Describe how you would organize daily practice for the offseason. Incorporate the XYZ situation into the six steps of instructional planning discussed in Chapter 9. Be sure to use your own words when defining how you would execute each step of the process in order to develop XYZ into a successful program. Please click here for some good insight by Bill Parcells on the process of turning an organization around. Link https://hbr.org/2000/11/the-tough-work-of-turning-around-a-teamBOOK Create a unique 10 slide PowerPoint (not including the title page or sources) on how you would organize your offseason. Must include at least 4 sources. I encourage the use of pictures and videos within your assignment. In addition, animation and voice to demonstrate specific techniques, tactics, and other aspects are recommended. Six Steps to Instructional Planning*  As with building a puzzle, using a systematic approach can help you put together your season plan. After you have articulated your philosophy, you can begin planning for the season ahead by following a simple six-step procedure called “Six Steps to Instructional Planning”:  Step 1: Identify the skills that your athletes need  Step 2: Know your athletes  Step 3: Analyze your situation  Step 4: Establish priorities  Step 5: Select the methods for teaching  Step 6: Plan practices *Reprinted, by permission, from R. Martens, 2004, Successful Coaching, 3rd Ed . (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics), 237.  Step 1: Identify the Skills That Your Athletes Need  The first step in organizing the season plan is to identify the specific skills that the athletes must be able to execute for the team to be successful, as shown in column one of figure 9.1. This list of skills is based on the technical and tactical skills in this book as well as the information on communication and physical, character and mental skills from Successful Coaching, Third Edition. In the following steps, you will be examining the list of skills and adding others if necessary. Step 4 of the planning process will then explain further how you can put this list to work for yourself.  Step 2: Know Your Athletes  The next step in the planning process is to work with your coaching staff to refine the list of skills that you are planning to teach, based on an evaluation of the strengths, weaknesses and ability of the athletes in your program. For example, assume that you want to run an option offense because you think that it creates strategic advantages on the field. Before installing this offense, you and your staff must evaluate the ability of the quarterbacks (both the starter and alternates) in your program to determine if they have the speed, quickness and decision-making ability to run an option offense effectively. As you learned previously, this evaluation takes place in many forms. You should study videotapes of the previous season’s games, focusing on the strengths and weaknesses of the individual athletes instead of analyz.

1. Describe how you would organize daily practice for the
offseason. Incorporate the XYZ situation into the six steps of
instructional planning discussed in Chapter 9. Be sure to use
your own words when defining how you would execute each
step of the process in order to develop XYZ into a successful
program. Please click
here
for some good insight by Bill Parcells on the process of turning
an organization around.
Link https://hbr.org/2000/11/the-tough-work-of-turning-around-
a-teamBOOK
Create a unique 10 slide PowerPoint (not including the title
page or sources) on how you would organize your offseason.
Must include at least 4 sources. I encourage the use of pictures
and videos within your assignment. In addition, animation and
voice to demonstrate specific techniques, tactics, and other
aspects are recommended.
Six Steps to Instructional Planning*
As with building a puzzle, using a systematic approach can help
you put together your season plan. After you have articulated
your philosophy, you can begin planning for the season ahead
by following a simple six-step procedure called “Six Steps to
Instructional Planning”:
Step 1:
Identify the skills that your athletes need
Step 2:
Know your athletes
Step 3:
Analyze your situation
Step 4:
Establish priorities

