He is a teacher/coach, and his brother is a big college OC. He gets a lot of his schemes and plays from his brother and then simplifies for small high school stuff.
He said most of the small high schools already play this way because they have so few players. They can't afford much contact in practice, and a lot of players go both ways.
The big magnet football schools are in the minority in terms of overall numbers.
The coach went to a big school and was like from 5th grade on he feels like all he practiced was hitting, but the game is a lot different now. With all these option/spread offenses he said its more like a lacrosse practice, which is ironically why he has such a small team as lacrosse tends to go year round and have a lot of his players.
It features John Gagliardi, a college head coach for 64 years, nearly all of them at St. John's University in Minnesota. He won 4 national championships and had an overall record of 489-138-11. His teams didn't tackle in practice.
we didn't tackle to the ground or cut block but in pre-season everything else was full go. Once the season starter it was a lot of running through plays at half speed and memorizing what the other team was going to try and do. Almost no hitting.
In my 3 years there we lost 4 games and played against 7 guys that went on to play in the NFL (a few of them for quite some time, including some guys from Lacrosse, WI).
John was way ahead of his time; almost everyone practices like that now. It was very attractive to me as I was coming off of a major shoulder injury and everywhere else was live contact, full pads Mon-Thursday and walk through Friday. Only guys that didn't have contact were the qb's; John had a famous quote, something along the lines of "why do the qb's avoid contact? Don't the other guys have moms that are worried about them too?"
Of course, knowing John he probably threw a few "shit, Christ" in there as well.
I think Coach G is one of the most fascinating coaches ever.
I would love to hear more from you on many aspects of his style.
* Did the players respect him
* Did the full contact of the games surprise the players as to the physicality of the game
* How did a 2nd or 3rd string player get to move up if there was no hitting. Especially on defense ( say if a 3rd string guy was a ferocious hitter and the starter was not)
Sorry for the follow up but man..you played for a legend,
Did the players respect him
Absolutely. Everyone loved John. Not everyone liked his son Jimmy (who probably shouldn't have been on the staff, to be honest).
* Did the full contact of the games surprise the players as to the physicality of the game
Not at all. By that point in time, if you can't block and tackle you can't play. Since we were in shoulder pads and helmets in practice, we could still work combo blocks, trap blocks, etc. and we did almost everything full speed in pre-season camp.
* How did a 2nd or 3rd string player get to move up if there was no hitting. Especially on defense ( say if a 3rd string guy was a ferocious hitter and the starter was not)
This was tougher. Our 4th and 5th string guys were better than the starters at most of the schools we played (including some D2 programs in North and South Dakota) and we had numerous players (including me) that were transfers from bigger schools. Honestly, John knew where his bread was buttered and the local kids from St Cloud and the surrounding areas got the first shot, and then the seniors. There were definitely some issues and hard feelings with this, especially from kids who came in from out of state. He lost a few of his really good assistant coaches because of it, as they had recruited a lot of good out of state players and most of them sat on the bench and got really pissed.
I have to finish with one last thing--if someone was a big hitter, it showed up in practice. To me, the most overrated thing is the big knock out hit, which really isn't even good fundamentals. The real good tacklers tackle like Pete Carrol on the Seahawks teaches it and drive through the guy's outside leg while wrapping up the legs. Believe me, we had plenty of guys that could hit hard. UW LaCrosse did as well, including a guy that played MLB in the NFL for about a decade.
Awesome stuff
I work with one of your starting DE/LB - Scheck - from that era. What position did you play, etc.? I keep telling him there is a Johnnie on the ND board, and I think Scheck graduated in '97 as well.
very good player; legit D1AA ILB that played D3. He and Jeremy Rohndorf were excellent players at ILB and Andy had the best memory of anyone that I had ever met--he used to get up at the nightly tape session during pre-season practices and recite the names of all the freshman that he had met since practice started. Amazing recollection.
Been fine over the years. No Full contact just means you aren’t tackling to the ground. You can still fit up, wrap up, and run your feet with good form at full speed and never bring a guy to the ground. Does it still happen on occasion? Yes. But you aren’t punishing kids to the ground repeatedly. You have to supplement situations where you may have to go low or wrap and roll with daily drills. Even with these restrictions, we haven’t seen a dip in our defense’s performance because we work on tackling daily and are still full speed and aggressive during team time. We just have our kids know the difference of how we tackle our own guys vs another team.
Because a lot of places would call what you do full contact, even if you don't take them to the ground.
I'm with you, if you are driving through the guy, moving your feet and wrapping up, that's 95% of it.
We called it the quick whistle.
But my understanding is that full pads and any contact at full speed (whether you finish the tackle or not) is limited, and they are pushing for more shells and less contact in scrimmage situations, and that the tackling is left to the dummies and defensive drills.
limited (i.e., not full) contact, even at full speed. I'm sure different places use different definitions and terms, but good luck getting uniformity.
Personally, I think the key injurious actions occur around the legs and knees that occurs with tackling to the ground or low block/leverage situations.
Of course there's the usual caveats about using one's head or going to another player's head; however those are actions that coaches are trying to eliminate anyway (not that they still don't happen).
My opinion, however, is that these policies serve to reduce the # of potential injurious plays but not change the nature of play. That is, injuries caused by contact will still happen.
I understand the argument but you might as well not have practice if you cant have some level (more than 15 minutes) of full contact during the week. Preseason is even more important to develop some level of tissue toughness. I always has some bruising on my arms during preseason that went away during the season. This rule would mean I would get that type of bruising after each game.
I'd be curious on two things
1) who came up with the time restrictions; and
2) how would you enforce it? Does 15 minutes mean a team or an individual. If you mean as a team you are going to get kids hurt because coaches are naturally going to have thier starters with the contact time over backups.