You've been doing... WHAT???

Get Ready To Freak Out...

I've been pretty busy figuring out the last 8 weeks or so of my teaching year, enjoying Spring Break (sort of), and learning some great stuff. What great stuff, you might ask? OFFENSE! Weird as it may seem, I've been really, really enthusiastically boning up on my offensive knowledge recently, for a couple reasons:

1. I need a break from defense. There needs to be balance, or the attempt at balance.
2. It's been really interesting.
3. As a future HC (someday... ?) I think it's pretty important to know exactly what you want on both sides of the ball and how you want it to happen.

Future HC?

Yeah, it's one of my goals to be a header some day. I'm not desperate to do it, I'd rather be a DC for a while and accumulate varsity experience underneath a man who's a legend around California, waiting for the right job, right position, right situation to present itself. I've a buddy who's desperate to be a HC, which isn't necessarily a bad thing in my mind, but I'm fairly confident that what will happen is that he will end up putting himself into a bad situation for his first gig. I want to be in control of what situation I put myself in and I want to make sure that when I do take that leap, I'm as ready as I can be (Not to be mistaken with ready, I don't think anyone's ready for their first header position).

Being ready implies having a complete vision for your program and what you want to do with the offense and defense. I think that it's totally cool for a HC to run the defense and have an OC that calls the plays, in fact, that'd be my preference in a perfect world. However, coming into a new program I think that it would be easier and more feasible to have a DC who runs your defense while calling your own plays on offense. Eventually, I would want to find an OC who can call, organize, and teach the offense the way I want and transition to the defensive side of the ball.

So, What's The Offense?

Well, taking a page from some particularly successful playbooks, I'm pretty sold on running the split back veer as my offense. I like triple option football because of what it does to the defense and it's big-play capacity, I like that the traditional split back formation forces the defense to adjust to a tight end, I like that your passing game is still relatively intact. If you watch De La Salle of Concord, they run a very simple, very execution-based split veer offense and do it very, very well. When Coach Lad took over at DLS, he went around to his friends who were football coaches and asked them what was the best offense he could run with slow, nonathletic smart kids. They all told him split back veer, so he learned it, and learned it, and learned it, created an atmosphere where his kids work their butts off year round, and mastered the teaching of technique to his players. Now, he has fast, athletic smart kids and wins state titles every two years or so.

My ideal situation for becoming a head coach would be one of these two options: 1-Taking over a private school with a losing program, or 2-Starting a program of my own. I'm going to do one of the two at some point, maybe even both. Heck, I could start my own program at a private and kill two birds with one stone. Regardless, either situation would be a great one for me to install the split veer as my offense.

Also, it would be run as an up-tempo, no-huddle offense to force the defense into very vanilla schemes, prevent adjustments, tire the defense, and have fun.

My Homework

What I've been reading to prep/educate me on my offense:

• Complete Book Of Triple Option Football by Jack Olcott
• Complete Guide To Football's Option Attack by Drew Tallman
• Coaching The Veer Offense by George Thole, Jerry Foley
• Homer Rice On Triple Option Football by Homer Rice
• The Hurry-Up, No-Huddle by Gus Malzahn
• Veersite.blogspot.com and it's ensuing message board.

And what's still to come/in the mail:

• Attacking Modern Defenses With The Multiple-Formation Veer Offense by Steve Axman
• Attacking Modern Defenses With Belly Option by Al Black
• Coaching The No-Huddle Offense by G. Mark McElroy

I've also been reading a lot of threads, new and old, on CoachHuey.com about the split veer, triple option, and double dive/inside & outside belly series. It's amazing how much knowledge there is in one place, I particularly want to thank Lochness, BLB, UCBears, and GroundChuck for their contributions, none of which have been small.

Busy, Busy, Busy

Holy Cow!

Getting this teaching job has been awesome for me in a lot of ways, but my goodness have I been slaving to catch up to where we're at in terms of grading and lesson plan prep, etc. I'll try to start re-posting regularly in another week or so, but I've got to get settled and into a flow first. I just submitted progress reports last night and approximately 45% of my kids have "F" grades because they're just not turning in work, which means emails home to parents all weekend, among other things.

