This is a re-blog of a post from the summer referencing the AFCA National Convention, which is taking place in Louisville, Kentucky this week.
The moral of this story is…
Persistence…
Practice…
Hard Work…
Hard Work Pays Off…
If you are at the convention, enjoy and do me a favor. If you read my blog, and like the content… share it (youcandomore.net) with a colleague in the lobby!
You Can Do More… your brain is lying to you…. Don’t Believe It!
Heading into “clinic season” and with the AFCA National Convention convening in Louisville, Kentucky this week, I thought it was an opportune time to re-blog this post from a year ago.
This is the second of three posts referencing the AFCA convention that I will re-run this week. They were from quite a while ago, so they have been buried with 200+ more recent posts and can be difficult to find. All are still relevant.
If you are at the convention, enjoy and do me a favor. If you read my blog, and like the content… share it (youcandomore.net) with a colleague in the lobby!
You Can Do More… your brain is lying to you…. Don’t Believe It!
Jeff Floyd – youcandomore1@yahoo.com
It is always interesting to see how people in leadership positions (like coaches) handle these type of situations… just one week in and many examples have surfaced… do you blame the players, or hold yourself accountable? I thought it was an appropriate time to re-run this post.
I first posted this after the 2014 Academy Awards… thought it appropriate to repost today… All around sad day
Many of us find ourselves at this point of the year between summer workouts and before heading into the full-on madness that is “in-season”. It may be a good time to add some teaching/ coaching tools to your arsenal.
This is a post from a while ago, but with an added “bonus” . Coach Justin Meyers improved on the film grading tool that can be downloaded via this post, adding a formula to automatically tally all the “+” and “-” grades for each athlete, and use that to calculate their percentage grade. Great work, Coach!
You can download the new and improved spreadsheet at this link “2014Franklin“. I will add a video in the next couple of days to help explain the formulas used. The formulas that Coach Myers added are on the second tab, “FranklinGradeout”.
When I began this blog over one year and 300 posts ago, I made a decision not to solicit from you, my readers, or inundate you with ad banners on the site. I value your attention and time and do not want to impose or waste it.
Today I am asking something of you.
My soon to be (end of this summer!) daughter-in-law, Cambria Potter is the director and curator of an amazing project called 50/50 KC. This project will put an art gallery, made of two shipping containers, in an underdeveloped area in our city (Kansas City) called the West Bottoms.
50/50 KC is important for our city, for the arts in our city, for the West Bottoms, for the environment… and yes, too, important for Cambria Potter!
Last month Cambria
was awarded the Rocket Grant from the Charlotte Street Foundation to help develop this project. This weekend her team also launched a Kickstarter Campaign to help fund the costs of 50/50 KC, which is slated to break ground in one month.
You can click on this link to learn about Cambria and the project… there is a short (under 2 minute) video there as well: 50/50 KC Kickstarter
Here, specifically is what I am asking you… Visit, Back, and Share
The sharing element of this is critical. Even if this type of project is not your particular cup of tea, I am guessing that somewhere in you group of friends, colleagues, or cadre, there is someone that 50/50 KC would resonate with, and who would love to help in some way. Here are the links you can use to share:
Cambria and her team are also having a Kickstarter launch party (50/50 Kickstarter Launch Party ) next Sunday evening (July 13)… if you are in the area, please RSVP and join us. You do not have to attend the event to back this project using Kickstarter… but you will be able to back via Kickstarter at the event.
Thank you for your time… it is valued by me.
If you have any questions about 50/50 KC, please email or leave a comment!
You Can Do More… your brain is lying to you…. Don’t Believe It!
Jeff Floyd – youcandomore1@yahoo.com
Heading into the summer, now is a great time to talk to your athletes about goal setting…
“Curiosity killed the cat”
I think curiosity has gotten a bad rap.
The longer I am in this profession, as a teacher and coach, the more I realize the importance of this trait – curiosity.
I have been thinking about this since a conversation I had with my wife about traits she looks for in her sales force… one of the top traits – curiosity.
I want my players and coaches to be curious… to want to know why. Instead of just robotically obeying or reciting rules, I want them to have the curiosity to learn and understand why.
The more the players and coaches understand the why, and have the yearning to investigate and learn the why, the deeper their understanding will be.
Give me a curious, sentient human being over a robot any day.
Even better… give me a curious, sentient, athletic, hard working human being.
Related posts:
You Can Do More… your brain is lying to you…. Don’t Believe It!
