How to Implement a Plan to Maintain Discipline in Sports | FBCP S11E08

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:41] Daniel Chamberlain Welcome back, coaches, this is the football coaching podcast. I am Daniel Chamberlain here with Joe Daniel as always.

[00:00:47] Joe Daniel How’s it going, coach?

[00:00:49] Daniel Chamberlain Man, It’s great playing a little army this week I got some extended orders, so I’m away from my normal recording place. But it’s still good.

[00:00:55] Joe Daniel It works, it does.

[00:00:58] Daniel Chamberlain It does well. Tonight we are doing our first. The first one is worked out correctly panel episode. We’ve had some that we’ve had scheduled before, didn’t work out, which is OK. Things happen. So we’ll have a couple of guests to introduce to you guys tonight and then we’ll move on to some. We’re really going to do more of an interview. Kind of asked the question, as you’ve been probably heard, other panels at clinics or such get a few answers to the same question and move on with things. So first, we’ll start with Coach Smith. If you don’t mind introducing yourself, sir.

[00:01:29] Antoine Smith Hey, how you doing, Antoine Smith? Memphis, Tennessee. Glad to be on you. Things about me. I’m actually a youth football coach and coaching youth for a very, very long time and I look young, but I’ve been doing it probably about 20 years. I actually coached my team through the Memphis Police Department. I’m going to Memphis Police Officer for the past 14 years. I had the opportunity to be a mentorship through athletics, so I felt like they were to Chico. When I got the opportunity, I’m like, I’d be happy to come out of football and this budget on my day, but is actually a really good time doing this. Also learning now. Also mentoring the kids is also mentoring some of the adults that I come in contact with. So, you know, growing program something that I definitely happen to hang my hat on. But again, thank you guys for inviting me.

[00:02:17] Daniel Chamberlain Yeah, that’s awesome. You know, I talked to Coach Daniel when we decided to this episode. So tonight’s episode, the topic is, is really just discipline and what type of discipline plan you have and how you formulated it and how you enforce it. Just kind of everything, you know, it’s the thing that some coaches struggle with. And so I talked to Joe about you, you know, basically you talked about when I met you at a clinic right over at Kenny’s clinic, you said you’re basically running like five football teams or the coaches, and you kind of talked about the struggles of that. So I thought, Man, I bet he has to work with discipline a lot. I figured you’d be good for the podcast perfect. Coach Weiss. If you don’t mind introducing yourself, sir.

[00:02:53] Bill Weiss Yeah, my name is Bill Weiss and the head football coach at Chisago Lakes High School, located in Lindstrom, Minnesota. We’re about a half hour north of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area. I’ve been a high school coach for 30 years and I’ve been head coach all at the same place here for twenty five years, and I’ve experienced a variety of different seasons. But I guess a constant as is, we’ve we’ve had pretty, pretty good kids up here. The talent level goes up and down, but their attitude and effort has been pretty solid and that’s probably what keeps me young and keeps me doing what I do.

[00:03:30] Joe Daniel Yeah, I know Coach Weiss, Coach Weiss has been on the podcast before. You’ve done a web clinic for us. I know two web clinics. Can’t remember one or two.

[00:03:39] Bill Weiss Yeah, one on D-line and one on the umbrella principal. Yeah.

[00:03:44] Joe Daniel So I’ve done a couple of web clinics and done, you know, been around JDFB for a long time and I probably brought you up. I probably mispronounce. Is it Chisago? Am I close? I never get it right.

[00:03:55] Bill Weiss Chisago

[00:03:57] Joe Daniel Yeah, just one day I’m going to get it right. Yeah, this is my challenge is like Daniel getting the Twitter handle right. So but anyway, like, you know, one of the most as far as watching your players on the field, one of the most disciplined teams that I see that I work with as far as, you know, execution on the field. So obviously a well-coached team. And so when we started to put this together looking for a head coach with experience, you’re one of those guys that’s got it. So looking forward to talking on this topic with you today.

[00:04:30] Daniel Chamberlain All right. So Joe mentioned that Coach Weiss was part of the JDFB Joe Daniel Football website. So it’s JoeDanielFootball.com where we have the pistol power offense and 4 defenses, that will be the 4-3, the 3-4, the 3-3, and the 4-2-5.

[00:04:50] Joe Daniel Nailed it. Nailed it.

[00:04:50] Daniel Chamberlain Thank you. Thank you.

[00:04:52] join.JoeDanielfootball.com, $1 get access to all of them.

[00:04:55] Daniel Chamberlain Bam, it paid the bills I didn’t even have to ask. I just knew.

[00:04:59] Joe Daniel Bills paid. Let’s go.

[00:05:02] Daniel Chamberlain Hi, guys. So we’re going to jump right in here. First question is, first of all section, I’m going to talk about why is a disciplined plan important or if you think it’s important? I guess that’s the real question is, is it important? I would assume we all think, yes. So, Joe, why? Why do you think that a discipline plan is important for the players?

[00:05:19] Joe Daniel It’s interesting because and it’s kind of up in Coach Weiss’ area a little bit. You know, there’s been people who not that they have no discipline, but have the no rule, you know, no rules type of idea that’s come along. But obviously that that program, which we’ve talked. It later was, you know, a little bit different, but the idea of discipline. I just think that our kids, so many of our kids are coming from these homes that there’s not a structure and there’s not a discipline to it. And I think that our discipline is not only important for players. You know, I used to think, especially as a young coach, like we need to do it this way because these guys are going to go out into the world and they’re going to have to behave a certain way. They’re going to be on time to work. They’re going to have to be. That’s always going to be required of them. But I think that looking, you know, after I’ve done this for 20 years, I think that our kids like having some structure and a lot of them have no structure outside of school and even school can get pretty loose and they get on the field and they get the football and there’s a structure and there’s a reason. And I think one of the things that we do with our discipline is we give them a reason why it’s important. And I think kids like that. I think kids like having structure. They know it’s for a reason. They know it’s for a common goal. So to me, our kids want that. Our kids don’t want to just go out there and have it just be a free for all of all this stuff going on. And I think a lot of our kids respond to it. So it’s important to have that built for them.

[00:06:54] Daniel Chamberlain Coach Weiss

[00:06:55] Bill Weiss I would agree with what Joe said. I think having a discipline plan clarifies a lot of things for kids. It defines what the expectations are. And I think in that setup, it lets the kids be part of something special. It lets them be part of something bigger than themselves. And I think a lot of people, kids, adults, you know, crave that opportunity to belong to something and an opportunity to be in something. And I think a discipline plan is an important part of setting that that that track.

[00:07:28] Daniel Chamberlain And so I think Coach and Coach Smith

[00:07:30] Antoine Smith no doubt definitely agree with both gentlemen. And so you definitely got to have something in place, particularly to me with the youth that I come in contact with. Definitely because of the discipline, a lot of parents meet me. They see me in the police uniforms, so they bring the kids want to be a part of my program is because they want them around the male mentors. They want some type of structure. Actually, this past week, I had a grandparent coupon to buy tickets to the precinct to come speak to me. But in the sense that she said, I want them to be a part of your program because I’m struggling in their home with them. I don’t have anything I can do with them. So in this move, the area that she really, really needs to help with, and I’m able to provide them with some of the other people that’s involved with the programs. I have other officers, I have school teachers out there with me, I have passion and I have other people within the community. That’s a part to enforce some of these things that we do like to do.

