By Malik Hall
Head Football Coach
Bates College
Twitter: @coachmalikhall

In football, as in many other professions, coaches are hired to solve problems. Some problems can be cultural, schematic, and or developmental. It’s the responsibility of the coach to generate answers for any problems that exist during games, practice, the off-season. Contrary to the belief of some, the coach’s responsibilities do not end with on the field solutions. He is also responsible for finding solutions for off the field questions as well.

Clinics can be a great source of information for coaches in regard to how they teach football schemes and techniques that are critical to the success of your program. That said, these professional development opportunities too often avoid talking about how we, as coaches, can grow in how we coach the person (athlete). The product can only be as strong as the person executing.

Here at Penn, we believe strongly in coaching the person, not the product. The person should always be valued higher than the product (i.e. wins and losses). 

“Winning isn’t everything it’s the only thing.” by Vince Lombardi is one of the most famous quotes in athletics.  A strong and definite quote from a men who revolutionized the game of football. It declares a view of, and what it means to, win. Not many coaches will ever argue against one of the greatest football coaches ever. 

Consider this, if you can win over people how can you not win games? 

I ask my children every day after school, “Did You Win Today”? I realize that it’s a human condition to want to win. It’s something that you don’t have to teach. Winning validates your work ethic and your ability to overcome obstacles. Who doesn’t want to be victorious in the heat of competition? 

Winning is the only thing, because losing isn’t fun, in fact losing most often creates a desire and yearning to win. Victory can also confirm that you’ve helped your players/team reach their full potential.  John Wooden, another great coach (basketball), evaluated players based on the skill sets they brought to the game. Wooden evaluations were based on a player maximizing their innate skill set. That ultimately won him several NCAA national championships. Lombardi infuses winning as discipline, and Wooden coached his players to be true to their skills and attributes. Both philosophies resulted in wins; however, those wins were the result of winning over the players, community and fan base. 

By Clay Iverson
Head Coach
Mukwonago High School (Mukwonago, WI)

As always it is a pleasure to contribute a report for X and O Labs, it is a great place to go to learn, add to, and gain research on a number of items related to a game that has meant so much to me and to many others. 

I have not only thought it to be an honor to contribute a piece to X and O but also it is fun, I like sharing what we do from an on the field perspective.  I have never had an issue with sharing any of the schemes, plays or series we run at Mukwonago or where I have been.  I do not get paranoid about who has our film, and in general if one of our opponents had our play book I would be just fine with that.  There is no magic in there, and as many of you know there is no magic in any playbook.  The X’s and O’s of football are easy to learn and if you have the internet and the ability to read, well, you can get whatever you are looking for and then some.  So sharing in these areas has been a great experience.

This report’s topic however, is something we rarely share outside our program.  One reason is people don’t ask, which I think is too bad.  The second reason is we don’t bring in up because it has let us have success at multiple places in multiple leagues.  I suppose selfishly we like to keep it in house.  I do feel though more and more coaches are starting to understand the importance of leadership training and teaching family (not just preaching family) within a program.

We Want to Win

I think sometimes when coaches hear leadership or developing the complete person or family they feel that means putting winning on the back burner.  I know that is what I thought, until I started to listen to what the great programs were doing.  When it came to scheme they were simple, when it came to program and player development they were very intricate.  Make no mistake I have never coached a game I didn’t want to, think, or prepared as hard as I could to win.

When I was younger I didn’t go to many of the leadership or team building clinic talks (I thought that was a waste of my time, especially when the guy down the hall was going to teach me a can’t fail way to protect my 5 step game vs. man pressure schemes).  Yikes, that seems absurd to me now. It is amazing the great players I got to coach when I first started who won enough games so I could stay in this great profession.

What sets programs apart is not the X’s and O’s and I would argue it is not so much the Jimmies and Joes either, but the development of the servant leader and the investment of a true football family.

Who is the Servant Leader

As a coach think about the things that you get upset about, I mean the things that really keep you up at night, that get under your skin.  If those things are how to run the smash route perfectly or what depth your safety should be at in cover 1 I would argue, humbly, you are a football enthusiast, not a football coach. 

While technique and scheme are important they are meaningless without a group of young men that are dedicated to improving daily, love one another, and have the courage to serve others before themselves.

