| Motivation and a FUNdamental Offense |
| By: Jon Carpenter - Capital High School (WV)
Originally Published in: Nike 2015 Coach of the Year Clinic Notes - By Earl Browning Provided by: Nike Coach of the Year When I got this job five years ago, it was advertised as down town as West Virginia can be. It is probably the only school in West Virginia that is not 100-percent white. They won 15 years ago, but it had been a long time since they had won anything. I watched a Bear Bryant movie on Sunday before my first practice started and I was fired up and ready to go. I was going to run them and really get after them. That first year we had a bunch of seniors and we did okay. The second year in the first game, I lost three of my five best players. Things fell apart and I realized I was not Bear Bryant. I was getting ready to quit. I was 35 years old and had one of the best jobs in the state and I felt like I was pissing it away. I was thinking it was not worth it. My wife was even trying to bust my windows out. You need to write this down. I went to a thing called "3-Dimensional Coaching." It was put on by the FCA. They brought a guy in by the name of Jeff Duke. The first thing he said was, "Kids won't show up and blindly obediently do what you want them to do." He went on to say that most of the kids you have do not have a father living in the home. I started counting off in my head of the players on my starting defense that lived with his father. I only had one player that lived with his dad. However, his father was a coach and this kid was a player. After I went to that program it changed my way of thinking. I realized I could not be Bear Bryant because that was not my personality. I was not the rough and tough ass-kicker that Bear Bryant was. Soon I did hire a coach that played at Marshall and he is an ass-kicker. The best thing I learned was who I was. In the third year at Capital, I was going to be myself. If we can do that we would be good. What I was going to do was have fun. If it is not fun it is not worth doing. The first two years I was miserable because I worried about everything else and I just got in the way. I realized I needed to keep it loose and to have fun. If we can do that, it is all beautiful. This is what I wanted to do. • Keep it loose • Excitement • Ownership • Practice The best thing I did was to create excitement. Excitement • Decorate • Use the Swoosh • Recruit your own There were several things I did to create excitement. I made a sign for the locker room. It had the word "0- Formula" on it with a big C for Capital and a Cougar jumping through the C. It also had a Nike receivers glove with a big swoosh on it with four fingers extended. My players got excited over that sign. I heard a coach speak at this clinic. He said if you take over a program, make everything new. That is what I did. I painted everything in sight. I painted the locker room, benches, and everything I could to make it exciting for the team. I still do that. My school is in Charleston, West Virginia and there are a couple of schools around me that recruit the hell out of my players. I have to go recruit my own players. My sister brought me a Nike sweatshirt. I use that Nike swoosh. It is the most amazing thing in the world. When I walk into the middle school, the kids there think we are sponsored by Nike. I told them we were going to wear Nike uniforms next year. I went out and got the uniforms with a swoosh logo on them. The kids line up to come to our school to play football. It was nothing more than the Nike swoosh that influenced them to come. Now we have three or four sets of uniforms and those kids love that stuff. I cannot complain about people recruiting my players. I just have to do a better job of recruiting them than they do. Someone sent me a bunch of action game pictures of our players. From all of those pictures I made a collage. I made a sign from them. I put, "We Run This Town." I made the sign into post cards. Every Thursday I write post cards to my eighth grade kids. It takes about an hour because I have 45 kids to send post cards to. I put them in a big envelope and send them to the principal over at the school. The principal told me I should come over and check this out. He said it is pretty ridiculous as to what goes on. I snuck over to watch the kids get their post cards. They lined up like I did when I was five or six years old waiting for a piece of candy. They line up to get their post card and they got so excited just to get something. That has taken off and every coach in my school does it now. We have a signing day just like the colleges do. I go get all the eighth graders that are coming to my school and put them on a bus. I bring them to Capital High School. At Capital, we have a great band with probably 100 pieces in it. The band lines up and the eighth graders get off the bus and come through the tunnel formed by the band. While they are marching in, the band plays the fight song. Those kids go nuts. As stupid as it is it embarrasses me. But as stupid as it is I like to coach those kids and I am going to continue to use that as a recruiting tool. I get a bunch of T-shirts that say "committed" on it and post the picture on Facebook and twitter. Recruiting has been huge for us. I remember what Jeff Duke with the FCA said about players. He said you must grab kids by the heart to get them to do what you want them to do. They are not going to run through a brick wall for you anymore. With my players, you must show them that you love them before they do anything. The first year I was head coach, we played the defending state champs and got our teeth kicked in. I do all my own laundry on this team. I pick up the balls on the field. I am the first person there and the last person to leave. It is miserable. If you are an assistant coach and think you want to be the head