[00:08:26] Daniel Chamberlain Yeah, kind of, basically. But all three of you said all great answers and I see the in my area. It’s what kids can’t get at home. So Coach Smith, a little bit of what you’re talking about and but less like them bringing them to us, like make my kid mind. It’s more the we just have to identify it at school, and that’s just the ones that get to school. There’s also the ones that never get there, right? So yeah, we see it as a discipline they don’t get at home or maybe they don’t have a father figure, or maybe they do, and they’re just busy all the time. But that’s it’s it’s a place where they can benefit from that discipline. They’re not getting elsewhere.

[00:08:58] Joe Daniel I think coach mentioned Antoine mentioned the parent aspect, which, you know, we’re going to kind of talk a little bit about parents getting involved, you know, letting our parents know. But it maybe it leads right into what we’re going to talk about next. But there’s what Coach Weiss said, which is they’re a part of something and they’re learning. Like when you’re kid, when you establish that discipline program and your kids know the expectations like that next year or two years, three years, when you’ve got your guys that have been in the program for three years and they’re establishing the discipline and they’re handling the discipline, like that’s pretty cool for them, and that’s pretty important for them, for sure. Like, that’s a huge part of it building the program around that, but also the parents knowing that I think sometimes coaches get a little bit. It’s not high and mighty, but it’s we get a little bit. Maybe we may over. We may overexaggerate our importance in this role. Sometimes we do a lot of facilitating the parents. Yeah, there’s outliers where we do a little bit of the raising, but I think most of the time we’re facilitating, we’re helping the parents like Antoine said. Like, I just need some help. I need somebody that when he won’t do what he’s supposed to do at home and we have a lot of single parents everywhere. We won’t do what he’s supposed to do at home. Grades just general behavior. Or some kids start going down a totally wrong track and you’ve got a parent who’s working two jobs like they can’t they? They’re struggling just to get by. And that kid’s all of a sudden staying out all night like, I need somebody else to help having that just. When in place, you can’t just jump in and all of a sudden be disciplined guy like it has to be in place. I think that’s really just all of those things coming together in wide program needs discipline.

[00:10:51] Daniel Chamberlain Absolutely. So the second part of this question is why is it important for coaches? So why is a discipline plan important for coaches? Coach Weiss, we’ll start with you this time.

[00:10:57] Bill Weiss I think it’s a two way street where it’s just as it’s important to define the expectations for the players and clarify things. I think as a coach that you have that clarified that when those difficult things come up, when it’s a day before a game and a kid violates a rule and misses practice or something that you can, you know, instead of struggling with, well, what am I going to do? What is what? You have a plan. You go back to it and say, Right, this is what our standard is. And as hard as it might be, sometimes everybody’s aware of it and there’s no surprises. And as long as you continue to stick with that and you continue to talk about it, not just a first day thing. I just think it really clarifies that everybody understands, you know, the players understand the coaches, understand the parents, understand that he choices matter and decisions have consequences. And I think that’s just one of the reasons why it’s really important for coaches

[00:11:59] Daniel Chamberlain just keeps their body on the same page. You know that the expectation is going to happen. Absolutely. Coach Smith, no doubt.

[00:12:05] Antoine Smith Definitely. You set the standard on day one. It easier because I definitely would as my kids let them know on day one what we can and do what we cannot do. You know, even from our kids standpoint, if I tell my kids, I got to come to your school and come sitting in a classroom. You don’t play. I would definitely not spend a lot of quality time in our practice together. Then in my pants, I have a standard for them as well. The kids don’t get the practice by itself. They don’t get the game. But I feel like you have to get them there. You have to get them there on time because one of the things that I love to preach to my parents is we play muster seats right now and then basically they want to see is going to grow. So even though some of the things that you do with your kids, they might don’t understand now, but eventually they will become older and that will see. So with the two way street, with the standard that we are staying with them, being a part of this program with all three is a three way thing. We all got to be on the same page, you know, as he said with the other coaches. I have a total of four teams, so each team I have a total of four coaches at least. So I have to get all of those individuals on one track with me and somehow, someway we get it out of a. But you know, when they start, kids don’t necessarily do what I supposed to. He can’t play and we it’s a tough call it on time, but hey, we have to make that call. And that’s a standard in why we continue to grow. I definitely think that helps you.

[00:13:37] Joe Daniel It’s the idea of the standard and knowing what we’re going to do, just like, you know, everybody said having that, having those rules in place, everybody. Well, it may be. I’m sure there’s something like this as police, but with teaching, we come in that first day, you know, they have the honeymoon period, right that first week or two weeks of class where the kids are all quiet. And when you first start teaching and you’re like, Oh, all these kids are so good. And especially when you’re new to teaching, somebody is going to come in and tell you, like, that’s the honeymoon period. You just wait. And it’s true to an extent, but the honeymoon period dies a whole lot faster for the teacher who spends the first day going over all of the rules and then kind of let them go right after that kind of doesn’t enforce them. And all of a sudden it’s like, What can I get away with? What can I get away with? What can I get away with? And all of a sudden the honeymoon is over and your classes a disaster? But if we establish in coaching, these are the rules and then we enforce them. Coach Smith mentioned there’s hard decisions. We enforce those rules and a lot of times like, I remember a kid like, you have these rules and we’ll get into all the discipline plan and everything. But we had a kid who was going to be our starting running back and the rule when our when the head coach that I worked for at that time. And I don’t think he had to enforce this yet. But I was there like the second or third year, and the rule was if you miss a practice and you do not communicate, you know, by that time, everybody could text or call or something. It wasn’t. If you miss a practice, you miss a practice. You made a mistake. You’re a kid. Where it came was, if you do not communicate now, you could get on the phone and be like, Hey, coach, I’m not coming to practice why you’re not going to be at practice. Well, because I don’t want to. OK, thank you for letting me know. We’re going to have a. Problem, but you communicated and that was rule number one. This kid didn’t communicate, he was going to be a starting running back. He misses a summer practice. He misses summer practice because his family went to the zoo like, you know, not good what he knew about. I mean, he knew about it the day before. He didn’t say anything. Mom knew about it. Mom knew about the rule because there’ve been. Apparently, he didn’t call Kid Scott. And I think talking about coaching staff, I think the rest of us on coaching staff were like, We’re not very good, like it was just the zoo. Oh yeah, we can. We can. We talk about it. But he was very, very much. This is the rule. And, you know, five years, six years, seven years go by. Nobody missed a practice without communicating. Couple of kids called, texted, said, Hey, coach, I’m not going to practice. Why not coming to practice? I kid you not. This happened multiple times. Why you’re not going to practice. I don’t want to. All right, at least you didn’t go to the zoo without telling anybody. Now we know that you just don’t want to practice today. We can deal with that in some way. But like it’s it’s important for coaches to have those rules to enforce those rules and then those rules will stick. Even if you lost your starting running back and the next one was not ready for prime time.

[00:16:55] Antoine Smith Can I ask how did that season turn out?

[00:16:56] Joe Daniel That bad.

[00:17:00] Daniel Chamberlain It’s the starting running back.

[00:17:01] Joe Daniel But but you know what? It wasn’t going to be that good anyway, to be honest. And so he established he established something that kind of like Coach Weiss is saying, like the talent at that school will come and go good years. Not good years. We were always OK. We were never just terrible. But sometimes the talent wasn’t there. But every year after that was basically enjoyable. And I can’t say that about everywhere. I’ve been. Basically every year the kids were, you know, on point kids were good.

[00:17:35] Daniel Chamberlain It reminds me of a pretty funny story I heard last year. A kid texted in Coach, I’m not coming to practice, and it was like multiple days.

[00:17:42] Joe Daniel The best text messages.

[00:17:44] Daniel Chamberlain And it was like his hamster had died and they buried it. And of course, everybody was like, No, that’s not good enough. But apparently he had this thing is a hedgehog or a hamster or something. He’d had it for like eight years or 10 years. It’s like the only animal he’d ever owned

[00:17:58] Joe Daniel I wish you had led with hedgehog, by the way.

