For the last several years I’ve
been taking notes and snapping photographs with the idea that I’d one day write
my coaching book. Not sure if it would be fiction or nonfiction, I always knew
that there was some sort of book in my coaching adventures.
So to start me on the path to
hopefully one day will be a book about coaching football on the small college
level I am going to write weekly blog essays about a variety of related topics,
mostly about how our season is going, my memories of past seasons, current
topics in football (like concussions). But mostly I want it to be about coaches
more so than players, and how our lives are dictated by football and how it has
affected our lives, both our football lives and our lives away from football.
Everyone sees on the internet or on
ESPN the millions of dollars and glamorous lives the coaches at schools like
Ohio State and Alabama make. That does not pertain to most of us who coach
football.
I’m writing
this at the end of our third week of practices. We have a scrimmage this
Saturday then our first game the following week against Franklin College. Time
wise summer practices have been a week longer than in the past, something that
has really made time drags a bit. The reason for the extra week is we no longer
have two a day practices. That is because of the Concussion prevention that the
NCAA has implemented, only having one practice a day keeps the players from
banging their heads too often. And it’s a good rule in principle; however, it
has had its negative effect. Because we had to be here a week earlier to still
get in the same amount of practices as we had in the past, we had to feed our
players and staff for a extra eight days. An extra eight days at $3600 a day.
Up in Columbus with the Buckeyes that type of cash is peanuts, but to the
hundreds of DIII schools around the country it’s a lot of cash. But the NCAA
often doesn’t think about the little guys too often, we aren’t on ESPN on
Saturday afternoons in the fall.
Survived the worst week for
coaches. Although the NCAA has outlawed two sessions a day for players they
haven’t done it for coaches. For teams like ours that start the season with 160
players, we spent the first week with the kids coming out in two waves, First
the older kids for two and a half hours, then the freshmen and transfers for
two and half hours. That’s five hours straight for the coaches, standing on the
hot and hard artificial turf in the sun. Ouch! We only had to do it for a week
this season, but it seemed like a lot lounger.
For us older coaches it was a handful of Advils or Aleves before going
out to the field. I’m too old for this shit! But as my old friend and fellow
coach John Perse always said, it is the life we have chosen.
A few notes
about my photographing skills…there are a lot of pictures on this blog from the
last several seasons of Thomas More football. My friend Dave Hostetler, who
once was a pretty good football coach himself, shot most of the better ones.
Digital cameras were made for people like me, who take a hundred pictures and
maybe six of them turn out to be good. I think you will be able to distinguish
between the pictures Dave has taken and those I have taken.
