Cardinals, Eagles, Ravens and Steelers, What Can We Learn From Them?
The Arizona Cardinals will be hosting the NFL’s National Conference Championship game after finishing a lowly 8-8 for the regular season. The Eagles, who only got into the playoffs because 14 planets aligned, 3 teams lost, and they beat the Cowboys (thank god!) in the last game of the season, were dead to rights, wouldn’t even be in the playoffs! Now they are traveling to Phoenix to play the Cardinals for the NFC championship!
The other #6 seed, from AFC, the Ravens, beat the Titans, though somewhat controversial, the bottom line is they are going to the championship to play the only remaining top seed the Steelers. So, what can we learn from this mess?
1. If your zone isn’t working, CHANGE IT! Translated to generic coach speak, if your plan isn’t working, you have to have plan B and the guts to pull the trigger and go to it. How many times were the Panthers going to watch Fitzgerald run between the corners and safeties before they got out of the zone or at least put a man on him! He had 180+ yards in the first half!
2. Tis better to take one step backwards and regroup, than to totally implode. How many easily intercepted passes did Eli Manning and Jake Delhomme throw while veterans Donovan McNabb and Kurt Warner took what the defense would give them and at a sack when they had too.
3. It’s the system stupid. For years I have watched the Baltimore Ravens and Pittsburgh Steelers dismantle opponents. When both played my Redskins it was painful to watch as they inflicted painful blows all night long. The players change, the systems work. Have a great system and plug your players in to execute it.
4. You have to play good enough to absorb a bad call. Don’t whine about the bad calls that you get, deal with them, move on, and play so good that the call’s don’t matter.
5. Anybody can be anybody on any given day. This is so true, especially in youth sports. You never know who is going to show up! A coach that can mentally convince his kids they are winners has a much more likely shot at winning than a coach full of superstars that never gel. We never have the best teams, but we believe.
6. Team defeats individual effort every time. It doesn’t matter who the stars are if they have no supporting cast. A star w/ a cast can thrive, a star on an island starves.
7. Offense wins games, defense wins championships. Defense, defense, defense. In baseball it is all about pitching and fielding, defense, defense, defense.
What did you learn watching hours and hours of playoff football?
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Conflict Resolution
I am putting this out there to try and determine how to overcome issues that come up all the time. At all levels of ball there is always more than one way to skin a cat. Different techniques for accomplishing this task, different ways to attack a situation, or different solutions to a problem that may exist. It seems everyone knows how to do this-or-that and everyone has a way to fix something. Often, there is more than one way to do something, and a conflict exists at the coaching level. How do we overcome this?
One of the most common things I hear parents and less experienced coaches tell their kids is to “keep your elbow up”. I used this only as an example, while this is not the worst advice in the world, it is wrong. The elbows should be relaxed and the hands high. Raising the elbow simple increases the swing plane and increases the time from the point the hands release to the point of contact with the ball. What we really want is hands to the ball as fast as we can with the most possible bat speed. This is accomplished by having the hands high, pulling with the lead elbow, and whipping the bat through the zone. Having the elbows relaxed facilitates this.
Another point of contention is the bunt, how to stand, should the batter square up? How should the feet be positioned, should they be running at contact? There are a number of ways to teach this, none in necessarily wrong, but everyone, including myself, thinks they know the perfect way to do this. I still see old school high school coaches to this day having their batters square all the way around and face the pitcher to bunt, this is wrong, but I see it daily.
But what do we do when there is a conflict between the coaches? The worst case is that one coach teaches it one way, and the other another. Then the kid is all confused. Should a coach who feels strongly about their position teach it w/o regard to the other coach? That seems counterproductive. Hopefully a strong manager will step in and make a ruling, but what if they don’t know for sure either?
I once had a 9/10 all-star team comprised of about 75% of players from my team. They were very good, they knew what to do and had been coached by me for 3 months. I had an assistant from another team who taught hitting differently than me. He was teaching an advanced method of hitting that I did not teach until the kids got to 11/12. Most of the 9/10’s had just started playing, so the goal was to keep them still and have them turn into the pitch. He wanted to teach them to rotate and explode right away, they couldn’t handle that yet, they weren’t at that skill level yet.
Even though I asked him not to continue it, he decided it was his job to teach every girl on the team a new way to hit in less than two weeks. Asinine. He screwed up every girl on the team’s swing and we went from scoring 20 runs a game to 3 or 4. Needless to say, we didn’t win the tournament. This is a tough situation to be in and one that often arises at All-Star time. Hell, I have daily battles w/ my regular season assistants, but that’s just it, we have battles, sometimes arguments even, but we work it out and everyone respects the other’s position, then we move forward.
I don’t have the answer to this situation. It happens in life every day. How many times have you been at work, come up with a plan, assigned tasks, and a week later, everyone shows up w/ whatever they felt like doing, or felt was best to do, rather than what the plan originally called for? You see this in the NFL all the time. When a team is winning they seem to flow like a well oiled machine, but when they are losing it seems the parts are fighting each other.