On the coaching front, it's been a very exciting time as we've hired a new HC who is a top-notch coach. He's been a winner pretty much everywhere he's been, with several section championship rings and a state coach of the year award to his credit. With him he brings the Wing-T, complete with the winged helmet design and all, and a very interesting quiet intensity and confidence that are obviously indicators of why he's been so successful in the past. I'm hoping I can convince him to allow me to retain our 3-4 scheme, but if he insists on a 4-4 look, well, I've got some ideas on that, too.

Ramble: 'Growing Up'

When I became a man, I put away childish things...

So I got hired for my first actual teaching position last week, teaching at a nice school about 45 minutes away from where I live. Kids are great, school is top-notch, I'm going to get A LOT of help with my curriculum planning-which means less actual work for me than normal-and there's even attractive, young lady teachers! Plus, in 5 months I'm going to make more than I've ever made in a single year. Very exciting times for me, right?

Well, kinda wrong. As much as I hate being a sub, and HATE being poor, it's still fun to be able to go home and have NOTHING to do aside from play Call Of Duty, ramble on Coach Huey, read, etc. You don't get to live that way very long in your life. The "post-college" years of life are a pretty awesome time for me so far, but I know that they're not only limited, they're rapidly dwindling for me. It's a funny time, in my opinion, because it's the end of some parts of my life and the beginning of others, with pros and cons to each. I'm no longer allowed to be a poverty-struck slacker, I need to take up the responsibilities that come with employment, 'age', and supposed maturity.

But what is it to 'grow up'? I've been saying for years that I don't feel much different than when I was 14 (25 now). I still laugh at ridiculously stupid things, have a sense of humor that-if anything-is getting more unique, watch South Park with more regularity now than 8th grade, and will occasionally forget to bathe for a day or three. I pay income taxes, cook my own meals, and sometimes even fix stuff around the house. I'm put in charge of the education and growth of teenagers in a variety of capacities, and yet most of my immediate friends are recreational (whatever the hell that means) pot heads.

What I think...

I think that growing up isn't just getting older, it's realizing that there's pleasure in taking on things that are difficult or unwelcome. It's reaching a point where you aren't the most important in your world (Ignoring the typical 'erotic' or 'parental' love that springs to mind for most people) and doing things for other people because that's what needs to be done. It's taking the things that used to dominate your time and your world and beginning to moderate them and phase them out of your life at times.

I'm by no means an expert on all this. This is something that's been on my mind a lot recently, but really has been brought to the forefront with recent events. I read a book last week called Do Hard Things, which I'll definitely post about in full at another date, which is geared towards inspiring teenagers to reject the way that society treats them and seek out responsibility, and am currently reading another called Man's Search For Meaning, written by a psychologist Holocaust survivor about his experiences and what he has drawn from them. I got a job, a real job, the first of my CAREER. I've had a series of conversations covering a wide range of stuff with a wide range of people, most having something to do with me and my life. All in all, I've been stewing on being a grown up a lot.

Good gets better...

I think there is no best point in life, if you're doing it right. Every phase of my life just keeps getting better, and better, and better. That isn't to say it gets easier, because that's absolutely not the case. In fact, life has gotten categorically harder, it's almost ridiculous at times. But in overcoming greater obstacles and living up to greater responsibilities, there's greater satisfaction and greater contentment. As I enter this next 'phase' of my life, I'm friggin' excited. I'm ecstatic. I'm eager like you wouldn't believe. I'm all these things because I know that it's going to be the best time of my life, until I enter the phase after that (I'm presuming marriage, but who knows what order things will happen in), which will only be better. So, let the good times roll, but let's also appreciate and enjoy that the easy times have long since sailed.

Website Plug: Habitforge

I'm a procrastinator, I'm forgetful and absent-minded, and I have a weird social anxiety thing that prevents me from embracing certain situations. Anyone that knows me in person would be surprised by the last one because I work very hard at counter-acting it as best I can (Read: Be loud, outgoing, and shameless), but I have a hard time with the first two.

While cruising lifehacker, I stumbled upon an article talking about a website called Habitforge. Basically, it's a series of email reminders to keep you on your game regarding whatever you tell it to. For someone like me who has a bad habit of forgetting things and putting off other stuff, I need nagging. Since I don't live with my mom anymore, getting a nagging email reminder really would help me take care of the stuff I need to be working on. I'm pretty stoked to give this a try and see how it works for me.

http://habitforge.com/