Throughout my life, I have been incredibly disorganized. I didn’t keep anything clean. I rarely threw things away. And I always thought I would be able to find it when I needed it.

Teachers would tell me how I needed to get organized, but I also heard how it was a sign of my creativity. There was always someone who would validate my perpetual mess. Sure, my parents would make me clean my room. But they’re pack rats too. My family hasn’t parked the cars in the garage since I was about 5 years old. Every year, I bought brand new notebooks and dividers and meticulously labeled them. A different color for every class. But by week 3, things were falling apart. And forget about keeping a planner. I forgot homework assignments, lost them when I did them, neglected to study for tests, everything.In college I kept a messy room, but my notebooks did get better. I was able to keep track of tests. I would liken it to being a functioning alcoholic. I was horribly disorganized, but I kept it under just enough control to get by. As I started my teaching career, my disorganization started to affect my work, but not so badly that I couldn’t get by. I would occasionally lose a student’s test (and even a whole class set of tests). I was always forgetting to turn some sort of paper work in to the administration by the due date. But they weren’t capital crimes, and I slid by. [Read more...]

When you’re sitting around preparing your defensive strategy, you’ve got to look at the schedule. I think sometimes we get so caught up in the first game, we don’t even look beyond, to the next 9 or 10 games – and where we want to be during those games.

Now, I’m not talking about looking at your schedule and deciding what type of defense you’re going to run. Its June, and if you’re just now making decisions about your base defense, its getting late. But we have to decide the order of installation, the balance between pressure and base defense, which coverages are going to be most crucial, and how much of this stuff we love so much and want to run so badly, is too much for kids who have a million other things going on besides football.So, we have to start with week one, and what we need for that team. And then we go deeper. For example, if we are running a 3-5-3 Defense, we need to decide if we’re going to need a 4-man front at all for Week 1. It sure would be nice to just stick with the 3-5 all year, but is it realistic? And if we’re running the 4-3 Over, I don’t think we can get away without running an Under Front as well. Unfortunately, if you’re playing a team in Week 1, the Under Front is a total waste until you can actually use it. That happened to us this past season, the Under Front was really only used in practice until about Week 4 when we finally saw a Tight End – otherwise all were doing with it was setting the 3-Tech to the other side. [Read more...]