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.