I guess this is what makes great leaders. Creating an objective, defining success, mapping a plan that offers the best path to success, and getting everyone on the team to buy into it. I have a friend who is a master at this, he is always positive, always encouraging, and always letting everyone know what they are supposed to be doing to achieve success. He is clear, simple to understand, and very motivational. Care to guess where his teams always finish?
Anyway, I guess my solution to any conflict resolution is listening and understanding, but making sure never to stray from the stated objectives. Where most coaches and leaders break down is never having clearly defined objectives in the first place. If we don’t know what we are striving for, how can we work to attain it?
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Arena Football Season Canceled
In my lifetime I have seen many leagues come and go. Soccer seems to be the most difficult to implement in our country, but the old Amercan Football League, the Extreme Football League, and countless others have come and gone. Today, we lose the Arena Football League. (I know they say they aren’t folding, but we all know that is BS).
This has a direct impact on our league because we are fortunate enough to host a family with a coach from one of the teams. He is not only in our Little League, but the kid played on our travel team as well. It is a tough business he chose, and he makes no excuses for it, they apparently move often. I am not that close with them, but I have spoken on occasion to them about this subject.
I don’t know what will come of the AFL, quite frankly, I wasn’t that big of a fan. It wasn’t really football in my mind, it was more like sandlot stuff more closely related to flag football than the NFL. It makes me wonder though, what about the NBA? What about the NHL? Both of those leagues have a number of teams in very small markets and exorbitant payrolls. The AFL had minuscule payrolls relatively speaking.
Today, we have no real idea what we will be doing tomorrow. Will we have a house? Will we have a job? Where will we be in 10 years? I was fortunate enough to receive a quote today from justsell.com that sums this up. It reads:
“A life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
Irish playwright and critic
When I read it this morning, I figured it was just more ammunition for me to use w/ my wife about all my prior business screw-ups, applying it to the AFL anyone affiliated with the organization should be honored. I agree. I don’t care if you like it or not, they stuck their neck out and gave it everything they had, win or lose.
I haven’t talked to our friend yet, but I am certain he isn’t sitting around whining about losing his job today. I bet he is making calls, networking, and making sure his resume’ is up to date. As the quote states, mistakes are honorable. As I tell my players, striking out only means you are one swing closer to a hit.
How do you handle your mistakes? Do you learn from them? Are they opportunities?
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Mr. Supplement Your Perfect Training Partner
For years muscle training was discouraged in baseball. They thought it would actually take away from performance. The athlete of today knows better. If you are going to be a top level athlete, you have to work out and you have to do weight training. Mr. Supplement makes you get the most out of your training legally!
VERY IMPORTANT: In my prior league we used to have the Washington Redskins strength training coach come out and speak to us. He was VERY adamant that weight training not occur until AFTER puberty. His position was that weight training for younger kids damages their growth plate. I have no idea.
VERY VERY IMPORTANT: thelittleleaguecoach.com knows NOTHING about weight training and does not pretend to nor do we wish to portray that we do. We know how to coach little kids and teach them the game of baseball and life’s lessons that go along with it. WE KNOW NOTHING ABOUT WEIGHT TRAINING OR SUPPLEMENTS OR ANYTHING. You are personally responsible for ANY decisions you make for yourself or your child. DO NOT DEPEND ON US, do your own research.
That said, Mr. Supplement seems to be a great place to pick up sports supplements such as Redbak, Muscletech, and Hydroxycut. During High School soccer training we used to use vitamins and endurance enhancers and they worked very well. We simply wanted to be able to train longer and get better, and the supplements seemed to do that. It could have been completely mental, but it worked for us as we were 1 goal away from a championship.
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Gameplan Your Season Like The Redskins Plan Their Games
How about them Redskins? 4-1 and 2-1 in their division with all 3 games on the road! In the NFC East, the best division in football, this is huge. But how do they do it? And what can we learn from it?
First, I don’t miss a single play thanks to my DVR and my NFL ticket subscription. This is still cheaper than the season tickets we used to have and better to a degree. Especially in January when the high temperature is expected to be single digits and we have three layers of clothes on.
I did not originally buy into Jim Zorn’s system. I hate the west coast system in general, but I do love Jim Zorn. Growing up, Kenny Stabler and Jim Zorn were my heroes because they were left handed. But a rookie coach on the Redskins with a new system? Oh no, what a recipe for disaster! Fortunately I was wrong as usual.
But how do they do it? Meticulously and methodically. When I think of the west coast offense I think pass, but the ’skins have a balanced attack. They use the run and the pass to keep opponents on their toes, but in the end of the game, they run, run, run, and dominate with ball control.
Why are they able to do this? Because they have a plan, they wear down their opponent, then they take advantage of them in the last 15 minutes as they are dead because the ’skins have controlled the ball the entire game. It is like a boxer that jabs, jabs, jabs, then in the 7th round or so begins big shots that have a detrimental and disastrous effect.
What can we learn? Many things, but the focus of this post is the big picture. It is easy to get caught up in the moment and forget about the big picture. When the ’skins were down 14-0 in the first quarter they could have panicked and thrown the game plan out the window, but they stuck to their guns and in the end were successful.
