Building a Tradition - Summer Camp, Day 3

by Brian Wical
Cardinal Stritch High School Head Football Coach
Follow @CoachWical

After two days of camp last week, Cardinal Stritch took the field Monday morning for the third time. Monday was our best day yet, which is good. I told the team that at the end of each practice, I should be standing there telling them that today was the best day yet.

We started the day off doing a tackling drill to wake our guys up, since we were starting at 7:30 this morning. The drill was fantastic, in that it really helped serve its purpose. Our players really got into it. It is always great as a coach seeing your kids enthusiastic and excited to be out there practicing as team. 

Defensively, our players started demonstrating knowledge of our scheme on Monday. Not just knowledge but mastery of the front. My defensive coordinator, Gary Allen, refused to move forward in the teaching process until our guys understood our base alignment, mixed with all of the defensive coverage’s that we will run. After Monday’s practice, I know he feel confident moving on to the next phase in the installation plan. 

We held a kicking tryout yesterday during or mid-practice break. We literally had no kicker on the roster left over from last season, and being new to the school, I didn’t really know capabilities of our kids in terms of kicking. I had all of the players kick XPs and also kickoff. We have narrowed our search down from the entire team to about six guys. Today we will try to narrow that down to two kids that we will really work with on our FG/XP teams.

 

Offensively, we also put together a complete practice. This is a great thing because on Friday, I thought we lost our focus for the last 30 minutes of the offense. We struggled completing our pass routes against air, even. Monday, the kids really came out ready to improve though, and it showed. We are grasping the offensive plays, formations, and overall philosophy much better than I thought we would, to be honest. I thought it would take us longer to grasp our offense than it would our defense. So far, it has proven to be the opposite.

 

Today, we come back with another camp day in the morning. We are then going to go against Toledo Waite and Toledo Scott at night in a 7-on-7. It will be good for us for a few reasons. First, we can run our routes against other athletes that don’t know the plays ahead of time. Also, we will see if we can cover anybody on defense. These two schools are well over twice our enrollment. I am anxious to see how we compete.

 

I will update later today after the 7-on-7.

Building a Tradition - Summer Camp, Day 1

by Brian Wical
Cardinal Stritch High School Head Football Coach
Follow @CoachWical

In Ohio, we are allowed to coach our kids in the summer months (June 1- July 31) for 10 days. How you use those days is really up to the individual coach/program. Some teams like to participate in a lot of 7-on-7 tournaments and events; others prefer to use theirs as practice days. Personally, I think they are best served as practice days, with a few 7-on-7’s mixed in, too.

I like the idea of backing the camp days up as close to the start of two-a-days as possible. This essentially gets us 2 additional weeks of two-a-day-like practices to teach our kids the offensive/defensive systems and philosophies. We will use two of our days to essentially do nothing but 7-on-7’s as we will be going to Lima Central Catholic High School one day, and we will compete in the Bucyrus Redmen 7-on-7 and Lineman Challenge another. We will do a third 7-on-7 in the evening one other day as well, and camp in the morning. 

With all the background of Ohio and its rules, and our schedule, lets get into Day 1 of camp. We came out ready to learn and were excited. I couldn’t ask for better enthusiasm to begin practice from our kids. It was hot with the temperature topping out in the mid-90’s as we began practice. The enthusiasm displayed by both our players and coaching staff was as high as you would like to see during the first 45 minutes of defensive practice. We then hit a little bit of a lull where our focus went out the window and we weren’t putting forth the effort we would like to see. The good news is that it was only Day 1. At the mid-practice break, I challenged our guys to come out for offensive practice ready to learn and put a complete practice together. 

After the break we started off slow as coaches, just going through our formation and adjustments, and how we align. It was a good session for our kids just to sit back and learn. 

I saw some really great signs offensively. Our timing on our snap count and motions needs a lot of work still, but to be honest, I have seen much worse first days in this offense, which is promising. Our guys need to understand that there is a solid foundation that is being built, but we are nowhere near where we need to be yet. I am very confident we will be better as we continue to get more practices under our belt and grasp why we are doing the things we are. 

