7 Reasons Other Than Recruiting to Work and Attend Summer Camps

By: Ben Brummer, Defensive Line Coach - Waldorf University

The off-season for coaches is not a break but rather, a time for retooling their scheme, training their players, and recruiting new athletes. The off-season therefore is full of clinics to meet other coaches and camps to evaluate and meet new prospects. Camps don’t have to be just for recruiting though, they can be a good venue for professional development as well. I just went with our staff this past weekend; the experience helped me discover that working camp provides unique opportunities to improve as a coach. Developing your skills as a coach, learning new drills, and even learning about other positions are great ways to use camps to improve as a coach. Here are the seven reasons working at camps can be good for coaches other than recruiting.

1. Develop your coaching skills.

Definitely when you get to the summer as a football coach it's been a minimum a month since you've had spring practice, and with that time off from actively coaching athletes you might develop a little rust. Coaches spend the offseason getting on board and clinicing but how many are you getting running drills? If not just for shaking off the rust, working camps offer chances for us coaches to develop their coaching skills. The setting of camps is a pressure cooker; you have to adapt quickly to circumstances that are very different from coaching your own players. You are working with kids that just met you, don’t speak the technical language you use and probably just ran through an hour of testing. Also, the level of ability at a camp varies widely, especially one that includes incoming high school freshmen class. When working with college players most of not all have been recruited to be there by the position coach, as well as we all know have a level of ability confirmed above the average high school player. Players that attend a camp can come from a great program that develops them thoroughly or they can come from a program that barely coaches the basics. That environment pushes you to work your skills as a coach; focusing a group, explaining drills quickly and being able to hold the attention of that group. These are skills a coach needs, and it can be helpful to practice them.

2. Improving upon the teaching of Everyday Drills.

All of us coaches have Everyday Drills, drills we lean heavily on to work the skills of our position. When we get well into running a room our players can do those drills with their eyes closed. Teaching the drill becomes nothing more to us coaches but a review session, and new players pick up simply because the group has the collective memory to make it easy for them to jump right in. The camp coaching situation gives us the opposite, now we have a raw group who has to be taught the drill with the limited time available and have to learn to do it well to get the benefits of the drill. As a coach you’ve got to be able to trim the fat off the teaching and learn to translate that drill to new players. Then you can take back that experience to your players and be able to improve on those everyday drills.

3. Learn different ways to teach technique.

If you are at a camp, you can see other coaches at work. You can see in a live setting how they teach a technique. Maybe they teach the same technique in a novel way or maybe they teach a completely different technique. As a coach, humbling yourself to learn from others is important. When watching a coach live teach a drill or skill it helps you grow. The wealth of knowledge in camps is often passed over in favor of focusing on evaluation which is of course important, but learning from other coaches can help you in this profession.

4. Opportunity to learn a new position.

It is rare to happen but I myself have been put into a situation where I had to coach a position at a camp that I had never coached previously. It is a unique challenge that you aren’t going to get as a college coach often if ever. The bigger time camps rarely have this problem, but third party camps can’t always guarantee every position is covered by an experienced coach. Most of us stay on a single slide of the ball and often the same position group throughout our careers. If you think you're a good coach just wait until you're put in charge of twenty high school offensive linemen for two plus hours of individual drills. That is a true challenge, and what an opportunity to learn how to coach another spot to figure out how to progress drills you don’t have as direct experience in running. An added benefit of this scenario can be you can gain insight into coaching that position and what it takes to be a good coach at that position. So down the line if you are blessed to advance to coordinator or head coach in your career you can have a better gauge for hiring or leading that position coach.

5. Get coaches out of recruiting and clinic mode in off-season.

We often get tunnel visioned in the Spring and Summer on how to improve our scheme and our roster. This isn’t bad but sometimes it means we are only getting better in those areas during the offseason. While coaching at camps isn’t the same as working with our own athletes it provides a good venue for shaking off the on the field rust. I enjoy clinicing as much as the next coach, nothing more interesting than the talking ball and learning from other coaches. Working a camp however gets me going, getting uninterrupted 1 to 2 hours of individual time just teaching young hungry athletes the game and the details of it is great! The other piece of it there is such a long time between that spring scrimmage and the first day of fall camp, so when you come back we all like to think that coaching is like riding a bike but I see it like any other discipline, you take a few months off from coaching practice it’ll take some time to get back into full shape. Camps can be that great summer practice, if you believe as a coach your guys deserve a professional high-level product of coaching from you then you owe it to them to take the time to get reps at on the field coaching staying in shape in running drills, commanding a group and being a motivator.

6. Creates opportunities to meet different coaches.

We all know this profession is networking, all have heard the saying it’s not what you know but who you know. Camps help you in both these areas. Camps give you both the opportunity to meet new coaches and to show them what you know. Young coaches might not think of this reason when taking an opportunity to coach a camp that it’s just for the other reasons listed, however it could be the first step in getting another coaching opportunity as well. At a camp another coach can see how you teach, how discipline and how you relate to players, that’s an interview. When you impress coaches in a camp setting it can only help you, even if it is only to connect with them as a colleague.

7. Making additional income.

Last but not least, there are worse ways to make some extra money. Camps are only a day's work and in my experience, they pay pretty good money. Some camp pay can range from one hundred dollars for a couple of hours to four hundred and fifty for full day camp. You add in that some of these recruiting services and camp companies are putting together full on showcases and three day combines that are paying for travel and hotels to get coaches to work those camps, it can be a good earning opportunity. If you really love coaching, a working camp is a much more fun way to supplement your income than working some random part time job. With the cost of living going up coaches can’t balk at some extra cash.

With the camp season around the corner, coaches should consider the above reasons to go work at camps. You're never not growing and learning as a coach and working camps can be a good way to do it. Young coaches especially should consider these things when looking at their summer schedule.