coach, you better think twice. I got all these guys to coach for me but after we got our teeth kicked in, it got pretty lonely. When the players see me service them, I think that is the best leadership model. I want the players to know that I am going to do everything I can to get them where they want to go. One of the best things we did for practice was to get rid of the football pants. We practice in shorts and volleyball knee pads. Our players do not need to buy anything to play football here. I sell enough popcorn to buy what we need. I will do everything I can to help the players and all they have to do is work at what they want to do. I am the youngest coach on my staff. I have a 65 year old, I talked about earlier. I have four or five coaches that are from Charleston and at one time thought they wanted the head job. I feel the only way they will be loyal to me is if I serve and respect them. I have a bunch of good football players. West Virginia offered my quarterback already. I have a good sophomore linebacker. We are really good. Practice is important to me. When we practice we want to go fast. Practice - fast, fun, and for a purpose • FUNdamental, everything must relate to the game • No sitting and wasting time • Teach - film practice • Very few sprints • Stretch on your time • Competition settles dissenters I want people to come in and ask, "How do you teach that? What do you do in practice?" When I got the job at Capital, football was not fun. The coaches tend to practice the same as they did when they were playing. That is how they did it in 1990. when I played here. That is boring as hell. With the players I have we had to make it fun to get them there. Three years ago. when we rebooted the program, I said I was going to make practice fun. I am not going to do drills because that is the way we have always done it. We do not have an organized stretching period. They stretch on their own. We are not going to be beaten because the players have tight hamstrings. We are going to get beat because they do not know the plays or cannot catch a ball. They stretch before practice and when the whistle blows. we play football. We have 60-70 players and we try to keep all of them moving and not wasting time. No matter what we are doing we always have two groups going. Players are like cows. When you herd cattle you find out something about the cows. As soon as one or two of them would lay down, they all lay down. That is why we practice that way. We do not want anyone laying down. We do our teaching off film. We have towers built that we can film from. We film the practice. We create competition between the players. We do not have depth charts. I never say give me the first team. The first day of practice, I tell them want the best eleven players on offense to get on the field. If I have to tell them who is the best eleven we are probably going to have a long year. Everyone on the team, knows who the quarterback is. At times, we have some disputes. Two years ago when I first started, we had two players come out when I called for the best fullback. They were both big dogs and played fullback. I told them we could only play with eleven and one of them had to step down. Everyone on the team stopped and looked at me. I said I do not know who is the best? This is football and it is an aggressive game. At that, one of them grabbed the other and they got into a knockdown drag out fight. I moved the huddle up 10 yards and said give me the best receiver. It was not long until the fight was over and we established who the fullback was that day. That set the tone for us. I know that sounds crazy, but before I got the job, the coaches played their favorite players. Coaches all play favorites, but my favorites are ones that win the fights. To get on the field at our place, you must be tough as hell and fight like crazy. I set my practices up so I can teach toughness. There is a big circle in the middle of our practice field. Early in the year we use it quite a bit. I tell them this is your daddy's drill. Everyone on your team thinks they should be playing. They should feel like they are a starter. If they do not play I do not want them going to their grandma or their uncle and say they should be playing. That uncle is going to come to me and ask why his nephew is not playing tailback. If we have two players that want to play wide receiver, we go to the circle. It is like a fight. The team gathers around that big circle and the two competitors go at it in the circle doing one-on-one hitting drills. It is violent and that is what we want from it. We film the first challenge match between the two players. We go in after practice and watch it. If your uncle comes in and watches that film, he will know why you are not playing. My favorite players are going to be the ones that are the bad asses. We have players that call each other out and challenge them for his position. I have a linebacker that West Virginia has offered and he is one of those bad asses. However, there will be some young player that thinks they should be playing and call him out. That is how we create competition. If a player is not satisfied with his playing time, I want him to come to me. I will make sure he gets a chance in the challenge circle. If you want to play get into the circle. I do not want you down at Walmart telling everyone you did not have a chance. My coaches never stop practice during drills. When we get rolling we continue. I do not want a coach stopping a drill with 22 players in it to teach one player. You can pull him out of the drill and teach him, but do not stop the drill. We do not condition after practice. We run very little sprints. We do our conditioning during practice. When we played there was a team drill right before conditioning. Some players took the team drill off knowing sprints were coming after the