Needless to say, I am excited to get out there today for Day 2 and watch as our football team develops and starts to experience more success on the practice field.

New Beginnings - 1st annual Ironman Competition at Cardinal Stritch

Coach Wical stands with the individual grade winners from the 2013 Cardinal Stritch Ironman Competition.
(L to R): Coach Wical, Joe Sinay, Grant Curavo, Stephen Materni, Drew Beier

by Brian Wical
Cardinal Stritch High School Head Football Coach
Follow @CoachWical

If you have been following my blogs at all, you will know that a big characteristic that I talk about often is the ability to compete. Our offseason workout program/competition is called “Always Compete”, which is also a motto for our program at Cardinal Stritch. The culmination of all of the work that we have put in takes place at one competition at the end: the Ironman Competition. 

This is an idea that I stole from my playing days in high school. The head coach at Lima Central Catholic High School back then was a man by the name of Andy Etzkorn. He always ran and competition at the end of the summer for us to show how much we had gained during the offseason each year. As a coach, I have had no experience doing this nor did I remember many of the events he used to include in his competition. Having said that, when I put together the offseason plan for us this year, I knew I needed to have an event like this. 

The premise is that there is 13 events, a mixture of some weight lifting challenges, running events, and some other random events thrown in as well. To me, this is a great chance for us to get physical measurements on a lot of our players, while giving them a chance to have fun and compete as well.

 

The guys came in ready to compete, and we even had one of our sophomores, Abel Castillo, get into the competition spirit by wearing an Ironman t-shirt. I could tell all of our guys were excited to be there and to compete. This is a major upgrade from the attitude just a month and a half ago from our players, even.

 

It was an extremely tight race down the stretch, and literally came down to the wire. The final event, a 1-mile run was the determining factor for the overall winner. Going in, junior QB/LB Joe Sinay had a one-point edge on sophomore WB/OLB Grant Curavo. Grant ended up beating Joe in the event by just 14 seconds. This was enough points to edge Joe in the overall competition by a single point, 296-295.

 

Not only do we award an overall winner, but then each grade has its own winner as well. The winners this year ended up being: Overall & Sophomore- Grant Curavo (WB/OLB), Senior- Stephen Materni (OL/DL), Junior- Joe Sinay (QB/LB), and Freshman- Drew Beier (WB/DB).

 

I believe all of our kids competed to a level much higher than they even thought possible 6 weeks ago. This is very promising as we move into our 10 coaching days at the end of next week. I told our guys this at the end of the day: “you have put in more work than anyone in recent memory at Cardinal Stritch. The good news is, you out worked some teams with bad records. The bad news is, you’ve still not won a game. The key now is can we take this momentum and hardwork and translate that into our practices as they begin.”

 

I think our players have the desire to be a better football program and to win. I tell them all the time though; no one wants to win more than I do. The closer they can get my competitive level, the more success this football team will have moving forward.

 

The foundation has been laid for this program, and now it is time for us to start building upon that. Only three more days until we take the practice field!

Coach Wical and Overall champion Grant Curavo after 2013 Cardinal Stritch Ironman Competition

Brian Wical is in his first year as the head football coach at Cardinal Stritch High School outside of Toledo, Ohio in the town of Oregon. At 25-years old, Coach Wical is one of the youngest head football coaches in America.  Throughout the 2013 season, Coach Wical will give readers an inside perspective of what it's like to build a tradition at a school that has had only ten victories since 2007.

When around other coaches - LEARN

Ada High School QB Mason Acheson takes snap from Columbus Grove Center Trey Roney

by Brian Wical
Cardinal Stritch Catholic High School Head Football Coach
Follow @CoachWical

I learned a few valuable lessons from this week being around some other football coaches at the all-star game practices for the Van Wert County Hospital All-Star Game. None more important than further reaffirmation that you should constantly keep your ears and eyes open when around other coaches. You never know what great information, schemes, or concepts you might pick up. 

