I am hoping to do this segment- "Old School Coaches" on a regular basis. I have put together a crew of retired coaches, who were highly successful in their high school coaching career. My hope is to post one question to them every two weeks.
Bob Anderson- Williamsfield HS
Bob is retired as boys basketball coach at Williamsfield. At a school of only 89 students, in 45 years, his teams won 732 games along with numerous tourney and conference championships. His 1997 team made it to the Elite 8.
Mike Cooper- Ottawa HS
Mike is the retired Athletic Director at Ottawa HS. He was varsity girls basketball coach for 22 years, as well as sophomore football coach for many years. He was inducted in the the IBCA HOF.
Tim Engebretson- United HS
He was varsity head football coach for many years at United HS. He also has coached basketball at different levels. His 2005 team won the Illinois State Title, and Tim is in the Illinois Football Coaches' HOF as well as the United HOF.
Greg King- Sterling HS
In his head coaching career at Sterling, his football teams went 78-28, and had 10 straight play-off appearances and 5 conference titles. In addition to his success as a football coach, he was inducted in the Illinois Athletic Director's Association HOF.
Mark Massey- Clinton HS
Mark was the head volleyball coach at Clinton for 38 years. His teams won 818 games, and twice took second in State. He is in the Iowa Volleyball HOF and Clinton HS HOF.
Thom Sigel- Rock Falls/Rock Island HS
Thom coached basketball for 32 years. His teams won 502 games, and he has the distinction of winning the State Title at both Rock Falls and Rock Island. Thom is in the IBCA HOF.
Mike Tracey- Alleman, UTHS, Moline HS
Mike coached football at Alleman, UT, and Moline for over 20 years. By most, he is considered the premier football coach in WB6 history. His teams won 140 games, and twice finished second in State. Mike is in the Alleman HS HOF and the Illinois Football HOF. He was also selected Illinois AD of the Year.
Greg Bennett- Lewistown
Greg coached many sports at Lewistown. He had teams go to State in girls basketball and football. He is in the Illinois Football HOF as well as being in the Illinois Basketball Hall of Fame. He is know for his commitment as a coach and his high energy level.
My Question
If you had a chance to watch another coach's practice, what things would make you feel they ran a good practice? In other words, what are the characteristics of a good practice?
Mike Cooper- Ottawa
When I watch a practice I am looking for several things:
1. Pre-practice routine to get the players working on basic skills before actual practice starts. If you don't have a pre-practice routine kids will just sit around or take shots that they wouldn't do in a game.
2. Coaches on the practice floor pre-practice working with players on skills or talking to them about expectations for practice or upcoming games. If coaches aren't present during pre-practice, players will not get the most out of it.
3. I want to see coaches that are organized with a detailed practice plan and groups established for each drill. Each drill needs to have meaning that will carryover into a game. Don't just do drills to take up time, doesn't take long for players to figure it out.
4. If you are going to be scrimmaging vs. Zone at the end of practice make sure you doing lead up drills that can be used when you scrimmage. Don't do man to man drills and then spend all your time working against zone.
5. Coaches must have energy, all the time. You can't coach sitting down. After each play or when there is a break, all coaches need to coach their position. Give feedback all the time. If kids know you are watching them they will pay better attention to detail.
6. I want a coach to pay attention to detail. If they let little things go in practice they will come back to hurt you in a game.
7. Make drills competitive! Keep score as much as you can. Losers of a drill should have a physical consequence, push ups, jumps or conditioning.
8. Lastly, I want to see a coach finish on a positive note. Hopefully you have worked so hard in practice you don't need to condition at the end. Kids think of conditioning as punishment so if you don't have to finish with conditioning it will allow you to finish on a positive.
Tim Engebretsen- United
I was always impressed when the whole team was engaged. I think that is a little more difficult in sports with many participants. If you get everyone involved it seems like the practice is more successful. In football if your non starters can run an excellent scout team you gain a substantial advantage. I believe it was Carthage that made shirts for their scout team. "We run your offense better than you." Getting that type of commitment from your whole team is great.
I also love to see when a coach gets their players to buy into the fundamentals on a daily basis. Donn Damos and Carrie Clayton did such a great job of that with United Volleyball. They would spend hour after hour on fundamentals and their players were always actively engaged. The results showed.
Of course if your having some fun it makes achieving what you want so much more possible. There are many ways to incorporate fun activities into your practice. I was amazed how some coaches can do that and still accomplish their goals.
Greg King, Sterling
One of the 1st things is they spend a lot of time on fundamentals. In football it comes down to blocking, tackling and running hard. Drills that can enhance these is one of the first things I look at. I learned this from the master himself, Bob Reade. The 1st 45 minutes of almost every practice was working on these things.
A key part is also that players are getting repetitions. It would drive me crazy when kids would be standing around in line. I would tell coaches to split them up into 2 or more lines if they had to. This would also include quick transitions between drills. Coaches would have been out there and have there drills set up. If it’s a new drill teach it during pre practice. Practice minutes need to be cherished.
The other thing I would see is there is competition! Going through drills is sometimes repetitive and boring. When you add competition to a drill it can bring out the best…and sometimes the worst in players.
These would be the things I believe I would see.
Greg Bennett- Lewistown
Over the years, I had the opportunity to observe numerous coaches leading practices in a multitude of different sports. I saw many excellent practices, many average practices, and some practices that would have to be classified as bad.
In general, the excellent practices, the ones that really caught my attention, were ones that influenced me to alter the way I was doing things. The best of those practices tended to have certain factors in common:
Organization: The superior practices I attended were always very organized. They moved smoothly from activity to activity, with little or no time wasted.