drill. When we work our kickoff drills that is part of our conditioning. I have a little special education player. He could not spell cat, but he can run. He thinks he can play tailback at Oregon. I put him in the end zone and let him return kicks during kickoff drills. I have three kickoff teams. We kick the ball off and I make the team stay in their lanes as they cover. The little player catches the ball and runs like hell all over the field. It looks like a greased pig contest at the county fair. They chase him all over that field. If we were doing sprints they would not run like they do in this drill. I could yell and scream, but they are not going to push themselves. They do in this drill. We run pass routes and things of that nature instead of running sprints. I make the linemen run routes and throw them the ball. That is how we condition. Our players give total effort in those drills. We get out of school at 3:00 but we cannot practice until 4:30. The players I have are a little different than most everyone else's team. They have a little different support at home. They eat lunch at 10:30 and it is a long time until they will get something else to eat. I set up a big table after school with bread, peanut butter, and jelly. I told the players we were going to have a peanut butter and jelly bar after school just like they do at West Virginia. They do not know that West Virginia does not do that but I tell them they do. I feed them before we go to practice. They all line up and have a feast on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. You would not believe how much peanut butter and jelly we go through. We do it in the weight room now. We do it all year round. It is sad but we have many players come out for the team just to get that sandwich period. It almost breaks your heart sometimes. I know they are not going to play football for us, but they come because we feed them every day. The players that can play benefit from this also and there is a little more gas in their tank for practice. At our place we are bad at having cramps. We run them enough we should not get them. but we have outbreaks of them. Some of the coaches think we are not running enough in practice. Their problem is not the running, the problem is they do not have any gas in the tank. If you have a car on empty, you cannot stomp on the gas pedal and expect to get more mileage out of it. You have to put some gas in the tank. When our players eat our energy level is up 100-percent. I have our players by the stomach. It may lead to the heart, but right now it is feeding them. At my place I have different kinds of problems than most schools. I have to deal with a thief problem on occasion. We had a missing phone one day. I went into the locker room and told them I was going to take a shower and when I got back that phone had better show up. I got back and the phone was not there. I went to the refrigerator and there were ham and turkey sandwiches in it. I started unloading it and told them I wanted that phone back. The phone showed up. I control the discipline on my team by their stomach. If I have a problem on the bus, that is what I use as leverage on them. Our players have ownership of the football program and they know I will take the food away for stupid and inconsiderate acts. This works for me. Competition settles dissenters. We do not have players sitting around complaining that they should be playing. If they do I remind them I have a film that should remind you why you are not getting as much time as you want. We have to revisit it on occasion, but that is the way it is. When I first got the job we went to the zone offense. We run the inside and outside zone, power, and buck sweep. When I got there most of the staff were wing-T coaches and they were not about to change. The Zone to them is a way you play in the secondary. The old guy on my staff told me it did not matter the structure of the offense, it is all about fundamentals. I told him one day to write down what the fundamentals were. I do that with every coach in our program. They write down the fundamentals they use with their positions. I want them all to coach a position. I do not want them out there standing around. I told them when they do drill work, it has to teach the fundamentals they wrote down. I went to Texas one year. If you are a head coach, you will appreciate this. Being a coach in Texas is a lot like running a rodeo. There will be two or three guys that jump on the bull. There are one or two guys that will be happy as hell to have the cowboy hat on with a pair of boots. They will run around and cheer like hell when the bullets are flying. There will be one or two guys that will look like a clown. There will be one or two guys that will be happy to hang on the fence. When I have the first coaches meeting, that is kind of the way it is. Everyone wants to call the plays or run the defense. I tell them I am tickled to death and I want them to be involved in this. "I want you to be involved with calling plays but if you are going to ride the bull on Friday night, you have to do the work. You have to ride that bull on Saturday, Sunday, and the entire week. You cannot run over the players trying to get out of here after practice." My place is a good place to call plays now. I have a 6' 2- quarterback and many of the things we do works. People tell me that was a good call. We did the same thing 40 times last year and it was stupid. It comes down to players and execution. I make up a chart that conveys to the coaches what we must do before we snap the ball. I tell them that all their drills have to match up to those fundamentals. I had a coach who played running back. When he came to us, I told him he was going to coach the offensive line. He told me he had never played offensive line. I said. "so what." If you want to be a good