What did I gain most from this week? I got a new kickoff return scheme for my team. The one thing I have had little to no experience in as a coach up to this point in my career is special teams. I will share my personal philosophy on special teams in the future with you. However, to make it quick, I think it is an opportunity to be different and make opponents work to defend your schemes. 

When developing my special teams playbook, I took almost nothing with me from Lima Central Catholic. I didn’t feel like the concepts fit what I wanted to do, in being unique. Therefore I was left doing a lot of internet searching and research. I decided on kickoff, to go with a pretty simplistic “wave” kickoff return that we used when I first arrived at LCC, but they’re no longer using it. I thought we always covered kicks pretty well using it and that it was a simplistic thing to implement for Cardinal Stritch. (Side note: a lot of the things I am teaching this year I am trying to make as simple as possible, because EVERYTHING is going to be brand new for our kids.)
 

For punt, we will have two different schemes, one for when we are backed up inside our own 20-yard line, and another for everywhere else on the field. I was always extremely skeptical of the shield punt being used at the high school level. Sure, when you have a bunch of Division I athletes on special teams at the collegiate level, it works, but I was hesitant about high school use. However, after reading some great research articles about the topic on xandolabs.com and talking briefly via the Internet with Coach Chris Fore from California, I determined it would be a great scheme for us, too. I think it is fairly simple to implement and should serve its purpose very well with our football team.

Without going through all of the special teams playbook, I will skip to Kickoff Return and the point of the whole story. When it came to kickoff return I knew this was something I wanted to be really good at. Sounds odd, I know. Who WANTS to be good at kickoff return. This means you are getting scored on a lot! Well, I don’t view it quite like this. I actually view this as another offensive play, and as you’ll learn (if you haven’t already) I am an offense guy. This should be our highest average yards-per-play play we have in our playbook. Having this philosophy, I want it to be great.

 

One night trolling through one of the several online coaching message board sites (I forget which one) I stumbled upon the “greatest” kickoff return scheme I had seen.  Without going into all of the X & O specifics, it was a 5-2-2-2 return set up, in which we has a man-blocking scheme, and the two return men either faked or reversed the football depending on which direction the return was called to go. The highlight tapes of this were phenomenal. Opposing kickoff teams knew what was coming and still struggled to defend it. It fit what I was looking for in a special teams play perfectly. It had just the right amount of deception, finesse, uniqueness that I set out to find.

 

Now the problem: I even struggled to remember which guy had what man on the return. I would like to think I am a pretty football-smart guy, and I was struggling. My initial response: I will get it, it’s just new. I put it together in a presentation, added it to the special teams playbook as my “prized possession” in there, and presented it to my coaching staff at our monthly meeting.

 

I never really felt great about the concept, however, which brings me all the way back to the beginning of the article: I’m at the all-star game practice surrounded by a lot of really smart football coaches. I see our coaches installing our kickoff return, and it is completely different than what I had planned, but something about it intrigued me. After the second day, I asked Coach Jerry Cooper to explain it to me. I was more curious about where he got it from, because it was not a return concept we had used at Lima Central Catholic. He proceeded to tell me he picked it up from Alabama’s special teams coordinator while speaking at a clinic in Michigan this winter. Once he drew it up for me, it turned out to be fantastic. Amazingly simple (something I am looking for), and I was able to pick up on every facet of it immediately. I usually translate that to a high school kid being able to learn it within a few reps.

 

The moral behind my story is: when around other football coaches, always be willing to learn something. I went into this all-star week totally detaching anything from it from my football philosophy and team at Cardinal Stritch. I walked away with our new kickoff return philosophy that is probably much better for us than my original idea. Its simple for our players, effective (Alabama runs it, come on!), and it will be easy for all of our coaches to grab a section of the return team and coach them up, much easier. Never assume you know everything, and keep your eyes and ears open to new concepts at every opportunity that presents itself to you. I know I learned that valuable lesson this week, and I will continue to do so in the future.

Service Day 2013

Brian Wical is in his first year as the head football coach at Cardinal Stritch High School outside of Toledo, Ohio in the town of Oregon. At 25-years old, Coach Wical is one of the youngest head football coaches in America.  Throughout the 2013 season, Coach Wical will give readers an inside perspective of what it's like to build a tradition at a school that has had only ten victories since 2007.

