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Post by mariner42 on Apr 13, 2020 9:10:44 GMT -6
In my opinion there has never been anything close to being a member of FCPGA. However (unfortunately) times have changed and the various online services are pretty good. I have known Bill for over 20 years and I have been to many of his clinics. I loved his big clinic he would have in the San Diego area and also his "by invite" sessions. Early in my career our HS staff attended a special teams clinic down his way in which a young GA by the name of Kasey Dunn was there and the new HC at Boise State Dan Hawkins attended. There may have been a total of 10 coaches. It was the most intense weekend of learning I had experienced. I went to a two-day tackling clinic in Poway with Bill, it was incredible value for whatever it was that I paid.
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Post by mariner42 on Apr 9, 2020 9:50:25 GMT -6
What does Bill Williams service provide you exactly? Incredibly detailed teaching tapes. Drills, scheme, progressions, all kinds of stuff. It's like Netflix for coaches (you request and he sends you DVDs). I was in FCPGA for a few years, incredible content. Thoroughly recommend. I've never been impressed with X&O Labs stuff, personally.
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Post by mariner42 on Apr 1, 2020 10:22:07 GMT -6
I'm a different vein of Bruce:
“You must be shapeless, formless, like water. When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. When you pour water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can drip and it can crash. Become like water my friend.”
If you're not adaptable, you're going to run into trouble. Exception being when you're just straight-up, across the board better.
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Post by mariner42 on Mar 13, 2020 6:43:38 GMT -6
Start really enforcing a bedtime ritual. Phone/TV off, lights on dim, warm shower, brush your teeth, cool room w/ warm blankets, read an actual book until you fall asleep. Sex always helps.
Also, Headspace and other meditation apps have great sleep recordings to help you fall asleep. Either ambient noise or basically bedtime stories for adults.
Try guided meditation or mindful breathing before sleep, they both do a lot for downshifting your nervous system and putting you in the right place to sleep.
Basically, you're too aroused. Chill yourself out.
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Post by mariner42 on Mar 12, 2020 6:27:39 GMT -6
What are you going to do when school shuts down for 2 weeks? Nice, leisurely workouts with unhurried warm ups and stretching after. Come up with BS Google Classroom assignments that my kids won't do. Clean my apartment?
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Post by mariner42 on Feb 14, 2020 7:11:35 GMT -6
Real Estate. Hit me up if you're interested in buying on the mid-Cal coast.
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Post by mariner42 on Feb 9, 2020 0:50:51 GMT -6
With regards to kids: I spent my first few seasons just kinda yelling a lot because I didn't know what else to do. Pretty lousy coach, all things considered. I yell far less now, results are better and I'm happier. Fewer tension headaches, too.
With regards to coaches: Let myself get bullied by an assistant who was way more confrontational than me, I should've let him go. Instead, things got worse and I got let go. I made lots of mistakes that year, but he was the mistake that really tanked things.
With regards to others: I broke up with the cheerleading coach, she left the school almost immediately, cheer program returned to the massive downhill slide it was in before they hired her. I've been a part of reviving two programs at our school and torpedoed a third. Really leaving my mark.
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Post by mariner42 on Jan 7, 2020 7:51:17 GMT -6
Not that techy. Just my stopwatch. Not exact but close enough. How many kids? Our track team is massive for the area, I'll recruit 110+ and we'll routinely have 40+ sprinters/hurdlers. I really like what you're talking about, I've read Ross' book and think it's super underrated, I'm just curious what the logistics are like.
