Coaching Football's "Little Things"

I’ve discussed in a couple of posts how similar football coaching is to commanding an army. Both require meticulous planning, an ability to look ahead and adjust on the run and a degree of luck once the operation is under way.

I watched a program on the Military channel last night entitled Surviving D Day. WOW!!! If you saw the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, you have an idea what those soldiers had to go through (literally!) to fight their way over 1000 yards of open beach just to reach the cliffs.

From a football coach’s standpoint, there are a lot of things to learn about this invasion. It all started about a year or so earlier when the planning began for the invasion on the Normandy coast of France. Gen. Eisenhower and his staff began to develop their strategy— their broad plan of action designed to achieve the goal of getting a foothold on French soil. Your strategy is what you do with your total resources that are available to you for this upcoming football season. If you haven’t done so yet, you and your staff need to start strategizing NOW!

What are your team’s assets? their strengths? What are your deficiencies? Where will you have to compensate? What are you going to be good at? How will you distribute your assets to gain the greatest advantage? For my team, our chief assets are smarts and speed. A deficiency is size. We need to strategize to maximize our assets and protect our deficiency. I might add we are also extremely aggressive. That makes up for the deficiency in size! We will be very sophisticated in our strategy because our kids are so intelligent. We will run wide, throw the ball a lot and attack on defense to utilize our team speed. We will run our Delaware Wing T offense which was first developed for teams that lacked huge linemen. We want guys who are agile, quick and like to hit. That’s my guys… to a tee!

I think a KEY to good coaching is: knowing where to utilize your strength. This simply means placing players in the positions where you can maximize their talent and give that player the best chance to help your team succeed. I can remember one year being adament about a kid who’d played LB for 2 years needing to go to Defensive End. We were going to play a lot more aggressive style of defense, particulary up front, and I felt that this athlete would be perfect rushing off the edge. I met a lot of resistance from our coaches. But I stood my ground and the boy ended up making 1st team All District for his outstanding play that fall— at Defensive End.

Tactics are the details. Tactics are the means of carrying out your strategy. This is the conduct of an engagement. How a battle is fought… how a game is played is a matter of tactics.

In the Normandy invasion, Allied forces were split into a 5 pronged attack across a wide front of beaches along the coast of France. You may recall that paratroopers (my uncle being one of them) dropped in behind the lines to secure bridges and causeways necessary for Allied advances into the heart of France. All of these details were the tactics that the commanders of the US and British forces came up with.

Suppose you’re looking at a season (or even an individual game) where you feel “out-manned.” Your strategy is to “shorten the game.” Thus, your tactics would be: run the ball! You want the clock to keep running. Passing it a lot just lengthens the game. Here you can see how strategy and tactics work together.

So, the first step is to plan. Next, you need to look ahead so you can make adjustments as things unfold. This is another KEY to good coaching: be a good game-time coach. Your strategy won’t change once you’re in the “heat of battle” but your strategy may change as circumstances call for it. I see too many coaches who cannot or will not make any changes during a game. This is a mistake in tactics.

The last factor is be lucky! The Germans did not commit their Panzer tank divisions to the coast for they feared that the Normandy invasion was simply a diversion. They believed the real invasion was going to be at the Pas de Calais. However, once they confirmed that Normandy was the real deal, they called on Hitler to divert the tanks. This was the morning of June 7th. There was still time to drive the Allies back into the English Channel! But, Hitler had taken a sleeping pill the night before and gave strict orders not to be disturbed! He slept through the morning without being apprised of the situation. By the time he made a decision to move the Panzers, it was too late! A little luck never hurts.

We used the “shorten the game” strategy one year ourselves. We knew we’d have to run the ball, play good defense and kick it away when we bogged down to have a chance to win against a much bigger and better football team. What we did not figure in was… at 7:30 the skies opened up! We’d kicked off at 7 pm and there was no lightning. So we played on. By half-time the field was a quagmire! We played the second half in mud up to our ankles.

We got a lucky break with the weather, had cashed in early with a score in the first quarter and hung on to win 7-6! It’s important to note though… we had prepared for this kind of weather by going outside in it to practice. I don’t know where I got the saying but it’s one of our program’s “mantra’s: “Football practice doesn’t get rained OUT… it gets rained ON!” If you might have to play in it, you’d better practice in it. Again, who first said it I don’t know… but it goes something like this: The harder we work (on the Little Things!), the luckier we get!