2. Step 5:
Select the methods for teaching
Step 6:
Plan practices *Reprinted, by permission, from R. Martens,
2004,
Successful Coaching,
3rd Ed
.
(Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics), 237.
Step 1: Identify the Skills That Your Athletes Need
The first step in organizing the season plan is to identify the
specific skills that the athletes must be able to execute for the
team to be successful, as shown in column one of figure 9.1.
This list of skills is based on the technical and tactical skills in
this book as well as the information on communication and
physical, character and mental skills from
Successful Coaching, Third Edition.
In the following steps, you will be examining the list of skills
and adding others if necessary. Step 4 of the planning process
will then explain further how you can put this list to work for
yourself.
Step 2: Know Your Athletes
The next step in the planning process is to work with your
coaching staff to refine the list of skills that you are planning to
teach, based on an evaluation of the strengths, weaknesses and
ability of the athletes in your program. For example, assume
that you want to run an option offense because you think that it
creates strategic advantages on the field. Before installing this
offense, you and your staff must evaluate the ability of the
quarterbacks (both the starter and alternates) in your program to
determine if they have the speed, quickness and decision-
making ability to run an option offense effectively. As you

3. learned previously, this evaluation takes place in many forms.
You should study videotapes of the previous season’s games,
focusing on the strengths and weaknesses of the individual
athletes instead of analyzing schemes. The results of off-season
testing for speed, strength and agility also provide useful
information during this evaluation. Summer workouts, including
weightlifting sessions as well as camps and passing leagues,
also reveal the ability of the athletes who will be competing
during the season. Using all this information, you and your
coaching staff need to add or delete skills on the list that you
began developing in step 1, based on the ability of the athletes
in your program.
Step 3: Analyze Your Situation
As you prepare for the season, you must also weigh the external
factors that will both guide and limit you. Budgetary issues and
related fund-raising options will affect scheduling, training
facilities, practice equipment and professional development
opportunities. Administrative and community support will
influence goal setting and expectations. Teaching loads and
staffing structure regarding assistant coaches will set
parameters for both off-season and in-season programming.
Clearly, then, many factors influence your planning.
Step 4: Establish Priorities
Steps 1, 2 and 3 of the six steps to planning describe general
factors that provide an important base of information regarding
your players and your program. Now in step 4, you must make a
decision about where to start and how to progress in the
teaching of skills. Refer back to figure 9.1 and notice the three
columns under “Step 4.” You are asked to evaluate each
essential skill based on two factors—teaching priority and the
athletes’ readiness to learn. To assess the teaching priority, you
must think of your overall scheme and plan for the season and,

4. for each skill, ask yourself, “Is this a skill that I must, should or
could teach?” Then, you must think about each skill and your
athletes and ask yourself, “Are my athletes ready to learn this
skill?” Take some time now to rate the skills on your form.
These ratings will divide the skills into three groups. Skills that
are A-rated are obviously priority skills that you must teach
immediately and emphasize. Include B-rated skills in the
planning process and teach them periodically. Finally,
depending on the progress of the season and of the athletes, you
can incorporate instruction for the C-rated skills. After you
have finished your A, B and C ratings, you will want to create
an installation schedule, as discussed in “Developing
Installation Schedules,” to ensure that during the season you
will teach all your A-rated skills, most of your B-rated skills
and some of your C-rated skills.
Step 5: Select the Methods for Teaching
Now that you have a complete installation schedule, you should
go through the schedule and determine the methods that you
will use in daily practices to teach the skills that you have
decided are necessary to your team’s success. As you learned
previously, the traditional approach to practice emphasizes
technical skill development and usually involves using daily
drills to teach skills, interspersed with group and team drills,
whereas in the games approach, players learn to blend decision
making with skill execution as you add the elements of
pressure, competition and game-day nuance to the performance
of essential skills. The traditional method might cover all the
techniques of football adequately and may even cover most of
the skills that players would typically use during games, but it
does have at least two glaring shortcomings: First, traditional
practice sessions by their very nature emphasize techniques at
the expense of tactics, and, second, they involve too much
direct instruction. Typically, a coach explains a skill, shows the
players how they are to perform the skill and then sets up