[00:18:01] Daniel Chamberlain I’m sorry. Sorry. I owe Salonika something. Blue hedge. Big deal. So I look at why it’s important for coaches a little bit different. I think of the enforcement of rules on the coaches. And so that’s even if it’s as stupid as like the ten pushups for cussing at practice, whatever. And then that probably leans back to the military side where it’s, you know, we kind of do the Beano do. So it’s you have to show them an example of what it looks like. And if you’re not going to enforce the standard on yourself, that will just it kind of it destroys that bridge of that gap of respect, right? So we probably started out with respect going both ways. That’s, you know, almost a honeymoon period of coaching. But if they see that the coaches can get away with everything, then eventually it’s going to cause an issue. Causes of rift. So I’m very big in the. And I’ll be honest with them up front, like boys, I don’t have to do a lot of pushups. I cut a little bit of practice, but we maintain that standard and we show them that you have to do it. We have to do it too. So I just it’s kind of the way that I look at why it’s important for coaches.

[00:19:06] Joe Daniel I guess, do you guys? I agree. But there’s always things with, I guess I guess there’s always been things where it’s like, we do have adult things. So you’ve got to establish like, look, there’s adult things that you’re not going to be. You’re not going to miss practice because your kid’s sick. Most of you players, some of you maybe. But my coach might or be late. A coach might. Yeah, I agree. We actually had a situation where we were, you know, talking to a coach about coming in and it was like, you can’t, you know, we’ve known him from before. And it was like, Look, this program that we’re building, you can’t just drop F-bombs like it’s your job. Not just because of the kids, but I guess, do you guys make any exceptions for coaches or is it is it like these are the coach rules period or these rules?

[00:20:01] Daniel Chamberlain It’s definitely more open. And yeah, I mean, there’s obviously coaches and rules. I mean, you’re like, you said, you’re an adult, you have other things going on in life where I’ve seen it. And it wasn’t even upheld well enough. I kind of wish that the standard been more enforced. And that’s like a coach that is never there to paint the field on Thursday. And it’s the rest of us always have to carry that bill or the guy who never has a bag ready to get on the bus on Friday night. Or, you know, it’s that’s more the standard upholding that you have a responsibility to do a thing, whatever it is, and you constantly have an excuse why you can’t get it done. That, to me, is equivalent to your responsibilities kid has come to. Practice and show up for the games and remember your stinking helmet in your cleats or whenever you get on the bus. And so the rule, they’re just being, hey, when you have to get this done, so we know it’s done. And if you’re not, and that’s where we kind of start with the going down that enforcement side, the cussing at practice taking, I’m sure everybody kind of does that from time to time. Maybe not, but you know, and the push ups become a joke or funny even. But there are other parts where your responsibilities aren’t being taken care of, and that’s where that really benefits.

[00:21:03] Bill Weiss I think regarding coaches and, you know, Road occasionally have a coach of mispractice and as part of practice and you know, a lot of times it’s, you know, their family reasons a coach be like, Hey, my my daughter’s playing soccer right now over on another field and I’m done with my portion of practice. It’s a Thursday night and the kids know that the kids have seen by football players. I’ve seen my kids grow up, you know, through the years and when they come back and now they’ll talk to like, Boy, I can’t believe your daughter is already in college now and things like that. And it’s so when someone’s had to step away for part of practice because I think it it’s again, it’s part of them showing that, hey, this is important. But there are other things that are more important. And in this case, my family is more important now if I’m missing a lot of practice or I’m missing a, you know, a critical parts of practice, you know, we’ve never had that problem, but I think that’s another issue. But I think and I haven’t missed a lot, but and neither of my coaches, but I think there is kind of an understanding among the coaches and among the players that there are some things bigger than football. This is very important to us. We put a lot into it, but we’re going to, you know, help another part of our lives, just like you kids do, too. And we make it work. And so I don’t think it’s ever, really ever been a zero tolerance, a real cut and dry because that’s tough when you paint yourself into that corner because there’s there’s always going to be something. I think the craziest thing I ever did, we had a playoff game and my daughter had her last swim meet on swim meet and it was parent’s night and at halftime. It was an early playoff game and we were, I thought we might do well and luckily we were doing well. But I just told the kids that I’m going to Rachel’s parents night and I walked from the locker room over there, got introduced with my daughter, watched a couple of races and I was back out. I told the officials hey I might not be back out right away. So I was going to be in charge right now and I came out middle of the third quarter. Some of the kids and even I was gone. I guess it shows how big a deal that was, but those that did, you know, were like, Oh yeah, coaches. Yeah. Rachel, I mean, it was their classmate. She had a swim meet today. It was your last one, and he had the opportunity to go home. And, you know, I just it’s sometimes what you can do when the situation dictated it. It had been a tie game or we were down by if you were up by, if you might not have done that, but situation allowed for it. And just because we didn’t have the hard fast rule about never, ever, ever. I was able to have the flexibility to do something like that because we would grant kids flexibility situations, you know, as well.

[00:23:48] Antoine Smith what my coaches are, the only thing I did ask them was this communicate this. So that’s why I try to get as many coaches on a group as possible because I know life happens. I know like a lot of my coaches, they have kids, they have wife, they have family and I know I take up a lot of their time. And I guess we all know football is a very, very demanding sport, and I would argue with another sport out there. I’m pretty sure somebody make an argument, but it’s a very, very demanding game. And I understand, especially even on a youth level, we don’t spring. Oh, so coaches, my coaches really don’t get a lot of time off like we had the month of January off in the month of February. We working out in March, we started playing practice April 4th. So two weeks from spring practice and we’d be back for the fall. So I try to give them if they need they. That’s this Hey, communicate that within your group. You know, we’ll figure it out and I work among each other. But definitely, you know, life happens. So, you know, definitely, you know, let it work for them.

[00:24:53] Joe Daniel Yeah, when you’re working with when you’re not working in the school. And I’ve been in a couple of places where we didn’t have very many teachers on staff were most people were lay coaches. That’s an even bigger thing is because you’ve got a big head job, like it’s one thing to go to the principal and be like, you know, I can’t imagine somebody cover this. I can’t go to the faculty meeting. Or can somebody cover this IEP meeting for me because we’ve got practice or we’ve got a game or whatever? Maybe you can pull that off. But like when you got a big head job, that’s not a thing. Like, they’re not like, Oh, cool, well, you know, go to your football thing. Like, it’s a lot harder to get that for them. I wanted to mention the because we’ve been talking about this. Daniel, this is for Shownotes. We did an interview with Chris Zablocki then we did a web clinic with Chris Zablocki back years ago, but this is something that I still use to this day. It’s in my program manual. It’s in JoeDanielFootball.com JDFB Coaching Systems join.JoeDanielFootball.com get access to $1. It’s inside, the web clinic is there, but there’s a podcast as well with Coach Zablocki. And Chris has this thing called priorities pyramid. And in fact, I I used it when I was the head coach and it was awesome. We now have it at the school I am at now, the head coach that I’m working with now, went and got, you know, one of the signs made for the weight room. That’s that pyramid. And that pyramid is basically the value structure. And it’s faith. You know, your faith and your values at the top doing what’s right and wrong, then I think it’s your family, then it’s your community. And then within family, we include self in your own health and that sort of thing, your community taking care of the community around you, then football and then selfish doing the things that just are about you. So I decided to stay home and play video games, or I have to mispractice because I put off doing this project for two weeks. And now it’s due tomorrow. And that works great with the kids and it works great with the coaches for exactly what you know what we’re talking about. Look, I’ve got things with my family. I’ve got things with my job that sort of falls into community. It sort of falls into, you know, these are things that’s family like, I’ve got to take care of my family, those kinds of things. And I think Coach told on that podcast a story about or on the web clinic, a story about a player who was going to miss the playoffs. I think they had not been very good. And then they made the playoffs and one of his players had planned a mission trip. And he basically was like, Look, this is the pyramid. You need to go on this mission trip. It sucks losing a starter, but this is the deal and we stuck to it all year. We’re going to keep sticking to it. So really cool thing for people to check out. If you’re wondering how to. I probably jumped into some of my discipline like plan, but that’s a really cool resource for how to decide what’s right and what’s wrong or what comes first and what’s a good reason to miss practice and what isn’t.

