Don Markham's Culture Changes

I don’t know if this answers your question really but I do know he eliminated stuff like “pre game” routine, very little Indo, they ran Team situations ALOT in practice. I have a dvd from him and it’s really good for anyone that has low numbers….

Yeah that MIGHT have helped.

😁

Back in the Coronapocalypse I found it. I think Rick Stewart (Pistol Wing T guy) published it, but the site is down….at least the last time I checked it was.

I'll never forgive it and its' social media brethren for what it's done to our society, but I digress.

Lol

There is a coach that has a video on YouTube by the name of Roger VanDeZande that has a (sample) presentation titled: "Turning It Around with the Double Wing Offense".

This coach claims that he coached with Don Markham in Oregon and learned the system directly from Coach Markham

At the time that he did this video, he was coaching at Fayette High School in Missouri. I attempted to reach out to the A.D. at that high school to find out where Coach VanDeZande may be coaching now...no response from that A.D.

If anyone knows of Coach VanDeZande's current location is please post...

I met him many years ago. He was sitting outside the weightroom, shirtless, drawing up his famous Markham toss over and over again on a paper. Kids were in the weightroom lifting pretty hard, but also goofing off pretty hard too...
He didn't care for a lot of the conventional stuff such as rigid practice plans. Pre-game warm ups were intentionally insignificant. Everyone would catch passes-including linemen- and throw balls (even though they never threw the ball).

No. That is Hugh Wyatt.

I have a VHS Tape of the "one-man clinic" that Coach Markham did in a classroom full of coaches (I am guessing it was at Bloomington H.S.(CA)).

IMO...it was outstanding. No BS, just honest/straight forward football talk.

Unfortunately, I no longer have access to equipment to convert this tape to DVD...otherwise, I would be willing to share this with others.

yep ident the front then set the blocks based on that front, it was revolutionary for the wing'd offenses where rules blocking has traditionally been the answer to everything. 

I never met the man, but I played against Bloomington when I was in HS; and I have worked with a number of coaches who knew him and coached against him. 

I couldnt tell you anything about 'culture' per-se, but a few crazy stories that fit in with what one would expect from a guy coaching in a blue collar community in the 80s and 90s. 

I will say this about their team my senior year, who ended up winning CIF: they had good athletes in skill positions. Maybe not D1 types, but definitely D2 caliber. 

Havnt seen a kid who didn’t know what to do be very confident

I've seen some psychological research on this.

The consensus seems to be that in order to get either, you need experience (aka practice) to build those qualities.

The old aphorism is that the bad thing about experience is that you don't get it until after you need it.

Once that starts to happen, confidence seems to increase faster than competence at first (Dunning-Krueger Effect), where someone with minimal competence becomes overconfident because they think they know what to do, but don't know enough to know what they're doing wrong.

You will see that stage referred to as "Mount Stupid" when it's graphed as this huge spike of high confidence above low actual competence.

Once the overconfident, but incompetent, person is confronted with irrefutable proof of their incompetence (like obvious failure), their confidence falls dramatically once the person realizes this... but *if* they continue to practice they build competence, which brings the confidence back up over time... until eventually when someone is highly competent their own confidence actually lags a bit behind their skills because they are acutely aware of imperfections and mistakes.

Some people, of course, manage to somehow be incompetent but avoid the consequences of this for a time.  These people tend to rise in rank despite their skills having holes or problems in it, where the Peter Principle comes into play.

I played for coach Markham in Bandon in the late 90s… we walked everywhere, ran all team O and D during practice …I can remember running 36 pitch at least 30 times until it was perfect ! no pregame … would go out on the field before game throw the ball around and get loose , run some plays then go back into the locker room and have a little pep talk …then take the field and play football! Always had team dinners cooked by Linda (his wife ) at his ranch along with a study hall if you needed it and film session . Markham was huge on weightlifting! We lifted all summer and ran sprints .. as far as The peanut butter sandwich laced with creatine …not exactly true … they were peanut butter and honey on wheat bread, his wife would hand us two sandwiches as we walked in and there was a shaker with creatine we were asked if we wanted creatine on our sandwiches. Of course none of us said no….lol.