I wanted to write this blog post because we are going to be hitting the dog days of Winter training. For the Football S&C coaches out there, this is a hard crash in the off season. For me as a director, I needed to predict this and to put my staff’s well-being first and foremost to be able to push spring ball and keep momentum going. 

A typical calendar year with football S&C is pretty loaded. Jan-February Winter Training, March-April Spring Practice, May Discretionary, June-July Summer Training, August-November Season, and December-January Postseason. Part of me misses the seasonality; I really do. The other part of me remembers the extreme fatigue felt of working Monday-Friday 5am-7pm and having to be in for the weekend for recruiting and make-up workouts. 

This, to me, is the central and most important component of the tasks of a good Director or Head S&C Coach. I understand the eventual dip in morale of your staff. Everyone is bright eyed and bushy tailed in January; let’s see your staff before a lift in February on a Thursday struggling to do basic level things needed of a coach. The real tell of a great run staff is how much enthusiasm a staff has when it really counts. 

The most important thing is to remove the fluff or garbage during the day that makes you feel validated for just being busy. Inventory your day: is there something that is needed or just unnecessary? For instance, how many training groups do you have? Can you get the same job done in half the training groups, why are you running 6 training groups a day? Is your team performing well because of or in spite of?

Are there five coaches standing around with one person training? That group time needs to go! Or you need to send your staff home because you cannot schedule properly. Do you make your staff do the stuff you don’t want to do, like breakfast checks or punishments? To me, this is not coaching; this is babysitting and creates distention between players and coaches. The end result is a bunch of athletes with no changed behavior and a bunch of assistant S&C coaches who are burnt out going into spring practice. 

In reality, where coaches are usually most fatigued they need to be most present. If they are completely unmotivated to be at the facility when the most risk is present. It is also the most important part of the training process. Stamina is probably not the right term – it is conservation of energy for when it is needed most. As a director, I want my staff locked in for when it counts. For that to occur, I need to be strategic with what tasks they have to perform. 

Having the stores when it counts or finishing a period of the calendar year with focus and excitement are really a matter of being put in a position to do so. Asking the head coach if all my staff needs to be here for one recruit on a Saturday in January is setting up your staff in February to be good. Asking yourself: “is my staff best served doing this potentially remedial task or saving their energy?”

It starts with prioritizing what is important. A great S&C staff doesn’t make an athlete better through osmosis or time served. A great S&C staff understands and zeroes in on the biggest windows of opportunity. You probably only have 32-40 training sessions in the Winter and Summer to make someone more resilient, more powerful, faster, stronger, better body composition, better conditioned. Ensuring each of those training sessions is optimal comes down to prioritizing your staff’s time. 

If you are director or head, ask yourself: where is the biggest window of development in your calendar year? Then ask yourself: what do you need from your staff to be ready for that period? After you do that, ask yourself: what are the biggest impediments to us being ready for that window? Then remove those impediments and address the staff. I need this period here to be where you bring the most value!