[00:27:54] Daniel Chamberlain So we’ll we’ll move along because we are going to get into our discipline plans here and kind of what they look like.

[00:27:59] Joe Daniel And let’s call a segway

[00:28:01] Daniel Chamberlain that’s is called a Segway. Every single episode, I feel like I use the word segway, I am trying not to use tonight, but you ruined it. Thank you. Oh my god. So part two, who is going to be a disciplined plan should look like or could look like. So we’re going to start with the first question. Coach Smith let you talk first, and that’s going to be what are punishable offenses under your discipline plan. And this can be players or coaches. We have really separated those. So either one. And so kind of just what is your plan cover or whatever your rules are, what do they cover morals from?

[00:28:35] Antoine Smith Do I deal with so many people, different age groups? So my truck is going to be the same as my five or six year old kids, so it definitely have to kind of be a case by case basis. But one thing that I always try to tell my partners is quitting can’t be our number one option and taking them off and saying, don’t let that be the option. Let me, you know, do it things. Even if we bear problem role, they don’t play that, sit on the sideline, look pretty for two or three games and they just sit there and I’ll get a great on the uniform that hurt they product. And I don’t know if anybody ever rode before. I can remember a high school and I had to do a couple hundred yards, a role and in some of the worst times in my life.

[00:29:22] Daniel Chamberlain That hurts more than pride coach

[00:29:25] Joe Daniel Rolling is the worst.

[00:29:27] Antoine Smith Definitely one of the worst times of my life. So a lot of times it is based on case by case due to what school I could get if I have to go to a good school. And again, I have that luxury. I can pop up in any kids school and my nice uniform is not a school. One can me around like I actually been into some of my kid’s classroom and set this up, and that’s pretty embarrassing when a police officer at the to sit beside you. Why do police here similar to who see you sitting there acting like they don’t know me, but I can only dream if they want me to go extreme with them. But I always tell my parents, Please don’t let them quit. Let me deal with them out here, and I promise you I will win this battle before it’s over and done with. So this is pretty much the basis for me.

[00:30:13] Daniel Chamberlain I don’t know if it’s worse to have the police come and stay with you or like your mom right next door with the ones your mom’s like. I’m going to come sit with you in your classes. I don’t know which is worse.

[00:30:22] Joe Daniel At least you can be like a smart football coach. It’s not my mom.

[00:30:26] Daniel Chamberlain I’m just that good. He’s got to protect me.

[00:30:27] Antoine Smith I’ll pop up of one of my kid’s schools. Last year, mom called me say he was acting a clown in class. I popped up. He didn’t see me. I was in away, probably four or five minutes before you look up. He looked up, you could have swore he saw a ghost. I my mouth, would you? And you know, we walked in the hall. He got a nice looking glass. And I promise you, man is key to have no more problems a year after those three days. I’m pretty sure you could have wiped this dry this shirt with all the tears and things that I desired, but we had a good time. We had some really good deals.

[00:31:08] Joe Daniel I mean, what’s punishable is like, we’re going to I can’t talk about this, but I don’t think that you need everything laid out. Like coach mentioned, it’s flexible like you have this. This is the rule I used to. At one point I thought, like, Well, if you just have everything written out and everybody knows the punishment for every possible thing, then discipline takes care of itself. Like, like, systemize it right. Everything is well. Some things can’t really be systemized. Exactly. So it’s a lot of you can’t think of the exact wording, but we talked about the pyramid for us as the reasons to miss practice. You know, it’s a lot of don’t do things that are detrimental to the program kind of kind of deal. And when you go when you go do things that are embarrassing to your coaches or embarrassing to other players or hurt the team. And we can get pretty, you know, if you out, go out and we catch you out getting drunk at a nurse team, it’s a bad look for the team. It’s a bad look for it’s it’s not good for you, especially if it’s only, you know, weekday or something like that. You get in trouble with with law, you get in trouble at school. All of those things are a bad look for the team. They’re bad. Look for the community. Potentially they’re a bad look for your family. That’s we’re kind of the pyramid comes back in and all of those things are potentially punishable offenses. I think that the big thing for us is like, we talked about it before on a previous podcast document. This stuff, because what you don’t want to do is you don’t want to punish a kid. A Kid B does the same thing six weeks later and gets a different punishment. You want to be consistent within which we’ll talk about later, but within within reason because kids aren’t all the same, but don’t do things that hurt the team. Missing practice grades, obviously, because that leads to you being ineligible. That’s, you know, those kinds of things. And I 100 percent agree with Coach Smith that let your parents know as soon as possible, like, please don’t pull them off the team. We deal with that in high school all the time. He’s got bad grades. I’m going to pull him off the team. It’s like, Well, now he’s going to go home at 2:30 and play video games instead of going home at 5:30 and playing video games. How does this solve anything? Please don’t pull him off the team

[00:33:31] Daniel Chamberlain and Coach Weiss

[00:33:33] Bill Weiss in terms of punishable offenses and the things that that we have, you know, quote unquote rules for attendance and behavior. But we try to preempt of a lot of those things. I think it comes down to some philosophical things that we try to, you know, hit home from day one and really throughout their entire time with football in terms of rules. I think Joe is right on it. You know, it’s really cool to have systematize by saying, Well, if you do this, then this is the consequence. But you know, there’s too many things and you’re not going to cover every possible scenario that we’re going to. Plus, I don’t want to give them a bunch of donuts. I want to tell them what they should do. And if our, you know, performance this is this isn’t an outcome. Light up progression and a standard is to perform at a championship level. Now, whether that comes to fruition on the scoreboard or not, that’s, you know, that’s not the point here. But one of the rules I tell the kids is act like a champion champions will be validated at the end of the season, but it doesn’t just happen. You start acting like that all the time. And so if there’s any doubt in your behavior, in your practice attendance, you can always go back and think, Well, am I acting like a champion or not? I don’t know. The thing that really drives what we do is we have a program philosophy pounder, OK? It’s just an attitude. I think a lot of places have that whether it’s chopping wood or roll the board, but it’s all. I think it means the same thing, and that’s another one. That’s kind of an expectation that this is how we do things. We are going to pound a rock. It’s an attitude of how it is. And that comes into play. And everything you do on the field, off the field, you know, going to practice, playing in games, going into the classroom. And so that’s a big part of what we do. We have specific things for, you know, missing practice. Yes, we do. And is, do we define it? Whether it’s excuse and an excuse. Yes, we do, and that makes a difference, but we really try to kind of always drive home that around a rock mentality that act like a champion because I tell the kids to go, we don’t become a champion in November. We start doing this. You know, I guess for the first time, we’re all together consistently, you know, in summer practice and leading into the fall. But that’s just a way of how we are. And if we can head off a lot of problems that way, at least we hope to

[00:36:08] Daniel Chamberlain We’ve, the two different programs I’ve been a part of have been pretty vastly different in how things were handled. But I think the same things were basically all handled right. And a lot of it was just responsibility. If you and I kind of talked about coaches early, but if you’re not doing, you’re handling your responsibilities, then there’s going to be a some type of way to resolve that. And it might be grades. It might be, you know, missing practice, whether it’s excuse, or excuse. I’ve seen that handled both ways like it doesn’t matter, you weren’t here. You’re doing the same thing, right? Quitting the team, like walking off the field that first time or whatever. So I’ve seen a lot of those. And I think the best way I’ve seen it done is just trying to find the intent and what’s going on and then trying to handle it from there. And you can’t always do that, right? We’re not. We’re not psychologists. We’re not. Well, some of us aren’t police officers, so some of us can see and a little bit easier or some aren’t and kids. I think it’s a little easier to tell than dealing with adults because they just they can’t hide it as well. But. And that comes out in the repeat offenders, which just happens to. Well, that’s yeah, the very next question. So on repeat offenders. So what is the progression that you use in your punishment? And we will start with Joe this time. So what’s the progression of punishment for repeat offenders?