coach, coach something that you did not play. You are going to have to work and learn what is going on with that position. He is now one of the best offensive line coaches I have ever seen. He never blocked anyone in his life and played tailback at an A-school. The first year I was head coach, we had a great tailback. We were in the second round of the playoffs and we were rolling. I was calling plays and had two or three offensive coaches around me suggesting plays to run. I looked out on the field and my stud running back was hurt. When he got hurt all the coaches that were suggesting which play to run were nowhere to be found. No one wanted to call the plays when the stud went down. There is a difference between being the head coach and an assistant, it took me a long time to figure that out. I go through every cutup I can find on us and save it to a file. I make copies of every defensive alignment the opponent plays to our trips set. I make copies of all those and put them in a folder for all my coaches. the quarterback, and eventually for the offensive linemen when they are smart enough to look at them. I have four or five ways the opponent is going to align on trips and doubles. We do it during the games. I have a coach in the box that takes a picture with a cell phone and emails it to my I-pad on the sidelines. When coaches tell me we have a shade defender causing problems. it is like speaking French to me. Show me a picture. Most of our players are like I am. They must see the visual picture to understand what we are talking about. That makes it worth what we pay Hudl. That is the only thing I do with it. The "screen shot" settles me down Sunday night. In our offensive game plan we list the things we plan to do. When I was an assistant coach coming up I learned from some good coaches. We never wrote anything down. I was like a fart in a wind storm. One coach won four state championships and the other won two. When I called the plays as an assistant coach it did not matter much to me. When I became the head coach and it was my windows that were going to get busted, it started to matter. Football is a game of situations. I talk fast and my players like to play fast. We are a no-huddle team. Offensive Game Plan • Formation • 1 Unbalanced formation • 1 Motion • 1 Jet sweep • 1 Option • 1 Trick • 1 Reverse • 1 Special Pass • 1 Draw • 1 Man beater pattern • 1 Middle open beater • 2 point play • Goal Line Package • Mike beater We start with four or five different formations and we pick out our best four or five. We are going to run anywhere from 50-65 plays per game. You cannot carry much offense if you are going to signal everything into the game. We take one unbalanced formation and design something off it. We run one motion scheme a game. With the motion we run the jet sweep. The motion becomes the fake on certain plays. We pick one formation and run the jet package off it. We run the jet sweep, the fake off the jet, and the play-action pass. We have one option play we go into the game with. We run one trick play. We put in one trick play a week and the players get excited about it. We may not run it but, they like to do it. We run one reverse and one special pass play. We have about five passes and that is what we stick with. We have one draw and it is the quarterback draw. In high school football where I come from you are never going to see a five-man box. There will be six in the box with a safety in the middle of the field. We have one man-beater play. I am at a school that has lots of speed. People generally do not play us in man-coverage. The coach that had the job before I got it told me we were not smart enough to run the spread offense. The fact was he was not smart enough to teach it. If they see no safety in the middle of the field, they know what to do. The quarterback can call the audible when he sees that and that gives him ownership of the offense. In our practice schedule, we run all our zone offense on Tuesday. Wednesday we run the power and jet stuff. On Monday, we run our individual patterns. On Tuesday, we work the passing game against traffic cones. On Wednesday we throw against people. On Tuesday, we work ball security drills. I put my four best ball carriers in charge of the drills. We have four stations and they run the drills. It is a five minute drill period and the players are in charge. They stress the coaching points and it is a great situation for us. We work situations during the week. On third-and-three, I let the running back pick the play he wants to run and which direction he wants to go. We do that in practice during the week so when it happens in the game he is ready to run the play. On third-and-long, I let the quarterback pick the play. We practice those during the week and run them on Friday night. That also leads to ownership in that phase of the game. We run that play on Monday. It is not a trick play pulled out of the hat. It is something we call every day of the week leading up to the game. When the situation occurs in the game that is the play we run. We work all week with the chains set up on the sidelines and practice situational football. The last thing we do on Thursday is go through every situation on our situation sheet. Two years ago we played for a state championship but I was not ready for third-and-four. I did a poor job and was not as good as I should have been. I realized that is something you work on before it happens. It is not something you do at the last minute. That is it. Guys if you see a 15 year old silver jeep broke down on the interstate, stop and pick me up. I may not make it home. The jeep has about 200.000 miles on it. I appreciate your attention. If there is one thing you can get out of this lecture it is "hope." If a goofball like me can win a state championship. anyone can. |
Motivation and a FUNdamental Offense
