learning to teach the want to learn
And other preseason thoughts
Welcome to learning to teach, a weekly newsletter where I explore different strategies and topics to help us all become better teachers of the game of football.
My biggest need as a coach is to better my ability to communicate. In other words, I need to become a better teacher. The internet is full of knowledge, but you’ve got to be able to absorb it and then communicate it. I hope this newsletter can help you do just that — so if you aren’t subscribed, you can do so below.
The football season is here and it is busy. And so you can’t do everything and you can’t focus on everything. You must be selective with what you spend your limited time and energy on because it’s so easy to solve problems that don’t help you move the needle.
And at the same time, as I talked about last time, you must get used to producing lots of bad because that’s how you get to the good.
But unfortunately, we don’t have time for that as football coaches. Win now or lose your job. And over the time I’ve spent coaching, I’ve done a lot of bad coaching. I’ve created poor practice plans, poor game plans, and neglected put players in positions that made success difficult.
So this year, I want to focus on two major things that I believe are two of the most important levers you can pull as a coach:
Teaching the want to learn
Putting people in positions to succeed
These two levers are “obvious” but basic truths are often obvious because they are the most important.
Let’s dive in.
Teaching the want to learn
This statement is true: all great coaches are great teachers, but not all great teachers are great coaches.
And it took me a while to learn this, but a recent article helped me see a new perspective on this view:
You must first teach the desire to learn.
I have seen the evidence of this in my own players. The players who want to learn do so. The players who do not want to learn do not learn.
And that’s because the factors that determine whether or not someone learns something start with the learner, not the teacher. Great teachers must know that learning starts with the desire to learn.
I highly suggest reading this article if you want to think more about this. In that article, the writer briefly talks about Kobe Bryant’s process of motivating players based on their personalities.
This is an obvious thing, but the obvious things are what we need to be reminded of the most.
Putting people in positions to succeed
This topic isn’t something that I have neglected, but more so something that I must constantly remind myself of because it might be the most important factor in a team’s success. This factor is one of those that is worth a lot of time and energy because it affects the game much more than other things.
Like the quarterback’s primary job is to put the ball where it needs to go, the coach’s primary job is to put people where they need to be.
Nothing tests the creativity of the coach like finding roles for the players on his team.
And this is one of the most rewarding things to see. There have been many players over my time coaching that didn’t start well in one position but then ended up in another only to see great success.
The greatest example of this that I have seen was two years ago in that tough 2020 season.
I was the offensive coordinator for the JV team and we had no quarterback a week before our first game. In other words, I was panicking.
We were practicing the corner route and one player ran a route, caught the ball, and then he threw me the ball back.
And I knew immediately we’d found our quarterback. That player had played cornerback for us as a freshman the year before and had been missing all fall camp because he didn’t have a physical. That quarterback went on to throw for 500 yards and 6 touchdowns in the 3 games we played that year.
I learned then the power of putting the right people in the right place. It’s such an obvious job duty, but it takes a lot of time to get good at. You must see a lot of players and start to understand what makes a good player and what doesn’t.
There are obvious cues like size, strength, and speed. And usually, those work great at helping you place players where they need to be.
But there have been too many times where the obvious position for a player wasn’t his best. And usually, those changes are the most impactful.
Final thoughts
Football is beautiful for many reasons, but one of my favorites is watching the change from the beginning of the season to the end.
You enter the season with great expectations and watch as they prove to be true or not.
And when you’re coaching every single day and solving those daily problems, it can be easy to lose focus of the greater issues at hand. But this year, I want to enter the season with a great focus on the things that matter.
This year, that’ll be learning about what makes each player want to learn and making sure I am creatively thinking about how each player fits on the team.
Until next time —
Emory Wilhite
Other Reading:
The story of one man’s ideas that changed how you think about the game