[00:37:23] Joe Daniel I just want to mention that going back to the idea of having these, it just popped into my head because coach mentioned Coach Weis he’s mentioned he’s been coaching for 25 years. Twenty five years, if not to make it your coach because I’ve been coaching for 20, but 25 years ago, I was playing high school and we had rules that don’t fly today. They just wouldn’t fly today, and it doesn’t feel that long ago to me. But a lot of things have changed, and if you sat down and said, these are the rules period, at some point you have to go back on them and that sucks. So you don’t want to put yourself in that, you know, with that strict limitation on you. So with the repeat offenders, it’s the same deal. It’s, you know, I don’t know that we can have a I think that at one point we did have you do this offense? It’s a quarter you do this and you can do that with some things like we have things like parties. For example, if you get a detention or you get X amount of parties to class, we can say, OK, you’re out for the first quarter or you’re going to miss the first half you could have you can have things like that. Again, I think that’s where you kind of look at the situation you go. You need to be consistent. We don’t necessarily have to have it in writing. I think the more things you have in writing, the more chance you get to get yourself in trouble. But there’s got to be a progression of, you know, punishment, basically. I remember just as an example of that progression, a coach that was away. I don’t remember his name. It was probably 15 years ago at a Glazier clinic. He was a coach at Parkview High School, by the way. Welcome to the Braves. Matt Olson, Parkview High School at the time. Head coach Jeff Francoeur. Yeah, yeah. Wear your little Red Sox hat? OK, I’m going to bring up Braves stuff right now because I you can get Freddy Freeman as I guess we completely derailed, possibly canceled. Coach Chamberlain has a Red Sox hat on, but he was talking about a system that they had. I think I got the right coach for this, but he was talking about a system that, you know, maybe Jerry Campbell, somebody a glazier. The first time you miss you do punishment with your you do punishment the first time you are late. You do punishment by yourself. Your position coach gives you a punishment. The second time you miss you. Do punishment with your position group. Your entire position group does the opponent. Not this late. This was a late rule, the second time your position group does a punishment together, whatever that is, rolling hills, whatever, it’s going to be the third time the entire team does that punishment while you watch. So there’s that progression. And then from that point, it’s no longer a point. You know, you continue from there. It’s like, All right, you are a problem. And one of their points was, nobody ever gets to that point, right? No, nobody ever wants to get to that point. Nobody gets to that point. It’s handled long before that, but it’s the idea of there being some kind of progression of discipline. You know, whether it’s you miss a quarter, you missed a half, you miss a game at some point. To me, the key is, you know, whether it’s playing time. We’ve always talked about, you know, you take playing time away from starters, you take dressing away from backups, you know, that kind of thing like, you don’t let a kid, you know, you don’t punish a kid who never plays. I saying, well, you’re not going to start this week. He’s like, OK, a good rule coach. So, you know, everybody can’t be the same, but there’s some sort of progression with it. But at some point you sit down with that kid and parents and you come up with a contract of some sort where we say, Look, this has been, you’re a repeat offender, just like where we tell the parents, don’t pull him off the team. The first reaction can’t be kick him off the team, either. So try to do everything we can to bring the kid back on the team or, you know, get him to some sort of a contract. Who knows? The next step is before we get to that point.

[00:41:12] Daniel Chamberlain Yeah, I really like that coach because that kind of brings home that. Maybe you’ve got a kid that needs you more than you need him, right? And that gives you a chance to salvage that relationship. You may get a little bit of respect out of it, actually by the state. I mean, maybe he never plays, but he just keeps coming to practice something like that. That’s that’s awesome. I like it. Coach Weiss.

[00:41:29] Bill Weiss I concur with a lot of things that Joel was just talking about as far as, you know, looking at the progression of punishment. We do have the rules and the wording on them. I’m just reading them up on the screen here. I’ll say that absences excused or unexcused and tardies may result in reminders and reminders would be the whole team doing something and the loss of playing time or dismissal from the team. Now let me go and say I’ve never had to dismiss a kid from the team. I’ve had kids dismiss themselves when they’re playing. Time has been reduced. They decide they no longer wanted to be around, but it was. It wasn’t that, Hey, your cut. It was a choice that they made because of that. So, so we do have, you know, it all set up, whether you know, if you miss this, you know, excuse practice, it’s sitting out part of a game or you might not travel or you might not suit up or to unexcused absences, you might sit out a game. So we do have things like that, but I think a lot of it has come down to is, you know, looking at it and finding out the way parties will drive me nuts. All right. We want to start at a certain time, but it’s also the why. And you know, some kids, you know, if they have an injury that they need to take care of so they can become better or they have got to see the trainer after school or the trainer is seeing the volleyball players, the swimmers, the cross-country. I mean, there’s a bunch of people in there and that player may not get out there right away. And if I start punishing people for being tardy pretty soon, their kids saying, I’m not going to go see the trainer because I’m going to get punished by coach, I’m going to make the whole team punish my coach. And then they have that injury nags on the whole time. You know, it’s sometimes there’s, you know, kids are seeing a teacher. It’s the only time they can see them. Or sometimes, you know, we really experience this a lot. In the last year with with Corbett, we’ve had more and more kids with different mental health issues. And, you know, if we just tell them that, hey, you’re done or we call them out on all that, I mean, that’s not helping them. And it might just even drive them away. And it’s kind of like what we just brought up is that, you know, sometimes you know, the kid needs football more than we need him. And I think it’s better for a lot of things in society. If the kids part of something and then we just I mean, our job, I don’t think, should be to drive kids away. I think understanding a little bit of the wild and sometimes there’s just kids that are gone or are tardy, and it’s because they’re just screwing around and those are the ones that will do. But I think it’s maybe even the next day when you find out the real reason why. And that’s one thing I’ve evolved over the years and not be knee jerk and just kids come out late. You know what’s going on? I mailed out a few things, but you know, I’m going to find out why my coaches, you know, Hey, I guess coming up, we’ll talk to you. What’s what’s peace? And it kind of brings me up. I remember a college paper I wrote. I wrote about Bear Bryant and Bear Bryant had a quote that I had to look it up today, but I remember it from my paper. But he said, Treat everybody. I used to treat everybody alike. That’s bull. Treat everybody fairly. And I think that was true for Bear Bryant. That’s that’s true for me. You, you have to think you could treat everybody fairly, but you maybe don’t treat everybody alike because not everybody is alike and everybody has the same situations. I mean, we’ve got some kids in our school that are born on third base. Life’s been pretty easy for them and to do the right thing and to go to the right places. That’s pretty simple. And when they screw up, you know, if you crack down on them a little bit harder and get them back at third base where I got other kids that, you know, grew up, they don’t even get out of the dugout. You know, I mean, it just it’s a different set of circumstances. And if I treat that kid who’s never been out of the dugout, you know the same way as I might treat the kid who started on third base, you know, I mean, in terms of equally treating them, I may drive that kid. I’d say, I’m not even bother. It’s too hard. Forget about it. I got other things I can do. Whereas if I could treat him fair and. And the kids see fairness, they really do. And I guess that’s something that we’ve tried to do. So we have our rules, we have the consequences. But one of the things it comes down to is an excuse your unexcused and we’ll take it from there and it comes down to who is or what is your excuse. You know, you guys talked about the zoo excuse the you know that those are ones I think we might take a little bit lighter to or the other way know, saying I’ve never had a kid. I don’t say, Hey, coach, I don’t want to. They may have just lied to me and told me something else, you know, but probably because they know that

[00:46:11] Joe Daniel I would have appreciated the creativity.