Little Sisters of the Poor group led by Coach Wical and Coach Jason Waters

by Brian Wical
Cardainl Stritch High School Head Football Coach
Follow @Coach Wical

One thing that I am always preaching about in our program is creating a 1^st class culture. I know it sounds cliché, but we want to help provide a program that develops young men that behave in a 1^st class manner. We want them to behave that way on the football field, in the classroom, and in our community. 

One thing a lot of kids don’t realize is their actions outside of the school building reflect not only on themselves, but on the football program and the high school. Therefore, if a kid is out in our community and causes trouble and has a run-in with law enforcement, not only will that look bad on the player himself, but also it will make people think that we don’t hold our kids accountable in our program. 

A fine example of this right now on a much larger scale is the whole Aaron Hernandez fiasco. Many people are questioning the New England Patriots, Florida Gators, and Urban Meyer’s handling of Hernandez while under their watch. This is exactly what I mean. It is automatically assumed that if you do bad, someone isn’t keeping a close enough eye on you. As a result, I try to teach our young men that it is imperative that they behave in a civil manner that displays class and character everywhere that they go. 

One thing that I think is essential in helping to provide our kids with an opportunity to show what great young men they are is scheduling a team service project. We can put action to our words, and it also shows our players that we as coaches don’t just give them lip service about these things, because we actually get out and participate with them. 

We had two different projects set up for our team this year, so we divided in half. One of the projects was landscaping work at the Little Sisters of the Poor home. This facility services the elderly who also are poverty stricken. Through conversation, I learned that there are actually nine nuns who live in the facility and help run and manage it, as well as two Catholic priests. Our kids did seven hours worth of odd jobs on their HUGE property, which included rearranging their maintenance garage, spreading mulch, assisting in cutting down seven trees, and edging their flower beds. 

The second group assisted a local parish, St. Jerome, in setting up their annual festival. They were a huge help to those responsible for managing the festival and assured everything would be set up. 

Both parties were extremely thankful for our help. There is nothing greater than seeing the bond that teammates make while doing these types of projects coupled with the pure excitement of the people we helped when they see all that we were able to accomplish for them in such a short amount of time. This was definitely a well spent seven hours and we will continue to do in future years as we build the football program at Cardinal Stritch High School. 

St. Jerome Festival set-up crew led by Coaches Allen & Nick Fuller

                                       
                     

The Importance of Mental Toughness

by Brian Wical
Cardinal Stritch High School Head Football Coach
Follow @CoachWical

In my opinion, mental toughness is the greatest thing that you can potentially gain from the weight room and off-season program. Notice I said “potentially gain”. There is no guarantee that you will actually gain mental toughness just by your kids showing up. You must “teach” it to them. There are various ways of doing this, none greater than endurance challenges.

As the coach, you can control the difficulty of the drills and exercises being performed on a daily basis. Since that is the case, at Cardinal Stritch we work to make the workouts tough enough that our kids will not be able to complete the entire workout or set without taking a small break. 

An example of this is Coach Baden (Strength & Conditioning) will tell our guys to do a set of Mountain Climbers. We may not give them a set number, but rather, we time them and don’t let them know how long we will be timing them for. We know it is tough even for the most in-shape athletes to complete this task without take a few seconds to pause when it is combined with all of the other exercises in the workout. The thought behind this is: lets say you wish for your players to be able to do 45 seconds of Mountain Climbers. If we time them for a minute and they take 2 or 3, 3-second breaks throughout, they are actually doing 51-54 seconds worth of them, which is more than what we had planned. Also, by demanding more than what they can do, you are forcing them to fight through the exercise whenever they are thinking of quitting. 

By using this philosophy, it has improved our teams overall mental toughness exponentially thus far. Between raising our expectations of competition and trying to “teach” mental toughness as best as we can, we have actually improved at a rate (in those two categories) much faster than what I had originally planned for this football team. That means we will need to spend a lot less time on these things once our summer camp days begin and can focus on football more. 