My main concern as a coach now, the things that keep me up at night, are reaching the level of complete servant leadership within our program.  This includes the following:

Having players who:

1. Sacrifice anything that would take away from the team’s success (parties, soda, junk fund, too many video games, drugs and alcohol, etc.)
2. Put (family) team success over their own individual stats or honors
3. Play and practice hard all the time
4. Never miss a 6:00 AM lift
5. Are great young men in school and in the community

A football coach likes to win, if you had a team full of guys that are all in on the 5 above points, I think winning takes care of itself and not to mention you will get rid of those restless nights (well at least most of them).

Developing the Servant Leader and the Family

As with most things in football the devil is in the details.  We have all given our leadership talks, preached the importance of being a family, and maybe even threw in a leadership counsel or retreat.  I think all of that is great and they are all great items to use when developing a team of leaders and servers.  However, you need a game plan or else just like on Friday night everything kind of runs together into “what should we do next” situations.

Here is our servant leadership/family development game plan; we use it for all 10-12^th graders, and pick parts of it to use with freshmen and even throughout our youth programs.

Introduction

Over the last four seasons, head coach PJ Fleck and the staff at Western Michigan University has built the Broncos into a top 25 program, an undefeated 11-0 record and on the brink of a major bowl appearance for the first time in school history. It was all part of an off-season plan that Coach Fleck shared during a Q and A with XandOLabs.com’s co-founder Mike Kuchar last spring.

Editor’s Note: The following research was conducted as part of XandOLabs.com research report on “NCAA Player Development.”

On Developing the Off-Season Mentality of your Program…

PJ Fleck, Western Michigan University: “We have a leadership council that is picked by our players. It’s made up of true freshmen; redshirt freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors. Every class is represented. There are 26 total players because I think you need a quarter of your team leading your team. Every class has a voice. It’s about a 36-week course. We do it up until spring ball and then we will vote again on our leaders after spring ball. Some guys stay on, some guys stay off. It’s not a right, but a privilege to be in on there. It’s a leadership class that we meet every week for 45 minutes. We do skits, we have readings and they take notes. My job is to take lifetime lessons and teach them in a cultural way. Every lesson is geared to what they know. We will use an example like adapting leadership towards Kanye West and Drake, for example. Or, we’ll use Lebron James and Stephan Curry. I can’t use Michael Jordan and Larry Bird anymore to teach lessons. I need to be up to date. I need to show them I know what is going on. I want them to have the ability to understand me. You have to adapt to your culture. We need to continue to keep up with their culture.”

On Developing the Off-Season Physicality of your Program…

PJ Fleck, Western Michigan University (Dan Nichol, Strength and Conditioning Coach): “We talk about developing energy more than anything else. We tell them that we have no bad days at Western Michigan. Not one. There is nothing negative inside our program. It’s difficult to do because we have days where we don’t’ want to do something. But we define maturity as when doing what you have to do becomes doing what you want to do. You must have energy to mature. That is a sign your program is at an elite level.”

On Developing the In-Season Mentality of your Program…

PJ Fleck, Western Michigan University: “Our position coaches meet every single week with each of their players. It’s an individual meeting, an academic meeting, and a social meeting. It can deal with football or it may not deal with football. It’s a quick 10-15 meeting with that player at breakfast and getting to know any issues or problems he is having. During the season, there are so many different stressors. You’re winning, you’re losing, you’re hurt, you’re girlfriend broke up with you, etc. The draft is approaching. As a coach, you need to have a thumb on all of them.”

On Developing the In-Season Physicality of Your Program…

PJ Fleck, Western Michigan University: “We constantly create competition, but we don’t compete against one another, we compete with one another. There is a big difference there. Competing against one another puts a divide in a team. The more you divide that team, you will struggle. How you compete with each other is you constantly be at your best and beat yourself from yesterday. You may have a matchup that’s not even close. We will pair a lineman with a skill guy sometimes in a competition but we stress the idea of failing before we see growth. It’s how much better are you getting each day individually. We flip the mindset to where we are competing with ourselves and not the other player. Can you make that play better than you did yesterday? It doesn’t matter who is across from you. If you can’t believe in yourself, than you don’t have a shot.”

On His Definition of Leadership…