[00:46:15] Bill Weiss I think they realize still going back to the philosophy that, you know, just telling me that I don’t want to. That’s not a pound, a rock philosophy. That’s not an act like the champion. And I think for a lot of kids, maybe this is one of the advantages of me being here, you know, forty-five years as a head coach that that expectation is just kind of known. I know there are some advantages of that because I’ve had some players who I’ve coached, their dads and their dads know the expectation of how things are. And that’s, you know, a benefit. And I think that that helps. So there are some things that I have that I can do and that we’ve done just because of that tradition. And so my situation is probably a lot different than what other people’s situations will be

[00:46:59] Daniel Chamberlain a lot easier to keep kids on a team that’s constantly winning games after punishment, then why would I do that punishment to be on this crappy team, right? I can understand that the difference there, the perspective you want to know the why I kind of reminded me of a joke and I saw it online over the last 10 years somewhere and it said I had to run. The coach made me run today because I was late to practice. My dad drove me to practice. My dad is the coach, right? So understanding the why, Coach Smith lets go on to you, sir.

[00:47:30] Antoine Smith oh, it definitely is different from me as well. Because Coach, I said, got a lot of great points. Definitely one of the things I do, I try to teach. There was one thing I can definitely say kids would never, ever, ever say mystery or not to do math there. But again, I deal with so many different kind of kids, different type of dudes because I welcome the troubled kids. If I see them come across them, if I tell the officer, you see that kid, that’s the kid that I want, because one of my saying is a coach very, very hard. But I promise you, I’m one of them, OK? Because a lot of times will go back to what we started with is the discipline that a lot of troubled youth might need, but they also need that. So I’m going to love on them like they might still sound on. But again, I’m a coach them hard, so it’s hard for me to, you know, I’m dealing with so many different age groups, so many different personalities and being in law enforcement. Here in the city of Memphis, youth crime is one of our biggest, biggest issues here are able to see that and see those numbers kind of hang my hat on is I like saying this that since my program been around my area, we have led the city in crime reduction in the last three years, and I definitely would love to say my program had something to do with it. At least I’m going to say that.

[00:49:00] Daniel Chamberlain I let you claim it coach. This is a coaching podcast you can play

[00:49:05] Antoine Smith but have an opportunity. I have about 125 kids. My program, that’s 125 kids that we know what a year. We know what they don’t doing. We know what we occupy any time in. A lot of them do get in trouble. But again, as this that was the case by case is because I don’t want them leaving the team. I don’t want them to feel like they might want it. I got a kid right now who aced out. He stood on a practice every day, so we’ve been working out like he’s still part of the team and I love it. I love that he feel like this is his home, and I never tell him he can’t call because this is his home and he’s one of the kids I was super duper hard on. Definitely love them. Real, real hard too. But it’s a case by case and I get it as hard as I need to get with them. But again, I’m gonna love them just as hard.

[00:49:58] Daniel Chamberlain So do you do anything with the parents in the realm of repeat offenders here, like the kid? Just consistent? I know you said you don’t ever want to take them off the team or that’s like your last resort. So are you doing like a contract with the parents or anything like that?

[00:50:11] Antoine Smith I don’t. And honestly, that you say the backs have been a talk to me and some of my other coaches have spoken about because a lot of times the problems there is with the players and not necessarily with the kid. And like with the tardiness the kid can drive to set the practice and the kid missed two or three days of practice. I can say, yeah, you know, don’t play Saturday morning, but this is really his fault. He can’t get. Except there. So if I can call mom and mom like I just I just didn’t feel like coming, you know, is it really, truly his fault? I try. I have a really, really good communication with my parents. We talk a lot. We use different forms, communication. I haven’t gotten to make any live videos, so we don’t lose things in transition. But we take them and I group me out. We have meetings all the time and again. Everybody decided to tell her my phone number. I tell them, Always call me because one thing I would tell my parents, if you see something that you don’t like, you might just don’t understand. Call me before you were asked to have a conversation about it. Let me walk you through the mindset. Let me walk you through what action will take you and even we leave. The conversation will agree to disagree. Let’s have that form of communication like I always welcome them to call what a is, whatever it is, what it costs me. If I can you tell me why you call this play or why you did that to this kid? And I have no problem articulating it to you, but you can understand my mentality where the missing me is. Because one thing I would tell my parents from day one, we can go own team belongs kid league better than what we started as we had a successful season. I tell them I won’t lie about it. I’m going to cry every night about their own fear. But at the end of the day, we definitely had a successful season. If that young man wants out better than what he started my fitness hurt, but it was a great season. Absolutely.

[00:52:09] Daniel Chamberlain We’re going to move to the third part here, gentlemen, and just for times sake, we’re going to kind of hit these rapid fire ups. We’re going to talk about presenting and enforcing your discipline plan. Coach was going to start with you here. So how do you present the discipline plan to your players, coaches, parents and administration?

[00:52:24] Bill Weiss As far as presenting the parents, we have a parent meeting every year and it’s been the same type of thing that I had same message. So unfortunately, we don’t get great attendance at the parents meeting. It seemed to back in the day. We used to have a lot more. But either way, it’s their opportunity to come there and. So what is presented in a preseason pre-season period, meeting the player meeting at the start of the year? That’s an absolute first day. It’s kind of how we start off. And again, it’s a continuation because if I just talk about those rules and expectations at that first meeting and then they’re never talked about are done together, you kind of lose itself. And we may not say, you know what the punishment is going to be or what the attendance policy is. But I talked about my philosophical things, you know, pound a rock act like a champion and that is constant the in their mind or that communication, you know, continuous administration is well aware of of how we do things to get a lot of that has to do, probably with my longevity and being here, I’ve I think I’ve I’m working with my fifth athletic director now and many of them have been other positions in the district beforehand. And so again, they’re familiar with me and they’re familiar with what we do. So that’s a pretty easy communication posted. So I think that’s just that consistency. And over time, that constant message is what’s really helped us get that message out there. And then obviously, if we follow through with it, that helps to

[00:54:03] Daniel Chamberlain Right to just kind of takes care of itself due to consistency. Coach Smith, go to you.

[00:54:09] Antoine Smith I’m not the same way our meeting is always our thing is all the same as having a helping communication with the parents. And as far as my kids, one of the things I’ve touched on already is having no veteran kids. Those veteran teachers are, you know, use and gotten your programs. My program is heading to year five and I don’t have to step on the practice field until the time to get with my group, my age group, because those veteran kids know how to get it started. They know what to do, so that part of taking care of it with the parents is definitely were meetings and communication communication. Definitely. We knows as adults, sometimes we struggle, but it goes a long way and I try my best to make them feel comfortable in the having those and making them feel important, so special, dealing with so many different personalities.

