time to assemble a staff, or evaluate the other coaches within the program, it can be a tough job.
The following guidelines have been put together throughout the course of my 35-year coaching career.
1. Develop An Interview Process. Interviewing someone for a job is a tough thing to do. It’s a lot more than just sitting across from a candidate and saying “So, tell me a little bit about yourself,” or “Tell me about your background.” If you’ve done your homework (which you must do prior to an interview), you should already know the candidate’s background.
2. Surround Yourself With People Who Want To Coach. Coaching is a tough job that requires passion and commitment to the game. If a coach is in it for the money, then he’s in the wrong business. And you don’t want guys who “clock watch” and can’t wait for practice to end so they can go home.
3. Try To Bring In People You Know. No one starts out as a head coach. You probably spent years as an assistant and worked alongside a lot of other assistant coaches. Bring in the guys you know you can trust, who will work hard and be committed to your vision for the program. Surround yourself with coaches whom you’d be comfortable coaching your son or daughter.
4. Give Qualified Coaches Tasks They’re Worthy Of. In nearly all coaching-vacancy situations, there were qualified internal candidates who interviewed for the head-coaching position. You must handle these people with respect and make them feel important to the program. Give these people a position of power (if they want it) and take advantage of their expertise. If that person ran the defense for 13 years, then get him involved in building your defense. Get them involved in the planning process.
It’s tough to deal with someone who interviewed for your job but didn’t get it. Have empathy for that person and treat them with the respect they deserve.
5. Hire Good Teachers — The X’s and O’s Will Come. I’ve met coaches who are football “braniacs” and could tell you anything you’d ever want to know about X’s and O’s. Yet these same guys had no people skills whatsoever and were terrible coaches. Hire people who can teach and get concepts across to young people. It’s not important what they know, but how they can teach it. You can convey technique and strategy to them as the years go by.
6. Put Your Best Coaches In Key Positions. The positioning of your best coaches is perhaps the most important thing you’ll do for your program. Of course, your offensive and defensive coordinators must be bright. But there are a few other key coaching positions where you must have good coaches.
Your offensive line coach, for example, must be an excellent teacher. Coaching the O-line is a tough, thankless job. An O-line coach must motivate five players to roll around in the mud day-in and day-out, fight hard and use precise technique — all while receiving little or no glory. These coaches must also be well-versed in all fronts and coverages.
7. You Must Have A Great Freshmen Coach. Contrary to what many people believe, the head freshmen coaching position is not an entry-level coaching position. The head freshmen coach is the most important coach in your program. This individual must be a good recruiter and possess outstanding organizational skills. He’s a guy who can deal with 14-year-old kids and get them to love the game. He must teach these young players fundamental techniques, as well as the more mundane things, such as how to put on equipment and pads. He’s got to deal with parents, use the worst uniforms, equipment and most beat-up footballs in the school. He must go into the crowd on Saturday morning and talk someone into holding the first-down markers and chains. He must do all this and still be excited to be out there coaching football. He must also have a great sense of humor, because he’s going to be witness to some awful football and things like kids stepping onto the practice field with their gear on backward.
8. Establish A Protocol For Hiring Coaches. As you begin to develop your coaching philosophy and bring your vision of football to the program, you should put the pieces into place in a certain order. Hire your program’s coaches in the following six-step order: 1. offensive and defensive coordinators. 2. offensive line coach. 3. head freshmen coach. 4. head sophomore coach. 5. The varsity assistants. 6. The rest of the program’s assistants.
When you’re conducting your coaching interviews, don’t tell the candidates what position they’re interviewing for or what position they’ve gotten. Ask them what positions they are most interested in coaching, where they see themselves in a few years and what other people would make great coaches for your program.
Once you’ve decided on the candidates who are the best fit for your program, you must decide where to put them. Maybe you’ll have a coach who’ll make a good coordinator down the road, but needs to be groomed for that role. Sometimes, you’ll find a situation where no one on the staff is qualified to coach a certain position, such as the O-line. Guess what happens then? You must check your ego at the door and coach that position yourself until an assistant is ready to take over that role in a season or two.
