Learn across disciplines, across sports, across eras. This piece shares quotes from David Halberstam's The Education of a Coach about the origins of Bill Belichick. Like him or not, he's garnered eight Super Bowl rings, six as head coach and two as defensive coordinator. His biggest coaching influence was his father, but other keys included his high school and postgraduate year coach, and Ted Marchibroda. It's worth the read.
"Find out what the other guys do best-which is what they always want to do, especially under pressure in a big game-take it away from them, and make them do things they are uncomfortable with."
"What football men...admired about him more than anything else was his ability to create a team in an age when the outside forces working against it seemed more powerful every year..."
"Modern media created a Me-Me-Me world, whereas he insisted on a We world."
"His ego was about the doing it and fused into a larger purpose, that of his team winning. It was never about the narcissistic celebration of self..."
"He wanted to bring his players to the highest level of preparedness, hand them an edge in a world where everyone was so evenly matched that any edge might determine the outcome."
"...where the people who took care of the tiniest details tended to be rewarded for it...he was the king of Post-It notes." (Note the pencil...)
"There is no celebration of any victory in the past..."
"He does not allow complacency."
"...he held on to the most elemental job of all: looking at film."
Of Ernie Adams (Belichick's Belichick) "I was impressed by everything about him - his intelligence in all areas, his almost unique knowledge of football, his work ethic, and his innate decency."
"...all offenses have weaknesses. The job is to find them."
"In addition to the usual pitfalls - the injuries sustained by key players, the coveted recruits who went elsewhere, the bad calls by referees, there were other forces, like politics." (This references Bill Edwards and Belichick's father Steve Belichick fired from Vandy)
"The most important thing any young coach could learn, he said, was how much football meant to them." - of the athletes at the Naval Academy
"And by watching him, I learned to see the game, how well prepared you have to be and how quickly your eyes have to shift." - Bill Belichick on learning from his father...remember how Pete Newell said a "coach's job is to help players see the game"
"...fame for an assistant coach was not usually regarded by the head coach as a good thing..."
“…they challenged you, challenged you to reach for more, to work harder than you thought you could and always to think for yourself.”
“He understood from the beginning the one great truth about film, that
the more you ran it, the more you saw.”
“…collegial courtesy was not just important, it was mandatory. Coaches tended to look out for one another.”
“You could always give him more-he always wanted more. He always wanted to get better.”
“Players respected coaches who could help them play better and who knew things that they didn’t know.”
“Yet he knew that in film there was power…he had been taught by a man who was the best.”
“What I didn’t know, I could learn - one of the things I had working for me was that I knew how to learn.” (Reminiscent of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the Bowdoin professor who commanded the battle of Little Round Top at Gettysburg...)
“The impression he made on colleagues…open-minded, incredibly hardworking, absolutely committed to being a little better every day, and knowing a lot more than most other young coaches.”
“He had this rare ability to place himself in the other team’s position.”
“You’re not here to be their pal. You’re here to coach them, and that often means telling them things they don’t want to hear about doing things they don’t want to do.”
“You had to look at your players and defend every player to the rest of the organization.” (The mantra of the Al Davis Raiders)
“…the more you knew at every minute what you were doing and why you were doing it, the less time you wasted and the better coach you were.”
Ray Perkins on Ernie Adams, "a football mind that was almost apart from other football minds, that he had a very rare gift of being able to look at film, to be able to understand it all, being able to dissect it, store it away, and then be able to call it up whenever he needed it."
"He was driven by his brain power, and his fascination with the challenge that professional football represented to the mind of the coach as well as the bodies of the players."
"He was more analytical than most other coaches, and he never lost that analytical ability, not even in the most tense moments of the game." (Post hoc game analysis does no good.)
"...character and a willingness to fit into the system would be of the essence, not just ability." Belichick would not sell free agents with wine, surf and turf, but with football.
"There had been an attitude among all too many players, he had decided, "that I'm a starter, I own my job, you can't bench me or even rotate me." (Belichick despises entitlement...)
"The younger players came to understand...the better you were, the harder you worked." (That was Belichick's view of life in the NFL as a filtered version of the Al Davis method.)
"...as they got the kind of players they wanted...the players themselves were beginning to buy in and to enforce a winning culture."
The Education of a Coach restates what you expect...hard work and commitment, especially if blessed with insight and aptitude, produce excellent if not always spectacular results.
Lagniappe (something extra): To err is human, to finish divine. Versatile finishing rocks.
Lagniappe 2: Spacing drill.
Lagniappe 3: New app from Phil Handy. Not sure I want to invest but the samples are promising. "94feetofgame" available from your app stores.