[00:54:57] Joe Daniel Yeah. And I’ll just I’ll echo. I mean, you know, obviously prayer meetings, all that kind of stuff. And I’ll one of the things that Bill talked about is the idea that it’s not something you present on day one and then it’s gone. We would break the whole, you know, we’ve talked about our five, the creed, these these five things and it’s the same idea. We’ll break the huddle every day on, you know, a break break practice out on day one is, you know, always doing your best or leave nobody behind, always doing your best, working together, expecting adversity. We talk about the priority pyramid. We give out equipment unless you could recite the priority. Pyramid. Every day we’re trying to end practice talking about one of those things, so like if if it’s, you know, if it’s something that’s going on, we talk about it. I think one of the things that I really like and I learned from one of the coaches our workforce is we don’t hide discipline issues. All these kids know they’re going to go talk about it. Now you may. There’s certain things you don’t talk about, but you know, at the end of practice, say, Hey, look, everybody knows such and such was late today, you know? You know, we’ve already talked to him and said, Hey, I’m going to share this with the team. You good with that kid says, Yeah, we talk about the issue that came up when we talk about the situation so that it’s a constant reminder to the kids that we have these rules in place and that there are consequences to it. So it’s the big thing is it’s not something that just happens once

[00:56:16] Daniel Chamberlain We push on the next question here, CoachSmith, we’ll start with you. How do you avoid getting backed into a corner by your own rules?

[00:56:23] Antoine Smith I think that’s a very tough one, because sometimes that happens. So as we talked about previously, like some kids, you be extra, extra hard on. You might go do something, but you go get this. Another kid who might have they might be dealing with some mental this, you know, mental disorder or might have some other levels that you have to necessarily do. So it is kind of hard because again, you want to set that ground throughout the team and the kids watch everything. You want that to me and my grandfather always told me, I always say, Do what you say you’re going to do. So it’s kind of tough. I don’t think it’s for me. I definitely find myself being back being a few tight with a few kids. But, you know, I have to kind of talk my way out of doubts. That’s a tough one.

[00:57:10] Daniel Chamberlain And Joe,

[00:57:11] Joe Daniel yeah, it’s I mean, it’s it’s tough because you do want to be. You do have to figure out treating everybody just like coach talked about Bear Bryant treating everybody the same versus treating everybody, everybody equal, breastfeeding everybody fairly. It’s like, Look, this is fair to one kid. This isn’t fair to another. One of the things that I realized is, and I, I grew up in a very upper middle class neighborhood. Every not everybody, but most people were pretty well off. People had their issues, people had their problems. But they also did a great job sweeping those under the rug. So nobody else knew about them, either. I only found about them later from getting to know my friends and starting to use alcoholic beverages to learn more about people. But before that, everybody just hit everything. And what did I say? What’s wrong?

[00:57:57] Daniel Chamberlain The truth is, the bottle got it.

[00:58:00] Joe Daniel Yeah, so you learned what was really going on, but I realized with these kids in the neighborhoods, maybe it’s just where I’ve been at big. I know everybody in their case, they may not know everybody’s issue, but there’s much more of an awareness that everybody’s not the same. And especially with our older kids, we can say to them, Hey, look, you know, this dude is from a different background. We all have to get into the details, which, you know, they’ve got a different situation going on than you. So we’ll talk about that and be upfront now with the details, but just understand that everybody’s different. We make sure that when our kids know everybody’s different, so not everybody is going to get the exact same punishments. And the other thing is just don’t put anything down in writing, like if you do this, then if you try to if then your rules you, I think you can definitely end up in trouble.

[00:58:51] Daniel Chamberlain And Coach Weiss

[00:58:53] Bill Weiss I would agree with all of you guys that, you know, sometimes it is hard to not paint yourself into a corner because you do have standards, you do have rules. But I guess I would go back to one thing is that be sure that the punishment fits the crime. You know, Joe, you talked about the one player that missed a practice, went to the zoo and they kicked him off the team. You know, for me, I would have been disappointed he was gone, but that wouldn’t have been the zero tolerance policy I would have enacted. I would have had, you know, would there have been a punishment? Yeah, no. I get I don’t know what was going on leading up to that if there were other things. But that’s just not, you know, the way that I would have handled that. But again, I’m looking at it from the outside, too. So it’s easy for me to not pass judgment on that. But I think it’s just the biggest thing I think is taking the emotion out of it. As football coaches, we’re very emotional people. We’re very passionate. That’s part of what drives us to do what we do for as much as we do it. But what enforcing a rule like this, and even if you’re kind of backed into a corner, I found it’s best if I can take that emotion out and just calmly tell the kid that, Hey, look, this is what happened. You understand. And this was communicated to you. This isn’t a new thing. And if the parents, you know, are also involved, hey, this is what happened. This was communicated earlier, and this is, you know, what happens as a result of this? I had to make some hard decisions, you know, before with kids. And a lot of times, you know, we’ve been able to do that by myself, remaining very unemotional about it and remaining calm. Throughout it and just communicating, you know what it is and then just letting them know that this doesn’t define you. You know, we still love you. We’re still part of this team, hopefully. But this is what we have to do now. And as soon as we get over this hill, we move on. You know, I’ve had kids that have had to sit out a quarter because of some things, and I just flat out told them that, look, this is why. But you know, once that happens, you’re back in there. We have full confidence in you. We have full faith in what you got to do. But for that first quarter of the game, you’re not going to be in there because of this. And after that, you know, we’ll move on and I’ll make a final comment here. Kind of along the lines of what Joe said. I’ve leaned on my captains a lot too and and told them that, Hey, look, here’s the deal. You know, this kid is and the kids know the situations better than I do as an adult at all. You know, I’ll even say to them, Look, you know, this kid doesn’t have the same life that you do. You know, this kid, things are a little bit harder for him. So this is how we’re going to handle it. And I want you guys to know that if you can communicate that with the captains, that will help in the locker room, somebody else is saying, Oh, I can’t believe in the captains can step in and say, Hey, shut up, it’s the right thing. Or at least I hope that’s what they’re doing. I guess I’m not. I don’t have a microphone in here, all their private conversations, but I feel as much as I can let them in on things they know where we’re thinking and it ultimately, you know, we want what’s best for everybody.

[01:02:05] Daniel Chamberlain All right. We’re going to move on to the next question, which is what is your plan for special situations and extenuating circumstances? So you’ve kind of touched on these a little bit, but Joe, we’ll have you go first here.

[01:02:16] Joe Daniel Yeah, I think that, you know, you take it to the, you know, as a head coach, I think you take it to your coaching staff all, oh, anytime. There’s a big decision. I think you especially anything that’s not clear cut and dried. I want to get the coaching staffs opinion what you know. What do you think? Are we doing the right thing? Am I overreacting? That’ll help you kind of deal with, you know, maybe somebody, especially when you got somebody who’s been on staff for a long time with you or few years with you and knows how things have been handled in the past because we do get attached to kids emotionally and you do react different when you’ve got a kid who, you know, has been given everything or has always been a certain way. And then all of a sudden he just takes a left turn than you would with a kid that you can kind of understand where he’s coming from. So talk with coaching staff so that they know what’s going on. We’ve had players who we’ve talked to the team with, definitely talked to captains, just get input, go to the parents. What’s the situation like at home? You’ll find a lot of things that, you know, usually when something gets really sideways, something has changed at home. And so that’s and coming from Fort Lee, from a county where Fort Lee was. Kids don’t always talk about this stuff. Parents get deployed or parents come home or all sorts of things change. And we got to we got to know all of those things and deal with that. So mostly it’s just communicating with people, communicating with everybody involved.

