Congratulations! You have just been hired as the head football coach at XYZ high school. XYZ is a new school that has never had a football program before. You have been hired to establish a successful program from scratch. 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 access this link for some good insight by Bill Parcells on the process of turning an organization around. https://hbr.org/2000/11/the-tough-work-of-turning-around-a-team Your assignment should be at least two pages in length, double-spaced, and follow APA format. BOOK 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 analyzing schemes. The results of off-season testing for speed, strength a.

1. Congratulations! You have just been hired as the head football
coach at XYZ high school. XYZ is a new school that has never
had a football program before. You have been hired to establish
a successful program from scratch.
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 access this
link
for some good insight by Bill Parcells on the process of turning
an organization around. https://hbr.org/2000/11/the-tough-work-
of-turning-around-a-team
Your assignment should be at least two pages in length, double-
spaced, and follow APA format.
BOOK
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

2. 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

3. 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 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

4. 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,
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

5. 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
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.

6. 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.
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.

7. 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
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.

8. 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.