What’s up guys, my name is Erick. Thanks for checking out WinWithThePass.com. Hopefully this site will be a resource to those of you that know what I know…high school football is about kids and kids love throwing the ball.
I’m a lot like you. I’m a high school coach. I’ve won a lot. I’ve lost a lot. And I love football.
I don’t really have any secrets or any special formula other than this: Every day, I try to put myself in the shoes of a high school kid. If I was 16, what would get me fired up? If I was 16, what would make me love football?
I think that we, as coaches, are faced with a monumental task. You see, it would be easy to coach if we had a team full of guys like us. I’m guessing you are in coaching because you are like me. You love football. You love x’s and o’s. You love the strategy. You love the grind. You love the weight room. You love the mud. You love the sore muscles on Saturday. You love football. If we had a team full of guys like us, we could run any system, we could have 3 hour film sessions, we could workout 365 days a year, we could practice for 4 hours every day. Guys like us are easy to coach.
The problem is that we aren’t coaching guys like us. We are coaching kids with homework, college plans, girlfriends, social engagements, twitter conversations, club basketball practice, and summer vacation. Our kids are great guys, but they aren’t really football guys. They do it because their friends do it and because they recognize it’s a unique part of their high school experience.
Ask yourself this question. If football was canceled tomorrow, how many of your guys would transfer to another school? How many of your guys love football so much that they would leave their friends, their teachers, their familiar surroundings, their girlfriend, and their other sports teams just for the chance to play football again? If your team is anything like my team, my guess is that not very many guys would make that choice.
So, if we know this is the case, why do we still sit in coaches meetings and whine about how kids aren’t committed, kids don’t care, kids don’t love the game. Instead, we need to accept this as reality and figure out how to deal with it.
If you are reading this and you have 40 kids that really love football, then count yourself blessed. You either have a very unique demographic or you’ve done a great job of building a love for this game.
But, for the rest of us, tell me if this scenario sounds familiar. We go through mundane practice after mundane practice and we can’t figure out why kids don’t love the game the way we do. We can’t figure out why they aren’t committed. We can’t figure out why they aren’t dedicated. We whine about their attitude and their effort and pine for the day when we have kids that really care. We challenge them with metaphors and stories about commitment, all the while trying to jam the Double Wing or the Flexbone down their throats. We tell them they have to love the game, but we never give them a chance because one guy gets the ball over and over and the rest of the guys get beat up trying to block for him.
What is so ironic is that most of are educators. We have been schooled in the value of differentiated instruction and student-centered learning. We know that kids need to look forward to coming to class and be challenged with a variety of projects, papers, exams, and presentations in order to be productive. Yet, even though we know this about high school kids, our offensive systems and our practice plans are the equivalent of a 1 hour and 45 minute lecture on the cabinet of each American President or the specific stages of Cellular Mitosis. And, we repeat this lecture every single day.
Kids don’t love football, because we don’t give them a chance. Practice is mundane because we have made it mundane. The best athletes in our school don’t come out for the team because it isn’t fun and they have better things to do.
I have been in education a long time and I understand one thing about kids. If they enjoy what they are doing, they will do it well.
That is the purpose of this site. I hope I can inspire you to adapt and modify your philosophy. I hope you can embrace a student-centered model. I hope you can start to think like a high schooler.
This site is about the spread offense. More specifically, it is about the spread passing game. But, really it is about the student athlete. I do not think that this is necessarily the most effective system out there. There are thousands of coaches that have a lot of success with all kinds of systems. But, I do believe that this system solves the problem of apathy. Kids love it. They will look forward to practice every day. They will work hard. They will play with passion. They will be committed. They will have fun. This system will make them love football.
Please, leave your comments. Engage. Download the Playbook. Sign up for blog updates. This is gonna be fun! Keep Chucking it around the yard!
Erick