Some may think that getting bigger, faster, and stronger is the most important thing that can be gained from the weight room. Although I feel this is very important to our overall success, I feel like it is naturally going to happen. What I mean is, I have hired a first-class strength coach to take care of the physical aspects of the summer plan. If our kids show up, I am more than confident they will get stronger. That is a byproduct of showing up. 

When you think about it, the alternative would be laying in bed at home. When you compare the two, showing up to the weight room for a workout is obviously going to get you stronger, bigger, and faster than being at home. Therefore, I focus on the mental aspect the entire time, personally. I try to drive and motivate our kids to push through it and to begin to tap into their full potential. Are we completely there yet? No. But the good news is that we are making decent strides every single day towards our ultimate goal: become a championship winning football program.

The Importance of Communication

by Brian Wical
Cardinal Stritch High School Head Football Coach
Follow @CoachWical

I always knew that communication was an important aspect to being a Head Football Coach. In fact, one of the main answers I gave in each of my coaching interviews on an important trait for a Head Coach was always communication. However, I am not sure I truly understood the importance of it until I actually became one. 

One of the first things that I picked up on after being hired as the Head Coach was that there seemed to be little to no communication in the past at Cardinal Stritch when it came to the football program. This was evident on all levels, but none more than with the parents. It was also true with the football players as well, which is a huge issue, at least in my opinion. 

First of all, the parents are probably the most important people that you can communicate with. Let’s face it, many times our kids wouldn’t be at a summer workout or even football practice in the fall if it wasn’t for the parents. They need to be the first group that is in the know because they are the lifelines to your entire football program.

 

At the first meeting I had with our football players after accepting the job, I had each fill out a player profile page. I wanted this for a multitude of reasons. Which included: their address so I knew what part of Toledo they were coming from, what position they had played in the past, their grade level - just to name a few. The most important line on there though was the line that requested the parents email address. I immediately gathered all of the email addressed provided for me and made a group in my school email account titled: “Football Parents”.

 

After establishing this group I sent an email out, just introducing myself to all the parents. I wanted them to know whom I was, where I came from, and assure them that I was going to lead their sons to new heights, both as football players and as young men in our community. This was originally done as a one-time thing. Shortly after sending it, however, I got to thinking that the parents would probably appreciate a monthly newsletter informing them of the happenings within the program.

 

I got a lot of positive feedback from our parents that they really did appreciate the communication, because before I got the Cardinal Stritch job, they felt “out of the loop”. Outside of the monthly newsletters, creating the bulk email group has allowed me to communicate changes with them as well. I distributed a summer calendar to all the families in April. Because of this, a few dates and scheduled events have changed a little since then. Instead of setting up a meeting or relaying a message through our athletes (that may or may not make it home), it was simple to type a quick message and alert everyone to what is going on.

 

The other great advantage of this is that it makes the families feel like they are actually a part of your program, which I want. It isn’t fair for me to preach that our team is like a family and that we should all care for each other, if that caring stops at the players. We are all a football family and that is something I am truly working to try and facilitate within our football community.

 

Because of that goal, we have started a football parents club. One thing that shocked me was that there was no organized club to help support our kids during the season. Things like team meals, fruit during two-a-days, etc. were all things that I have seen football parent groups do in the past. Yet, the issue was, we didn’t have one at all. That isn’t to say there weren’t parents doing a tremendous job in supporting the players in the past with these types of things, because there were. 

However, they were more isolated events by single families, than they were an actual group. I believe the group concept is one more way to help our parents truly feel like they are a part of our football family. I am proud to announce we have started that club, and just finished with the second monthly meeting Monday night. Traditionally, this will be something that is completely and solely run by our parents, and I will have little to do with it, other than coordinating certain plans and events together. However, since the group is still in its infancy I went to the meeting Monday night to make sure my visions, the school’s visions, and the parents’ visions were all aligned so we don’t get in trouble or offend any other groups. 