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Post by mariner42 on Jan 7, 2020 7:22:30 GMT -6
I've adapted Barry Ross' sprint training philosophy to football to a large degree. I also coach track so we really use even more of his philosophy. Unfortunately as 1 poster said, it looks like we aren't doing too much work. In short, I time their sprints (20's -80's-1 distance each day) and each kid goes until his time drops too much. Not below @ 3%. BUT they rest 5 minutes between each sprint and we rarely get to 10 sprints. 400 runners and higher might need more traditional intervals but they are then working sprint endurance. My sprinters, jumpers, vaulters, 110 hurdlers, throwers and football players rarely do intervals. They do up to 10 sprints until they have dropped too much time, 2-3 times a week and go home. (weights are always 1st) The other days are skill event work. Throwers throw every day. We aren't blazing fast but we clearly get much faster. It does take creativity to adapt it to FB practices. During the season we do need some speed endurance. Off season-pure speed work. What kind of numbers are you working with for these workouts? Do you use a Freelap or some other timing system?
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Post by mariner42 on Dec 30, 2019 23:44:30 GMT -6
I pay attention to Coach Dixon's philosophy and there's a lot of it that I think is REALLY important. I can't pretend to be 100% aware of every detail of his program, but I've read enough to have a good general understanding of his world view. The Good: 1 - Keeping your team fresh. Football is a LONG season and your kids need to still enjoy football in late October and into November. This means being aware of accumulated fatigue, which is just good coaching. You see this with coaches who do less and less work in full gear and less and less full speed as the season goes on. During our state semi-final run last year we spent probably 75% of our practices in shells or just helmets and physicality was definitely not our issue. 2 - Challenging the norm is good. That said, I don't think MOST football coaches are the conservative/regressive cavemen that a lot of folks seem to imagine. 3 - Speed kills, so learning to play fast matters. The Bad: 1 - Football isn't just speed, it's also strength and endurance. Pursuit drill, imo, shouldn't be a 'fresh' period. Ours lasts 10m tops and our guys are gassed after, but they are better about pursuing the ball while fatigued and trying to force 3 and outs. Tying into the idea of freshness, however, this last year I only did pursuit drill 3 times because we were so innately good at pursuit that it wasn't necessary. 2 - Speed also comes from technical proficiency and assignment mastery, both of which take time. 3 - I don't know if this philosophy works if you've got some 'meh' quality coaches. We've definitely got guys in our program who run indy drills, set up cones, etc, and that's their big contribution. Seems to me you need some guys getting after it to go whole hog on this. The Ugly: 1 - I think presentation matters and Tony Holler in particular doesn't always present his stance in a way that people want to listen to. I LOVE a lot of his ideas, I think Chris Korfist is insanely brilliant, RPR is dope as hell, I just think sometimes they feel like that teenage girl who's constantly projecting the image of "OMG I'm SO different, I'm not like other girls!!1!" Another resource on this kind of idea is in Fergus Connolly's newest book The Process which was co-written with Joe DeFranco's right hand man Cam Josse. I'm still debating whether it's worth the price, but there's a lot of ideas in it that'll make you re-examine your practices and weekly setup. Side note coach- Connolly's book The Process is a great book and was worth the price for me. Alot of take aways and ideas from it like you mentioned. I found it much easier to read than "Game Changer". Yeah, Game Changer is a slog to get through for sure.
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Post by mariner42 on Dec 30, 2019 9:55:59 GMT -6
I pay attention to Coach Dixon's philosophy and there's a lot of it that I think is REALLY important. I can't pretend to be 100% aware of every detail of his program, but I've read enough to have a good general understanding of his world view.
The Good: 1 - Keeping your team fresh. Football is a LONG season and your kids need to still enjoy football in late October and into November. This means being aware of accumulated fatigue, which is just good coaching. You see this with coaches who do less and less work in full gear and less and less full speed as the season goes on. During our state semi-final run last year we spent probably 75% of our practices in shells or just helmets and physicality was definitely not our issue. 2 - Challenging the norm is good. That said, I don't think MOST football coaches are the conservative/regressive cavemen that a lot of folks seem to imagine. 3 - Speed kills, so learning to play fast matters.
