The Game Remains the Same

This particular blog may be a little of the “preaching to the choir” variety, but I do think the topic merits discussion. What am I talking about? Right now it is the tendency of those coaching or playing men’s football (at any level) to discount what we’re doing in the women’s game as irrelevant from a scheme perspective.

I’ve coached at the high school varsity level, the men’s semi-pro level and of course women. Recently on a men’s Facebook forum, the topic of the Fly Sweep came up, and how best to block it, what to run with it, etc. Now, if you’re familiar with us at all, you know that in the last two years we’ve probably run more fly sweeps than any non-scholastic team around (just because I know of a couple schools that run it exclusively), and we’ve had a lot of success with it. So I felt pretty comfortable in talking about the Fly in depth.

Some of the responses I got were along the lines of “that stuff won’t work with men”….which is funny, because I got those very schemes from Saddleback Junior College, which,  the last time I checked doesn’t have a women’s football team.

I also remember a DB on the men’s team I was the OC of in 2012 talking smack just before we went to team about how he “tore up” our offense during 7-on-7 and that “this isn’t the women, Coach”….OK, so noted. The defense didn’t stop us that night, or really any other, that whole season, and we won the league title that year (it was a nice daily double for me – winning the national championship with the women, and a league title with the men).

So what’s my point? That the game is the same, no matter what level you coach. I coach my individual female OL the exact same way I coach my male OL. The schemes I use are virtually identical, and the next time I coach a men’s team, that playbook will look a lot more like my women’s playbook than vice versa. My latest men’s playbook is based off of stuff I picked up in the women’s 2007 season and I refined a little bit to my own taste. The new playbook that I’ll use will look much more like what we’re doing with the women now with some expanded ideas for the future.

I think the only allowances you need to make in differing levels of football are in understanding and practice time. I wouldn’t teach as many concepts to a youth team as I would an adult team – there’s a difference in understanding. I don’t think you can have as many adjustments on a men’s and women’s level as you can on a high school level – there’s a huge difference in practice time.

What IS interesting is that I think in general, women can handle more variety in concepts and assignments than men can, from a mental standpoint. Women are like sponges and will willingly soak up whatever you’re teaching them…..although some long-time vets need to be careful that they don’t fall into the same trap that men usually do – that they know everything there is to know about the game.

In all honesty, I think that coaching high school ball is the best mix. You get to actually mold someone as a person and as a player. The time you spend around them all year makes for lifelong friendships in many cases. The level of coach you go up against each week keeps you on the very top of your game.

You get that sometimes in the women’s game; there are staffs out there that keep me awake at night trying to figure out how they’ll react to what we do. There’s a couple in the men’s game too, but not usually. Part of the reason is that in the men’s game you rarely get film. If you get one game you’re lucky, and that was usually shot by someone’s girlfriend and it focuses on him the whole game, including when he’s waving on the sideline…..So there’s not a whole lot of specific game planning going on, because you don’t have a whole lot to go on. It’s more of just doing what we do and seeing if our best stuff is better than their best stuff.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that there’s an awful lot of good things going on in the women’s game. There are some excellent staffs, some really, really good football players – not just athletes like there were 10 years ago, but actual good players. No one coming into the women’s game as a coach should look at it as being easy in any sense – it’ll take hard work to get near the top, and if you’re not on point the players will call you out. And that’s a good thing!

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Interest in our November camp is really taking off. We're almost to the point where we might need to bring in extra coaches - not quite, but it's close. Please go to the Facebook event page here. If you have any questions at all, please let me know! 

On a congratulatory note, one of the instructing coaches, Lori Locust, just won a men's national championship with her team, the Central Penn Piranhas. Way to go Coach Lo!