Post by coachdoug on Jul 9, 2009 14:38:55 GMT -6
For those of you who don't know me, I have been coaching at the youth level for over 15 years. I read a lot in the offense section of this site (especially the passing game board), but I usually limit my posts to the Youth section and the Rules board. I spent Monday and Tuesday earlier this week with my team's 13 year old QB (and his dad) at the DSQA Position Camp here in Southern California, and I thought I would share some of my observations with y'all.
The camp absolutely exceeded my expectations. I knew Coach Slack was an expert on mechanics and QB play in general, but I didn't realize what an impressive and good man he is until I met him. His camps aren't just about making better QBs (although they certainly do that), they are about developing boys into good young men. I learned a ton that will help make me a better coach and our QB will benefit tremendously as well. Here are a few things that I took away from the camp:
The camp absolutely exceeded my expectations. I knew Coach Slack was an expert on mechanics and QB play in general, but I didn't realize what an impressive and good man he is until I met him. His camps aren't just about making better QBs (although they certainly do that), they are about developing boys into good young men. I learned a ton that will help make me a better coach and our QB will benefit tremendously as well. Here are a few things that I took away from the camp:
- Coach Slack emphasized the need for QBs to be leaders and good men (moral compasses for the team) as much or more than anything about actually playing the game. He challenged the kids to aspire for greatness but warned them that greatness comes at a price. He said that greatness requires passion and that the root word of passion means suffering (e.g. "The Passion of Christ"). Greatness in any endeavor cannot be achieved without suffering and without being of service to those around you. It was very inspiring.
- Coach Slack has endured some tremendous hardships and tragedies in his life (of which he only shared a few), but has walked the walk and talked the talk. He sets an excellent example of actually living the concept of "being of service." Again, it was all very inspiring - I think a lot of business people would benefit from hearing Coach Slack speak even if they had zero interest in football.
- Coach Slack and his staff not only explained the mechanics of throwing, but explained the bio-mechanics of why those mechanics work. He regularly said that these mechanics were not his opinion, but the structure of the human body requires them. He constantly challenged the kids to tell him why they were doing something - not to demonstrate their ignorance, but to get them to think so that once they do understand why they're doing something, they can defend it and have confidence that they're doing the right thing.
- Coach Slack's C4 system gives the player the tools he needs to self correct. Once you understand the mechanics, it's pretty easy to see what went wrong on any pass that misses it's target and to make the appropriate correction on the next throw. It was pretty cool watching how much some of these kids improved over just a couple days.
- He spent quite a bit of time on jumping rope. Not only is this an excellent way to develop quicker feet, but really training hard on jumping rope is hard work and tied in nicely with the whole "hard work/suffering" speech that preceeded it. He had his teenage son with him to demonstrate some of the drills they do with jump rope and it was impressive to say the least.
- Coach Slack emphasized footwork and ball handling for handoffs, pointing out that HS teams nationally only throw the ball about 9 times a game.
- While he didn't go into a lot of detail on the R4 system, he did spend some good classroom/film time on coverage recognition and each coverage's inherent weakness. We then took it out on the field and gave the kids a look at live coverages in a competitive situation. They lined up 4 DBs (2 safeties and 2 corners) at about 8-10 yards and had 2 QBs take their drops while the DBs moved to their coverage spots. Within a very short time, most of the QBs were able to identify the coverage and yell out the weakness by the second or third step of their drop. We have never really spent any time with our QB on coverage recognition before, but he got it and was consistently making the right calls on his first or second step.