Jeff Floyd – youcandomore1@yahoo.com
I really enjoyed reading the PrepsKC profile of Van Horn head coach, Jeff Tolbert… especially this part:
Tolbert said he has taken a lot from his former head coaches both on and off the field but one man’s influence stands out. “The top of that list is Harold Wambsgans,” Tolbert said. “I learned about how to be not just a good coach but to be a man. I admire him as much as anyone I’ve ever been around and I’ve been around some good coaches.”
As a young coach, I remember hearing coach Wambs (then at Shawnee Mission West) speak at a clinic and thinking to myself, “I want to be like him”. A couple of years later, one of my best LB’s at the University of Central Missouri had played for Wambsgans at West. Reading Coach Tolbert’s profile reminded me just how connected we all are in this profession.
Years ago, in 1980, Astronomer Carl Sagan had a show on PBS called Cosmos. It was a great show, and I enjoyed it so much that I taped the entire series on 14 VHS tapes (VHS tapes – not a DVR) and kept them until about a year ago!
In one episode, Sagan explains how humanity is all connected…. we are all made of “starstuff”… elements that were created when stars in the universe go supernova and explode.
“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”
And he was not speaking metaphorically… this is how the “heavy” elements in our universe are created.
I think it is very much the same in coaching… in us, we all have a little bit of the “stars” that preceded us…. Coach Tolbert has some of Coach Wambs “starstuff” in him, as do I… Fred Merrell, Terry Noland, Mike Foster, Roy Witke, Bill Feldkamp …. and many more have contributed their “starstuff” to me and countless other coaches.
Whose coaching “starstuff” has helped make you the coach and person you are today?
What “starstuff” are you passing on… what stuff of yours will be around 50 years from now?
You Can Do More… your brain is lying to you…. Don’t Believe It!
Related Posts:
Thanks to PrepsKC, the home of the Greater Kansas City Football Coaches Association for running this post on their site today. I hope you can take some time to visit PrepsKC, and “Like” this post!
Jeff Floyd – youcandomore1@yahoo.com
First… if you have not watched A Football Life, Vince Lombardi, I highly recommend it. It is a combination of information from the David Maraniss biography, When Pride Still Mattered, and John Eisenberg’s book about Lombardi’s initial year in Green Bay, That First Season. It has lots of great film footage, quotes, and overall coaching information. It is a genealogy/ history of football coaching.
A couple of quick takeaways…
Three words that many coaches have trouble saying… me included.
“I need help”
Is it that we are too proud to admit a fault, or have too much hubris and think we know it all?
I know that I am not good at saying or admitting that I need help, and at times it has slowed my growth as a coach.
Vince Lombardi began coaching at St. Cecillia high school in New Jersey. He won 5 consecutive state titles before heading to Fordham and then West Point to coach with the legendary Red Blaik. After a successful stint there, he went to the NFL as an assistant coach with the New York Giants (a pretty good staff…. Lombardi ran the offense and Tom Landry ran the defense).
Coach Lombardi overcame his pride during his first year in the NFL.
Coach Lombardi struggled adapting his coaching style to the NFL… and by some accounts was on the verge of being (in the words of Frank Gifford) laughable. Coach Lombardi was not afraid to admit he needed help. One evening during his first training camp with the Giants, he went to the room of Gifford and his room-mate Charlie Conerly and asked “What am I doing wrong?” They visited and shared some insight, and according to Gifford, “the football information just poured out of him from that point on”.
If Coach Lombardi can admit that “I need help”, then it is something we probably all could do from time to time.
John Madden realized he did not “know it all” after attending a football clinic where Vince Lombardi was speaking on the Power Sweep.
In 1962 Madden was coaching at a California Junior College. He walked into Lombardi’s presentation and had a seat in the back.
“How stupid was that… Vince Lombardi was talking about the Power Sweep and I took a seat in the back row like in church”
Madden shared that Lombardi spoke for 8 hours… ON ONE PLAY, the Power Sweep…
“He talked for four hours… we took a lunch break, then came back and he spoke for four more hours. I walked out of that clinic and realized that I did not know a damn thing about football”
When we think we “know it all” and stop being lifetime learners, we are probably in trouble.
Here are a couple of clips of on Lombardi teaching the Power Sweep… classic
I highly recommend this show, as well as the books, When Pride Still Mattered, by David Maraniss, and That First Season, by Jim Eisenberg.
Remember – You Can Do More… your brain is lying to you…. Don’t Believe It!
Jeff Floyd – youcandomore1@yahoo.com