5. situations in which the players can learn the skill, without
placing that skill in the context of game-day, tactical decision
making. Recent educational research has shown that students
who learn a skill in one setting, say the library, have difficulty
performing it in another setting, like the classroom. Compare
this finding to the common belief among coaches that today’s
young players don’t have football sense, the basic knowledge of
the game that players used to have. For years, coaches have
been bemoaning the fact that players don’t react as well to game
situations as they used to, blaming everything from video games
to the increasing popularity of other sports. But external forces
may not be entirely to blame for the decline in football logic.
Bookstores offer dozens of drill books to help coaches teach the
technical skills of football, and teams around the country
practice those drills ad infinitum. If drills are so specific,
numerous and clever, why aren’t players developing that elusive
football sense? Perhaps just learning techniques and performing
drill after drill creates not expertise but the ability to do
drills. An alternative way to teach football skills is the games
approach. As outlined in chapter 1, the games approach allows
players to take responsibility for learning skills. A good
analogy is to compare the games approach in sports to the
holistic method of teaching writing. Traditional approaches to
teaching students to write included doing sentence-writing
exercises, identifying parts of speech and working with
different types of paragraphs. After drilling students in these
techniques, teachers assigned topics to write about. Teachers
used this method of teaching for years. When graduating
students could not write a competent essay or work application,
educators began questioning the method and began to use a new
approach, the holistic method. In the holistic method of
teaching writing, students wrote compositions without learning
parts of speech or sentence types or even ways to organize
paragraphs. Teachers looked at the whole piece of writing and
made suggestions for improvement from there, not worrying
about spelling, grammar or punctuation unless it was germane.

6. This method emphasized seeing the forest instead of the
trees. This forest-versus-trees approach is applicable to teaching
football skills as well. Instead of breaking down skills into their
component parts and then waiting until game day for the
athletes to put the pieces together, you can impart the whole
skill to the team and then let the athletes discover how the parts
relate. This method resembles what actually occurs in a game
more than the traditional drill method does, and learning occurs
at game speed. These latter two concepts are crucial to
understanding the games approach. This method does not take
you out of the equation; in fact, you must take a more active
approach. You must shape the play of the athletes to get the
desired results, focus their attention on the important techniques
and components of the game and enhance the skill involved by
attaching various challenges to the games played. You can use
the games approach to teach almost any area of the game. For
example, instead of having quarterbacks and receivers work
endlessly on route timing drills and one-on-one drills against a
defender, you can create games around pass routes and reads,
and encourage competition.
Step 6: Plan Practices
At this stage you should sketch out a brief overview of what
you want to accomplish during each practice for your season.
You will pull all the information that you have gathered from
the previous steps. Your installation schedules should also help
you greatly at this stage in the process. Figure 9.4 shows a
season plan for the games approach, using a 12-week season
plan that includes a two-week period for postseason playoffs
(for a sample traditional approach season plan, please refer to
the
Coaching Football Technical and Tactical Skills
online course). Although this season plan was created in
isolation, you can use it in your season planning. You may find
that you are more comfortable teaching blocking using the

7. traditional approach but that the games approach works best for
teaching pass reads. Use these season plans as templates to help
you to create the plan that works best for you and your team. In
the sample season plan, you will notice that the first two weeks
are completed. After the games begin in the season, the practice
plans are more open ended so that you can focus on problems
that may have occurred in past games and can develop practices
according to your game plan (we will discuss this further in
chapter 11). You will also notice that we have identified some
technical and tactical skills that are important to teach during
those later practices. Keep those skills in mind as you are
further fine-tuning your practices during the season. The main
objective of your practices at this point is to focus on your
game plan, but as time permits you should fit in these key skills
to help your players continue to learn throughout the season.
Keep in mind that this season plan was based on the skills in the
book rather than on an individual installation schedule.
Although this season plan provides a good example, you should
use your installation schedule and the information that you
gained in the other five steps of the process to create a detailed
plan tailored to your program. After you have developed your
season plan, you can further refine individual practices. We will
help you do that in the next chapter by showing you the
components of a practice and providing a sample practice plan
for the games approach.