The Bad: 1 - Football isn't just speed, it's also strength and endurance. Pursuit drill, imo, shouldn't be a 'fresh' period. Ours lasts 10m tops and our guys are gassed after, but they are better about pursuing the ball while fatigued and trying to force 3 and outs. Tying into the idea of freshness, however, this last year I only did pursuit drill 3 times because we were so innately good at pursuit that it wasn't necessary. 2 - Speed also comes from technical proficiency and assignment mastery, both of which take time. 3 - I don't know if this philosophy works if you've got some 'meh' quality coaches. We've definitely got guys in our program who run indy drills, set up cones, etc, and that's their big contribution. Seems to me you need some guys getting after it to go whole hog on this.
The Ugly: 1 - I think presentation matters and Tony Holler in particular doesn't always present his stance in a way that people want to listen to. I LOVE a lot of his ideas, I think Chris Korfist is insanely brilliant, RPR is dope as hell, I just think sometimes they feel like that teenage girl who's constantly projecting the image of "OMG I'm SO different, I'm not like other girls!!1!"
Another resource on this kind of idea is in Fergus Connolly's newest book The Process which was co-written with Joe DeFranco's right hand man Cam Josse. I'm still debating whether it's worth the price, but there's a lot of ideas in it that'll make you re-examine your practices and weekly setup.
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Post by mariner42 on Nov 24, 2019 9:43:50 GMT -6
I wish I could rename this thread, it isn't generating the type of the discussion I was hoping for. I wasn't looking for things that coaches feel are "stupid" but rather trying to hear stories of things that coaches did that clearly were not working, and yet they continued to do them and wondering the reason why they did so. I'll share an example of something similar: I stopped calling buck sweep in our biggest game of the year. It was our best play to our best player on offense, but I kept worrying because we struggled to block their DE with our WB. I kept envisioning us getting blown up on the play, even though it never happened. I was just paranoid of the mismatch and stopped running it. They took away our best player without ever taking away our best player. 95% of the time when I do something like this it's either because I'm foolishly paranoid or dramatically over thinking something.
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Post by mariner42 on Nov 17, 2019 23:22:05 GMT -6
Proper certification/education, Unfortunately, I have seen folks with quite and alphabet behind their name who didn't know $hizz about strength training a HS athlete. And also, I think that most certifications are useless except...it's the only way to get that gig at the HS level most times. My non-negotiables would be: -Have you trained people before -Have any of those people you have trained been HS athletes -Do you know anatomy (kid points to his lower back and says this hurts, you better be able to know what they are pointing at and how to train around it) -Can you show me some history of success with your training methods, not just a one or two athlete example but several athletes who have become better because of the strength training they provided. If they can provide those, then they are qualified to be talked to about the gig. If not, hard pass. Totally agree with two clarifications: 1-there's also an element of CYA that should be considered, 2-I did include the term education because I agree that certifications aren't all that important. Sincerely doubt Jim Wendler has any certifications, but I'd hire him in a heartbeat. Also, I think it's hard to show athletes improving because of strength training, unless you're just talking about objective things like VJ, SLJ, etc.
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Post by mariner42 on Nov 16, 2019 22:52:41 GMT -6
If you had the opportunity to hire a full time strength coach that was working w all sports, what would be some non-negotiatables? since the weight room is so critical, I figured this was better here than the strength section Proper certification/education, not just some jabroni that did a weekend Crossfit cert. At the same time, has training plans that meet students where they are. Good teacher/coach. Understands the big picture of sports at the HS level. Charismatic/strong personality, the kids have to respond to them.
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Post by mariner42 on Oct 18, 2019 23:14:54 GMT -6
Most of my reports revolve around formations and the hash marks, there's just too much good info from those things. I haven't bothered with hit charts in about 5 years.
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Post by mariner42 on Oct 3, 2019 23:02:39 GMT -6
Lost a game 69-66 once. We gave up 8 TDs of 40+ yds. Our WR had 200 total yards and 3 TDs in only the 2nd quarter.
