Making co-coordinator coaching roles work to an advantage

By Keith Grabowski | Posted 11/11/2016

For years, the idea of co-coordinators made no sense to me. I felt that putting yourself in that situation naturally led to a power struggle and a lack of definitiveness as to who has the final say.

So in order to make a situation like this work, it is necessary to define who has the final say and who is the play caller, setting clearly defined roles and structure.

Looking at the work done prior to each game planning meeting, the coach in charge of the running game focuses solely on how we will run the football. He doesn’t work at all at this point on the passing game. The opposite is done with the coach in charge of the passing game. Then the ideas are brought together as a staff with all coaches adding ideas.

If you were to walk into our meeting room while my coaching staff is going through our game planning session, you probably would not be able to identify the coordinator. At any time, a different coach is on the board explaining an idea and strategy for defeating an opponent’s scheme.

This is made possible by an understanding that we will work within the system that we have set up and build a menu of plays that works with our player skill sets. In addition, we operate with an understanding that if an idea is not used, it should not be taken personally. We will consider everything so we can get a lot of ideas and develop a game plan that best fits our personnel and system.

In these meetings, we go through our personnel groups first. We create a list of groups in the order we feel we will use them from our best personnel versus this opponent to the least favorite.

We then talk about formations. Each coach give his ideas, and we see where there is agreement and how we can fit run and pass game ideas together.

Based on this discussion and watching examples on film, we then create a play menu of our base game plan. We then fit all of this into a practice structure and use our Coaches Edge Game Planning System, which will script our plays we enter into our game plan board. The system ensures we will get each play on our board the proper repetitions to be prepared on game day. In the session the next day, we handle our situational needs in a similar fashion.

On game day, there is plenty of input between series and a discussion of what is happening and where we should look next takes place each time the offense is on the sideline.

Having two coordinators is an advantage because with the work divided in half, the running game and passing game each receives more attention to detail in the planning process.

The structure is horizontal until a decision must be made, then it’s top down from the coach who has the role of being the head coordinator. What we create with this system is a group of coaches sharing ideas to help us win and feeling they are empowered to do so.

Keith Grabowski has been a football coach for 26 years, currently serving as an offensive assistant and technology coordinator at Oberlin College in Ohio. He previously was a head coach at the high school level for eight years and the offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach at Baldwin Wallace University. Grabowski serves as an advisor for several sports technology companies. He is a columnist for American Football Monthly and writes his own blog at thecoachesedge.com/blog. He’s the author of “101+ Pro Style Pistol Offense Plays” and five other books available on thecoachesedge.com and operates Coaches Edge Technologies. Follow him on Twitter @CoachKGrabowski.

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