Energy/Enthusiasm: Players and Coaches were not simply “going through the motions.” They were actively involved in what was going on and seemed somewhat fired up to be practicing.
Focus: Players and Coaches were very focused on the task at hand. They worked diligently to improve skill sets, prepare for upcoming opponents, and to execute individual responsibilities.
Competitiveness: The truly great practices always had a high level of competition. Drills, scrimmages, skills contests, etc., always pitted one person or group against
another. Players “got after it” in an attempt to surpass their teammates. The victors were often rewarded in some way, while the vanquished often found themselves running a few extra sprints, shooting a few extra free throws, or putting away the equipment.
Evan Massey- Galesburg
Practice Plan- I would expect to see them have a written practice plan. A coach is a teacher, you have a lesson plan.
Early Interaction- When players come out on the floor, coaches should be interacting with them. As they are doing pre-practice or warmup exercises, I would hope that each coach is going around and talking one on one with players as they warmup.
Tempo- Practices need to have a tempo to them. Drills don't drag out. You work on a skill, get your repetition in, and move on. There are not long pauses between drills. Practices have an inertia.
Limit Standing- The Bob Knight rule was "plus one." What that meant was if you were doing any drill, you take the number of players actively doing the drill and the players standing waiting their turn. The number of kids standing and waiting should never exceed the number doing the drill plus one. So if you are doing a drill involving four players and you have eight waiting, you need to divide the drill into two groups.
Drills Don't Teach- A coach can't just run a drill and think it teaches itself. Coaches must constantly be giving feedback and instruction for a drill to be effective. And drills need to be constantly changed to work on specific weaknesses.
Coaches Engaged- As the team does drills or scrimmages, all the coaches should be involved. Maybe it one coach focused on a particular thing like blocking out, or maybe another encouraging or instructing players when they come out. You don't want to see coaching just standing talking to each other.
Intensity- The intensity and competitive level needs to be game like. I always believed in the first four minutes of a game, you usually saw which team had the most intense practices.
Finish Upbeat- I liked to do a drill at the end where the team was competing together against time. The hope was that they would finish practice with a win.
Bob Anderson- Williamsfield
I feel if it's a good practice, I think it should cover the 4 basic parts of the game, offense, defense, transition and situations. I think all of the assistant coaches should be responsible for at least one area of the game and watching to make sure that skill was done correctly by all the players. If not being done correctly, he should take that player to the side and show him how to execute it the proper way. This was something I really felt made our practices better when we involved the asst. coaches more. I think the coaches also enjoyed it more.
I would also like to see the players communicating and moving from drill to drill and not losing valuable time. They say that a person can tell how a team wants to play a game by watching them practice.
I used to set up my practices by putting 5 categories at the top of a sheet of paper. The 5 areas were loosen and fundamentals, next was transition, then defense, then offense and lastly situations and conditioning. Then I would come back and put the drills under each category that I felt would cover what i wanted that day. Then I transferred that onto 5x8 cards to take on the practice floor with me. I used to divide the amount of time spent in each category as follows: 15 mins. for loosen and fundamentals, 15 for transition, 30 for defense, 30 for offense and 10 for situations.
Thom Sigel- Rock Island
I have been accused of having some OCD tendencies and pretty detailed and organized. So I think one of the things that would stand out even as a young coach would be how efficiently they used their time. I started out as a coach who would plan practice almost down to the minute.
However, two things would happen that bothered me. The first was moving on to the next segment because it was time to move on, even if we needed (and should take) more time to work on whatever it was. The second situation that would occur was taking the time to work on something past the allotted time and then getting off the schedule I had set.
As I progressed, I set up practice plans on what we wanted to accomplish and didn't need to be set to the schedule. We could adjust as needed throughout practice to accomplish the goals for that day. That might mean not using as much time on something if we didn't need to.
I think one other aspect of practice I put more emphasis on as a young coach would have been how hard they were working, running sprints, and conditioning. However, as I became more experienced, that part of practice probably wasn't as important as when I was starting out. I think we can get players to work hard and compete, as well as get conditioning, just in the organization of the drills and segments of practice.
While I still believe those aspects would impact what I thought about a practice, they would be interwoven into what I think I would see in a good practice.
ORGANIZATION: There should be a plan. As the season goes along, the players would also know any routines or drills and can get into them seamlessly. If there are assistant coaches and managers, they are aware of the plan and are top of their responsibilities for the day. I also learned to incorporate more conditioning into the practice so we didn't have to spend time running sprints for conditioning.
FOCUS: If there is a focus for the day, such as defense, etc., the players would know that, and I would see drills and segments related to the focus of the day. The players would also be focused on what they are doing. One way to help that goes back to the organization. Drills and segments should try to have as many players engaged as possible to eliminate standing around. Another way to increase focus, get players to play hard, and have them compete is setting up competitive segments with competition involved.
ENERGY: There is the saying that "the head coach and the best players/leaders can't have off-days at practice." So it starts with the head coach "bringing it" and setting the tone that what we are doing today matters. The organization of practice can also help infuse energy by mixing up the order of segments or changing up drills that work on the same things. Sometimes we would use music to simulate crowd noise even though it often just helped 16-18 year old play with a little more energy.
TEMPO: We used this term a lot to get players to let them know we didn't want down time. This pretty much is a result of the first three. If the practice is organized with segments that included conditioning, keeping players focused without the down time and having competitive segments, it would help with the energy in practice. This would make me feel that there is a good tempo to practice. And ultimately, that means it would also be an efficient use of the practice time.
No comments:
Post a Comment