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Post by mariner42 on Aug 18, 2019 8:50:59 GMT -6
You can improve with age-maturity-experience, especially as you become more comfortable-confident in your role and what you're coaching. Be yourself, don't force it, but make a real effort to communicate with each player every day, even if it's just "Hey Joe, how you doin'?" Remember too players are especially receptive to compliments and will strive to get them. Give out a "Good job!" or "Atta boy!" whenever deserved. Off the field that could be "Hey Billy, your ball skills are really getting better!" or whatever. Agreed. It's ok to be a bit subdued, if you know your stuff and you can motivate in YOUR own way, you'll be fine. You don't have to shout to get kids to play hard. I'm pretty loud, I project my voice well, but I'm much less of a yeller these days than I was in my mid 20s and I'm getting better results at the same time.
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Post by mariner42 on Aug 1, 2019 10:28:01 GMT -6
That is how we do it in Maryland Public Schools as well. Been doing this since forever, and there is no problem with it. JV plays either Thursday afternoon, or Friday at 4. The biggest issue I see, is that you lose the ability to move kids back and forth from JV to Varsity. I know those who play JV on Monday can play those kids on Friday as well, with limited play time, usually a 6 quarter per week limit. We can't do that. Juniors are mandated to play on the Varsity, and once a kid moves up to the Varsity, he cannot go back down. What is your concern? Good question. My concern is, like many others, I utilize my JV staff for game-day duties from everything from supervision to team meal prep to uniform/equipment issue. Not to mention that I want the JV guys to be fresh (not worn out from their game) in order to help the varsity with adjustments, scouting, charting, etc. I just feel like it's a lot to ask for the JV guys to do all on one night... Couple thoughts: 1-how much are your JV guys really doing during the varsity game? My contributions to the varsity effort are really background stuff for the most part. 2-Get your JV guys to work harder. I coach our JV game, set up all the HUDL equipment, and then I'm on the headsets for the varsity game.
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Post by mariner42 on Jul 13, 2019 22:22:41 GMT -6
Question - What comes after Generation Z? Is this the end? Given the direction of climate change... Not yet but soon!
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Post by mariner42 on Jul 8, 2019 13:09:40 GMT -6
well, they’re ours and we’re theirs. They are just as stuck with us as we are with them. We all want better/tougher/ whatever players, but let’s keep in mind that they could have better coaches too. Maybe just keeping focused on holding up our end of the bargain is the answer. Have coached w/ guys who when they win they pat themselves on the back and when they lose "they have no talent" or " our kids just suck". But.....if kids say that about us, well they must be entitled little pricks. Bottom line, kids come & go, but if you never look in the mirror and develop YOURSELF, then you are at the mercy of your talent. Yes....we all are to some extent, but my goal is to try and take every team I have to +1 or better than what they are probably capable of. 3-6? I'm pushing for 4+. 5-4 I'm pushing for 6+. Maybe I can and maybe I can't but one thing I know for SURE. $hitty attitude and excuse making has no shot. Getting after it gives you a chance. JMO. Agreed on all accounts. This is an interesting conversation to follow, but I think at the end of the day, it's on us to fix the problem. It's not fixable everywhere, but you should do your best in the situation you're actually in and when you can't bear it, get out.
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Post by mariner42 on Jun 20, 2019 13:10:17 GMT -6
Just more or less venting. Is it just me or does football seem to be one of the only sports pushing athletes to be multi sport athletes? Maybe its just where I coach, but Baseball pushes Fall,Spring, Summer ball. Basketball and AAU pushing year round basketball, and where I am at, wrestling pushing Spring and Summer freestyle. It amazes me with the war on football. I get its cause of concussions, but in our area we push being a multi sport athlete, yet other sports want kids to specialize. Anyone else? We do it because football is a sport whose athletes benefit from training a wide variety of skills and competencies. Our kids need to be strong, fast, agile, explosive, and coordinated with stamina. Basketball appreciates a well-rounded athlete, but they don't NEED to be as much as they need technical and tactical competencies that only playing can bring. Our former women's soccer coach played for the US national team and she really opened my eyes about some things. Training physical qualities is important, but a soccer player has to have technical skills to succeed. You can throw an athlete at WR and get production. You can't throw an athlete on the soccer field and get production. You can take a freaky athlete and have success on the basketball court, but he's got a serious limitation if he can't dribble or develop a jump shot. That said, MOST high school athletes need to be more well-rounded in their development and they need coaches who support that. I don't like baseball and basketball keeping athletes year-round, but I REALLY don't like that they don't have any kind of physical development going on. If our basketball program was full of strong, resilient, powerful kids, I'd be happier because at least then I could tell myself that they've got the athletes long-term health in mind. Every time I see a tall, skinny forward with love handles, I die a little inside. As a result, I'm basically Dennis from It's Always Sunny now.