If you have a great freshmen coach in place who can handle things at the lower levels, then you can keep the younger, more inexperienced coaches as varsity assistants and you can work closely with them and “coach them up” to your needs. It’s harder work for you the first few seasons, but it’ll pay big-time dividends in the long run. It may also initially be tough to sell the idea of taking on the head freshmen coach’s role to an experienced coach, but it’s all part of selling your vision of the program to everyone on your staff.
9. Assign Administrative Duties To All Coaches In The Program. This may sound simple, but it’s absolutely critical to your program. Assign specific tasks to certain individuals and post the complete list in the front of your team’s playbook. This lists not only who’s in charge of coaching each position, but it also includes duties such as equipment (equipment room, inventory, dealing with the supplier, etc.), scouting (forms, scouting schedules, notebook, reports, etc.), weight room (sign-in sheets, testing, off-season hours, equipment), academics (eligibility, overseeing all current grades of players, exam weeks, study groups), team managers, trainers, travel, media relations, statistics (game and cumulative), the junior-program liaison and much more.
Assign these tasks according to an individual’s strength and hold the coaches accountable for their duties.
10. Set Up A Staff-Improvement Plan. Spend time with the lower-level coaches in your program and attend their games. I want to see how a freshman B-team coach handles a 14-year old offensive linemen who’s five-foot-two and has his pants falling down. Is that kid getting into his stance properly? Is he excited and pumped up to be playing football? I want to see how these young coaches react to the adversity of coaching these young players. I don’t care about win-loss records. I’d rather see that they’re being coached properly and that they’re learning proper technique — blocking and tackling — and developing a love for playing football.
Periodically, you should attend the practices of the lower-level coaches. Watch how they run the practice and know what drills are being run. I’ve seen some scary things on the practice field and some drills that are outright dangerous. It’s the head coach’s job to make sure the right things are being taught.
11. Set Up A Mentoring System Within Your Program. Pair up your more experienced coaches with the younger or inexperienced coaches on your staff. And even though your practice time is short and valuable, you must assign and allow time for them meet, even if it means giving up some of your own meeting time. It’s invaluable for inexperienced coaches to pick the brains of the older coaches. Check in with the coaches who are being mentored and make sure that the mentoring program is meeting their needs.
When you’re in the middle of your season and in over your head with work, practices and game preparation, the last thing on your mind is how the freshmen B-team coach is doing. But this is a critical aspect of the future of your program. Even if it’s something as simple as a “How are you doing?” phone call, it makes a freshmen coach feel like a million bucks to get a phone call from the head varsity coach. Make staff develop a priority!
12. Reinforce Clinics, Continuing Education. We encourage all of our coaches, at all levels, to attend clinics, read coaching publications and participate in film-exchange programs to develop their coaching knowledge. Each off-season, we put on a one-night coach’s clinic for our own staff. We bring in our area youth coaches, feeder-league coaches and all our high-school coaches and present a clinic-type forum to enhance their coaching knowledge. I’ll bring in retired coaches and other coaches from another area into this clinic and have them lecture primarily on drills and techniques.
Our staff also visits local colleges and spends time watching their practices. We also invite the feeder school and youth program coaches to our practices a few times each season.
13. Evaluate Your Program. You need to create effective tools and procedures for evaluating your program. At the end of each season, we evaluate our staff in an informal manner (every 3 years, we do formal evaluations for the entire staff which are turned into the athletic director). We’ve created self-evaluation forms that the entire staff fills out. It’s funny, you’ll find that coaches are almost always the hardest critics of themselves.
Encourage feedback from your assistants on what things you can do to further help the program. I’m fortunate to have a vocal staff that speaks up when they feel that I’m screwing up. This is terrific! No one coach has all the answers, so get other input. Create an atmosphere in which the assistants feel OK disagreeing with you. You never want a coach to feel intimidated to give criticism. Our Sunday meetings can get ugly at times. But as long as everyone’s honest and the criticism stays in that room and doesn’t carry over from there, we know that everything’s going to be OK.
Dan Mortier has been coaching for 32 years and in 2004 was elected into the Illinois High School Football Hall of Fame. He has a career head coaching record of 114-82 and 6 conference championships. His 1996 squad went undefeated.