Football Camps and Lazy Coaches

I raised three boys, got them into college football, and dealt firsthand with the system—navigating the way it was set up, while cringing at its pitfalls and vast amount of easily fixable malaise that permeates sports coaching at the high school and college levels. This perspective leads to me to a question for today’s “elite” coaches:

So, you think you’re a big-time college coach. You’ve earned your way into a job that’s taken a decade or more to obtain, while bouncing from school to school. You’ve moved your family around, pulling up roots and attempting to grow new ones while giving your family some semblance of normalcy in a new town. You have earned your position and now hold the control of kids’ futures in your hand, but are you worthy of that weight? Have you put any energy into the value and efficacy of your coaching or of your evaluation process and your athletic camps? Or do you, like so many across our nation, bring in numbers of kids, give them the same basic metrics to get through as quickly as they can, measure their times and distances, their height and weight, how far they can jump and how quickly they can run the 40? If it is the latter, this will hurt, but you are doing every kid that comes through your so-called camp a disservice. Camps have long been money makers, because they bring in large numbers of kids for fake tryouts, while the coaching staff is concentrated on the few starred players, whom they woo like a young boy does his first date. Coaches fall over backwards to bring in the anointed ones, those lucky enough to be tall or fast, but not necessarily even proven in football. Many starred players are only fast on the track,  but are treated like royalty while tens of thousands of kids across the country, with the same dream of playing professional football are used as filler while, you give wristbands to those who jump the farthest or run the fastest and the rest of the masses are essentially there to pay the overhead you incurred by putting on the camp.  All of you should be ashamed for being so myopic.

Firstly, get the basics right coaches. You owe that to all the kids who put in the hard work, day in, day out to get as far as they have. If your lazy staff can’t be bothered to accurately put a measuring tape on the wall so that every single kid you measure ends up 1.5 inches shorter than he really is, you suck. Every kid you measured ends up upset before they even grace your field. If you do it on purpose, your idea to incentivize through making kids feel cheated is not very effective.

Big, prestigious camps are the worst. There are too many kids. There are too many age groups. The big kids want to be noticed so badly that they push the smaller, younger kids out of line to get more reps but for some strange reason, you don’t have  staff competent enough to stop the bullying. Do you think a father who hears that his son was pushed out of line so some bigger punk could get more reps is going to come back to your prestigious camp? Why did you bring in so many kids that your coaches and tangential staff can’t pay attention to what is happening in the lines you put the kids in? You can do much better.

While some metrics are important and a good judge of certain aspects of talent, most camps, including the richest schools, don’t take the time to put kids under the same kind of pressure while trying out as the kids face in an 11 on 11 game. Why does this matter so much?

If evaluating a WR or RB, a TE, or an LB, DB or SS, you put those kids, as all camps do, in a line and have them run against ONE defender, you’ve created a test that is only partially effective in measuring what you need. Without the pressure of an entire offense bearing down on a defense, you will never see how a kid acts under extreme pressure.

Real pressure changes everything. I’ve seen so many tall kids and fast kids run a route and burn their defender in a one-on-one situation who can’t do the same thing under real pressure. I’ve seen DB’s and LB’s overlooked because they are 2/10^ths of a second slower than the 4-star athlete that everyone is fawning over, but who folds under real pressure almost every time. If a kid gets stars for speed, stars given by different groups who have no homogeneous standards across the nation and perhaps those stars came from running track and not football, then of course he’s going to burn a slower defender under almost no pressure.

But take that same defender who gets no love from the coaching staff and put him in a game with 22 bodies on the field and watch if he can read the offense and start moving towards where the play is going to be before the play gets there. When 22 bodies are moving in different directions, the pressure increases by a factor of 10. A defender who is not duped by offensive trickery, not just from the offensive player he’s guarding, but from the rest of the offence and even those players on his side who may have read the play wrong, that defender is worth his weight in gold because that is football IQ and your boring metrics and quick looks at players at most camps will not measure the IQ of a particular player.  You don’t measure heart that only comes out in games under pressure. You don’t see how well a player takes a hit or better yet, how he tackles. You don’t bother looking at a player in the millisecond before a defender hits him to see if he turns away from the hit or turns into the hit to plow through it. The US Army did a study on this topic, and found that these things are measurable, visible, and that they do make a difference.

College camps tend to measure and merit height, speed, and agility. Unfortunately for all the really, really good players who are a few inches shorter, who have put in years of dedicated practice, who have honed their skills and their minds to be great overall players, too damn bad. College coaches are too lazy to test your football IQ. They will never know if you can soar through the air like a ballerina when you catch the ball or defend against a ball, under real pressure. College coaches drool over starred prospects because they have gotten attention in articles and magazines. It really doesn’t matter how immature or conceited the player is—it’s all about money and following the herd. This is proven time and time again as college coaches make offers on the same starred players while forgetting about all the years of hard work and dedication that other talented players spend, trying to attain their dreams and make a difference. College coaches owe hard-working, athletic children more and they can and should do better.

Michael Stiffleur