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Post by mariner42 on Jun 16, 2019 10:35:46 GMT -6
It's NEVER easy to get ANY basketball players in the weight room EVER.
There are football players who also play basketball, and then basketball players who also play football.
I think the frustration comes in when the former confuse themselves for the latter and vice versa. Last summer was our best summer ever in terms of attendance for both the varsity and JV, so much so that we got a bunch of rewards for the 100% kids even though we don't really do that kind of thing. We got them special helmet stickers, t shirts, sweatshirts, let them pick gear first (we always do this). Not surprisingly, we had the best varsity and JV seasons EVER for our program. Funny what showing up and doing the work will do for you.
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Post by mariner42 on Apr 27, 2019 11:32:40 GMT -6
One of my all-time favorite kids that I've coached is now 26, finished a master's degree, and is going to be coming out to help this year. He's going to be dynamite once he gets some seasoning and the kids are going to love him.
I've got another young'un who I think has some potential coming out to help, he's going to need more firm guidance but it'll be good for him and us.
My full-time OL coach from two years ago was part time last year and we got by because we were really good, but he's full time again this season, so that's also great.
I should have a pretty good staff, which is neat because that's not a typical thing for a JV program where we are. Coaching by yourself is pretty tiring.
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Post by mariner42 on Apr 13, 2019 8:31:17 GMT -6
I follow Tony holler, holler korfist hfc, simlifaster, Elon sports performance, all on Twitter. They have tons of athletic development stuff on there. Same, I'm actually curious more about overall program stuff. How other HCs structure their programs, recruit athletes, the accountability mechanism they have, etc.
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Post by mariner42 on Apr 11, 2019 13:56:43 GMT -6
One of my assistants tells me I gave him goosebumps with my talk before we won our biggest game this year. For the life of me I don’t remember anything, kinda like the debate scene in Old School. Just kinda blacked out and then we kicked some butt.
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Post by mariner42 on Apr 11, 2019 13:53:48 GMT -6
Is there a track and field equivalent to this board? I’d like to be able to have similar discussions with other track HCs.
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Post by mariner42 on Apr 10, 2019 18:24:25 GMT -6
We're looking at downgrading our subscription and then going elsewhere for our sideline system. We were all-aboard the "F*** HUDL Sideline" train after the last few years of frustration, but this has really challenged us.
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Post by mariner42 on Apr 1, 2019 17:04:24 GMT -6
I love the Cover Art @jordon1 Did you draw it yourself Beats the hell out of what's on the back... Really like it Jerry, I'm going to recommend it to the HC.
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Post by mariner42 on Mar 27, 2019 6:42:12 GMT -6
We have 3 football classes: Varsity, JV, and Freshman. I teach the JV since I'm JV HC, HC has the varsity and freshman classes.
I also teach 4 regular weight training classes with a mix of athletes/randoms. I'm working to change one of those classes to an athletic period for athletes in general, looks like it's happening for next year.
We're very outside the norm for our area and for California in general at it shows in our results.
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Post by mariner42 on Mar 16, 2019 9:33:24 GMT -6
Our principal and AD both basically told me that I need to start using a planner because I'm so involved in so many different parts of campus life that they don't want things to fall through the crack. The principal in particular recommended one of those for me. I'm struggling, but I'm not going to give up on it. It's like anything else, you have to make a deliberate, consistent effort to establish a habit/discipline.
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