Re-Thinking my zone approach.

Well another season is in the books. I foolishly thought I might be able to keep some content up on this site while the season was under way but...well....I was way wrong.

A couple of thoughts before I begin to dig into the evolution of how I teach zone.

1) I got a flip camera to film practice and I will never NOT film practices again. Mainly focused on drill work through the summer, then only filmed the team time (as I ran into a problem with breaking it down, battery life through the course of practice, and watching JV players run through drills.) Here from our spring scrimmage:

2) I really learned that no matter how good a teacher of something you are, very few kids will remember what you taught the year before. I will not make that mistake again.

Ok so...Zone.

Last season, as seen in the previous posts on the zone concept, we employed a true zone concept (ie step and feel pressure and react.) And we got pretty good at it, so I figured we were on to something. Well, what happened is that group of lineman graduated.

I was pretty sure I could teach the next group to get off and feel it just like the last. But what I needed to learn was a system that was player neutral, ie we would have success regardless of the Jimmy's. If we had great jimmy's we would explode, if we had average jimmy's we could get consistent yards. So what this year ended up being was a bastard system, one where we evolved from a straight man scheme to a combo team.With that said. I want to emphasis that we did not get there entirely this season. But for next year we laid a ground work, a teaching method, and a thought process that will lead to it.

Part of coaching is learning how to do something better, and trying to teach the next group kids who are completely different from the last group.

More to come on how we are gonna do it better....