The next place where communication becomes key is with your players. You absolutely must communicate everything to them. This includes: team rules, expectations, times, events, what to wear to practice, etc. If you don’t, I promise the first thing you will deal with is the kid saying “well, coach, you never told us that”. Most of the time, they will be right and you have no legs to stand on. To help prevent that situation, communicate EVERYTHING to them. Each week in our scouting report, the last page is a schedule of the weekly events. I even communicate what color jersey they are to wear to practice, what the practice attire is, when there is a meeting, special event, you name it. I do this because that way every kid loses the excuse of “coach didn’t tell me”. 

The third most important aspect of communication within a football program is with your assistant coaches. My coaches probably think I am crazy already, and we haven’t even coached a game yet. I try to be the most organized and prepared that I can be, for everything. I have monthly meetings with our staff, and each meeting is to discuss some different kind of topic. For example, in February the meeting agenda was just an introductory meeting to my program. I then went through in March and taught the entire offensive playbook to my staff, as if they were the players. In April, our Defensive Coordinator did the same thing. I run the Special Teams as well, so I went through and taught each of them the playbook. You can see that each meeting had a set agenda, and was put in place to keep us all together in the off season still, meanwhile working towards being ready for late-July when we use our coaching days and actually get to have football practices. 

The bottom line here is that in every facet of your football program, communication is essential. With parents, coaches, players, and even school administration. Every decision you make needs to be communicated to at least one of those four groups. We owe the success of our football program, often times, to how well we can communicate what is happening in our head to others around us. Make sure you are doing all that you can to help your program by taking advantage of something so easy.

All-Star Week Update: Northwest Ohio All-Stars

 

Crestview HS (Convoy, OH) WR Venice Roberts takes the jet sweep hand-off around right end as head coach Jerry Cooper looks on

 

by Brian Wical
Cardinal Stritch Catholic High School Head Coach
Follow @CoachWical

This week has been flying by! In this past, this was always the official, unofficial, start to football mentally for me. Having never coached in this game previously, I always attended and watched our players at Lima Central Catholic take part in the game. In my mind, this always got my brain in full-blown football mode and in the mood for the season. I was already there this year, being a first year head coach in a new place, however, the practices have gotten me even more excited for football season to begin. 

On Day 2 of practices, we worked a lot more on the defense than on Day 1. The issue with the defense and this game is that there isn’t a lot that can be done from a schematic standpoint. You are required to either play Cover 1 (man-free defense) or Cover 0 (straight man-to-man) in the secondary, and you can only blitz your middle linebacker to either A-gap. The linemen cannot stunt and must be lined up over an offensive lineman (they can shade, but not align in the gap). Finally, you must do all of this out of a 4-3. Obviously, these rules kind of put a defensive coach in a bind and don’t leave a lot to work on. All-star caliber football players should be able to play these two defenses in their sleep. Needless to say, not much defensive work has been done in practice this week, however, much more was done on Tuesday. We also installed all of our counter run plays and inside run plays, offensively, as well as continued to rep our pass plays. The timing was much better and began coming together too. 

Day 3 was the best day of practice yet. We spent a lot of time perfecting our rocket and jet sweeps. The timing of these two plays essentially dictates the success of the entire offense and was critical we got it down. We also did a little more work with our special teams, although we struggled with our kicker getting the ball off the ground in kickoff, which was a little unsettling. Especially considering he was bombing kicks 70 yards on Tuesday. I am confident once the lights turn on though, all will be good in that area as well. 

Overall, I am really enjoying my time with all of the players. We coached against every player on the roster last season, and it is neat to see their talents up close. The one thing that is also neat is seeing the football IQ of some of the players that come from the better teams. Its not surprise that the kids who come from the more successful schools have some of the highest football knowledge and IQ, as well. 

Last night, both teams (WBL All-Stars and NOW All-Stars) came together in Van Wert for the first time. The teams have been practicing at separate facilities up to this point. We are given one hour of practice time on Thursday for a walkthrough-type of practice and then the people who host the game did  a cookout for all of the players and coaches. Naturally, I cant wait until 7:30pm tonight when we can play some real football, though!