Although Cincinnati is obviously not on the Pacific coast, it’s where Bill Walsh was an assistant coach for the Bengals and coach Paul Brown when he built what has become known as the West Coast offense, long before he led the San Francisco 49ers to three Super Bowl championships in the 1980s.
In the off-season between the 1998 and ’99 seasons, I read Bill Walsh’s book, “Finding the Winning Edge.” Out of curiosity, I looked online to see what it was selling for this past January. You can buy a used copy for between $100 and $2000 (that’s not a typo – two thousand bucks).
That book became the organizational template for Mason County football. Coach Walsh laid out a blueprint for process and attention to detail that would fit not only a football program but also most organizations or businesses.
Much has been made of Nick Saban’s references to the “process” in January as the Crimson Tide completed another national championship season. Bill Walsh’s book emphasized the process and working to improve each day. Without question, winning and success are the objective. But his focus was a long-term view of success as opposed to getting caught up in evaluating success or failure based on the most recent game played.In 1998, we had won our last three games to finish 4-6. I liked the idea of focusing on long-term success because I felt I had more control over working hard to get better every day and doing what was right.
In the short term, a lot of things occur, good and bad, over which you have little control. While planning for contingencies is definitely part of most jobs and certainly coaching football, circumstances can drive football coaches nuts. Most definitely, focusing on the process is the way to build success and one of the ways I have been able to keep my sanity coaching high school football.
Coach Walsh is also known for developing the play script – the list of plays that a team will run at the beginning of the game and in critical situations by down and distance, field position, etc. His position was it is better to make as many important decisions before the game when there is more time to think calmly and critically. Sun Tzu’s “Win the war, then fight the war” was soon hanging in our weight room after I read it in Coach Walsh’s book.
The script has become a critical part of our preparation, game plan and winning on a weekly basis. When the players ask to see the script on Sunday night, that is a good sign that shows they understand how important our preparation is each week.
Scripting our plays allows us to be extremely multiple with formations and motion while running the same plays over and over. It takes several hours on Saturday and Sunday, but we try to anticipate the best way our opponent’s defense should align to the different sets and motion and subsequently the best way to attack them with what we do best.
That makes it pretty simple on Friday night. I asked Coach Chris Ullery, who has been our offensive coordinator, “Are we getting what we expected?” If the answer is yes, we keep going as planned. If the answer is no, we are going to attack the area that is weaker than we had anticipated.
This idea of preparation and process has gone well beyond the script. In the off-season, we benefit a lot by breaking down our games versus opponents that we will play again. That gives us a big head start when we get up on a Saturday morning after only a few hours of sleep and begin the weekly game prep process.
We use our scripts for which plays we will practice each day. We plan as much as we can for each practice so our time is spent with players working and improving, as opposed to coaches thinking and making decisions. We plan the pregame, what video we will watch, what we will do in meetings, and so on.
The preparation is time-consuming work, but it dramatically improves productivity and performance.
Coach Walsh’s blueprint has led to the creation of job descriptions for every coach in our program from the Little League program through the varsity. At the top of each job description is our mission statement: To pursue excellence each day in every detail, to build a championship-caliber program and mentally tough young men of the highest character, discipline, and determination.
One of the toughest things I do, but one of the most important, is trying to keep our entire program on the same page. All of our drills are on one PowerPoint and available to all coaches in our program, again from the younger kids through the high school. Our playbook is available for all levels through PowerPoint and Hudl.
Bill Walsh believed it was important for him to share that documentation with his owner. For me, that means my principal, athletic director and superintendent. I like doing that. It communicates to my bosses that regardless of what happened this past season, we have a plan and we are continuing to work for improvement each day.
When I told my wife Stephanie what the book was selling for, she was ready to sell our copy. “Finding the Winning Edge” is the best organizational/process book of its kind. We better keep it, but if she decides to give me a job description, I am probably in trouble!
This column originally appeared in the Maysville Ledger Independent and was edited by Zack Klemme.