How does this apply to the big picture? Because it doesn’t matter if you win in the fall. The fall is about building skills and readying players for the spring. The steady and methodical repetition of each player should be the focus of the league. Getting kids to understand all the positions on the field by having them play all the positions when it doesn’t matter enhances their overall understanding of the game. Then they know what others are supposed to do in a given situation and reaction becomes intuitive.
Batting the entire lineup gets every player more at-bats and moving players up a division when they are borderline improves their skills. Enduring excruciating walks while developing pitchers and watching kids steal while a new catcher evolves is part of the process. Win/Loss records are unimportant. Anyone can win in the fall, it is the spring that matters. Developing skills and understanding of the game should be the focus of the fall season. This goes for every level of play.
What do you do to help kids learn in the fall that you may not do in the spring?
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Misc. Ramblings September
Finally Football season is in full swing
Finally football all weekend long! The college kickoff last week was a tease, but now the real thing, the National Football League! My Redskins looked very lethargic, but they had a formidable opponent in the likes of the defending super bowl champions. Hopefully next week will be better. Could be worse, I could be a Patriots fan! Talk about trouble!
Baseball Playoffs Start Soon
I love pennant races, but man, I can’t wait for the playoffs to start! There is nothing better than a game seven in the playoffs. That’s when you see players like Randy Johnson pitching relief!
Story Ideas
Writing for a living is really fun! I am beginning to understand how to do it and it is quite a pleasure. I fire story after story after story off for MyTopiaCafe.com. Very interesting stuff.
$500/day
That’s my goal! It shouldn’t really be that hard either. That is only one ebay sale, 10 stories, 5 sales, whatever, it isn’t that hard to do. You want to make $100K/year? You don’t even have to make $500/day! Bet when you looked at the figure you said, “I can do that”. What is your goal? If you make just $100/day you make $36,000 per year! Want to make $100K? You need make only a little more than $300 every day. You can do that cutting grass can’t you? Sounds a little more attainable when you look at it like that doesn’t it?
Fall Season Starting
The fall season is starting and I will be coaching three teams! Senior softball, major softball, and minor baseball. With my younger boy starting T-ball next year it looks like I will have three teams for quite a while! I guess I can kiss any semblance of life goodbye.
My Friend Said Spend Time With Her
My friend said to sit down and watch some TV with my wife no matter how tortuous. Said that’s what she wants, but she won’t tell me. I don’t know, is he right? Is it really that simple? It can’t hurt, I spend every waining minute in front of the laptop, maybe a few with her would be rewarding.
Tahoe has Defect
Found out our Tahoe has a defective air conditioning system that will cost $2,750 to repair! Hard to justify that kind of money going into the winter! Have to have air conditioning in Florida though, guess we will be trading it in next spring. I better get making my $500/day!
Local Rules
Every league should have its own local rules that are more restrictive than Little Leagues. My favorite for the fall season is no pitcher shall pitch more than 2 innings. This forces the coaches to develop pitchers.
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Misc. Ramblings
Image via Wikipedia Clinic On Saturday
We are holding a softball hitting clinic on Saturday and I can’t believe the response we have gotten! Guess we will have to find some additional help! At least the kids are still pumped to play.
Own It
What do you do when you screw up? Do you try and hide it? Avoid it? Or do you own it? This is one of the best lessons we can teach our kids through sports. Own it! Make an error? Apologize and get a hit! Get picked off? Make a diving catch. Own it and make up for it!
Fall is Coming
The fall season is coming! As frustrating as it can be, it is still one of my funnest times. Our fall season is instructive and not competitive. It gives the kids a chance to move up a division and get experience there for next year. The problem is, other leagues keep teams from the prior year together or play too competitive in the fall. In the end, all our kids get better and in the long run, that helps us to excel.
Fall Means Football!
Woohoo!!!! Time to waste away every Sunday for 3 months! Go Redskins! Can you say Jason Taylor? Too bad Sean Taylor isn’t there as well. They would be hurting people very bad! The NFC east is still the greatest division in football. Always has been, always will be. Of course, I hate the Cowboys, hate the Eagles, and dislike the Giants, though I dislike them the least of all.
Fall Means Playoffs!
The fall means baseball playoffs! There is no better time in baseball than the pennant race and the playoffs. Does it get any better than a game seven? Where else will you ever see a team’s ace pitch relief on 2 days rest? I love the fall!
Endless Summer
Of course since I have moved to Florida we no longer have a winter. Yeah, I know, it gets down into the 50’s every once in a blue moon, and people here wear layers! But, really it never gets all that cold. Gotta love it! I moved here because when I was visiting, on a January 15th, I remember the date, I was in shorts, playing golf w/ aligators lounging on the fairway! It doesn’t get much better than that!
Time to Get Busy Again
I have been off and had much time to catch up on chores around the house, online, and here at the site. Very nice! But I am done! I need to get back on the field and start working! Hopefully I will pick up some more individual training clients to keep me busy until we start practicing again.
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