[01:03:44] Daniel Chamberlain And Coach Smith

[01:03:46] Antoine Smith definitely case by case with me, having like with the four different teams. So you see you have his own coach. So if that particular coach, in that particular case, I love him, make the decision and I kind of does support him in their group and what they need to do. It’s been a few occasions that I had to kind of step over and make a decision for a couple of other coaches. Very rare, but mostly it means supporting them because this is technically their group, their team, so they make the decision. I, you know, we got to do X, Y Z and whatever they say, x y z is. I’m on board with them and we will figure it out and then try to do it to make it what’s best for the kids. And overall, we’ll make it best for the organization because things can get so sideways. We don’t want, you know, ’cause we don’t want have to keep the key thing we did back then. A corner for kids that it’s making the other kids uncomfortable is making us look in a certain way that we can enforce the rule than a discipline that we overall, you know, we can have 25 kids on the team and we can have that one that we can’t get a hold of and that can become a cancer to the wrist. And again, I hate to have to. We had a few occasions like that, but I would hate to have to say how a kid can be a part or what we do. We I think we had like twice we had to figure that out, but a lot of times I let those coaches make the decision. Just me, let me support.

[01:05:13] Daniel Chamberlain So something I’ve seen that worked pretty well here, I’ve never. The two schools I’ve been at, we’ve dealt with some different extenuating circumstances and neither head coach is allowed the rest of the coaching staff to have much input. One made all the decisions by himself. That was very weird in the coming weeks because it wasn’t a this kid isn’t going to. Play, it’s this kid isn’t going to play offense, and I’m the defensive coordinator, and I just had to make the call. You can still play defense like I need you, right? I don’t, I don’t know. There wasn’t any guideline put out another just use the captains of the team and brought them in and had conversation almost like trial, right? Like, there’s some evidence. Here’s what we did. And this was kids that equipped quit the team in spring or in a summer practice. They wanted to come back like week seven and eight, like it was winning all a bunch of games. We were, I don’t know, one in six or two and five or something, but they decided they’re seniors. They better come back and play ball there last year, and they let the captains decide. I think that way worked a little more. At least the students felt like because the captains weren’t all seniors, it was like a freshman quarterback was a captain, right? So everyone got a little say so. I thought that worked out pretty well with some. I’m sure there’s a circumstance that would work out as well. Maybe you don’t even want them to know about certain things. But the last question here, and this is the biggest question that’s kind of been building up to, unfortunately. So when do you determine that enough is enough and you’ve got to cut a player like what is where’s the line in the sand? And you know that that’s they have to go and we’ll start with Coach Weiss on this one.

[01:06:41] Bill Weiss Well, let me say, I’ve in my 25 years as a head coach, I’ve never had to. I’ve never had to remove a kid from the team. Now we did have a kid who I guess we could define as a repeat offender, and it wasn’t anything serious. It was just it was a very negative attitude that was just spilling over onto the rest of the team. And he was probably the most talented player, and we had decided that when I say we, this was a coaching staff decision. I mean, ultimately, it comes down to me, but I rely, you know, Joel mentioned that as well, you guys. I concur with a lot of what you said. I rely on my coaching staff for a lot. I’ve got several coaches who are head coaches in other sports, so they’ve walked in these shoes. They get it. And so I really rely on them a lot. You know, so and I guess like just got to make sure going back to what I’ve talked about earlier. Is it fair? You know, is, you know, dealing when enough is his removal from the team, if that’s the extreme thing that we’re going to do. Is it fair for what’s happened as the does that crime fit or does that punishment fit the crime? So yeah, those are those are tough things to do. But I think this is a combination of communication and talking over with others and, you know, in an extreme situation that I’m probably not going to bring into captains because that’s not their job. You know, I don’t think it’s you can rely on your captains for a lot of things. Maybe I can tell them that, hey, this is the decision we made, but I’m not going to ask their advice on whether we move somebody. But like I said, with the one circumstance I do remember, we just moved the kid down to the bottom of the depth chart and he was our most talented player. But we’re like, You know what? He’s just hurting us, and we didn’t want him to leave, but he saw that stormed out the locker room. You know, it didn’t come at that, you know, I didn’t want that to happen, but I did want him to change his attitude. And, you know, I did see him later years. And, you know, I think he’s a productive member of society now, and no one holds any grudges. But at the time and place, it was the decision that had to be made and the decision he made. I mean, that was his choice and he lived with it, and I think he got over it, you know, but it was what was needed at the time.

[01:08:56] Antoine Smith So for me, definitely. He hit the nail on the head with the negative attitude because again, I called it one of the biggest cancer that you can have within a team and organization, especially with no young youth that can be horrible to have. So for me to ultimately say, Hey, this kid came, be it for me, is more the parent in the kid if I don’t get the buy in from both. If the kid will have to kind of figure out how I feel like he’s got to be a white guy in my mind or we went wrong. But if we can get the buy in from the kid in the parent, then ultimately, to me, a decision like they will have to kind of be made, of course, and take the group of coaches come together and that particular group. But that, I think is going to have to be a thing of the parents and the kids because again, that one can definitely cause a lot of trauma or we did the rest of them. So for me, The OC, you have to be both, not buying it.

[01:09:56] Daniel Chamberlain And Joe

[01:09:58] Joe Daniel Sorry, I was muted. The I’m new to this Zoom thing. Then there I was listening to something today not related to football, but they use the phrase sacrificing one for the good of the herd. And that’s kind of what we go back to the story of the kid in the zoo. That was the idea, right? I don’t know that that I necessarily would do. I know that I wouldn’t do that as a head coach. But at the time, I understood the logic, understood the thought process of it. Today, my thought process is a little more like sacrifice. Icing one what sacrificing one kid, one-one, 15 year old, and I hope I’m not sacrificing him now, I will say that kid, by the way, came by he blew back the senior year and started and all that kind of stuff. And there have been kids that were left the team and they did come back. There have been kids who left the team and didn’t come back. I can’t think of many that now I was only a head coach one year and I don’t think I kicked anyone off. In fact, I know I don’t start with twenty seven weeks initial twenty seven. We can afford to kick in went off. We were doing bending over backwards to make sure nobody left, much less trying to kick people off. But you know, I don’t remember many instances of kids actually being kicked off. I remember, well, not a lot, but several times like Coach Weiss said, kids got themselves where we would say, Hey, look, you’ve gotten to this point, you’re not going to play on Friday because of this behavior. But in order to stay with this team, you’ve got to show a commitment to this team. You’ve got to be here Monday through Thursday and be on scout team. And some kids responded to that. Most kids, I would say the win that’s happened. But there’s been some, especially when it’s been an attitude issue, that that attitude has just been. I’m not doing that. They might make it to Monday or Tuesday and then realize like, you’re serious, they’re not getting any time and they’re playing on scout team and they don’t show up Wednesday or Thursday and then try to show up for the game. And it’s like now, too, that’s not how this works. Try not to make that decision, but there is an element of there is an element of sacrifice, one for the good of the herd. In this way, if it gets to such a point where you are legitimately damaging the team, then we may have to do something. I’ve had had kids removed. Really unfortunate situation this past year does come to mind where that eventually had to happen, but it had to be such. So I’ll tell you this for our head coach. It had to be such a series of events that I think the entire coaching, the entire rest of the coaching staff and most of the players were like, He can’t be with us. This just can’t be. It had to get to a point where literally everyone was like, This just can’t. I think even he was like, I just can’t be there in order for that to happen. And it was a really unfortunate situation. We really did our most to avoid it. But you know, it’s got to really be hurting. It’s got to be her. It can’t just be hurting him, and it can’t just be pissing me off. It’s got to be. It’s got to be hurting everyone.

[01:13:14] Daniel Chamberlain Well, gentlemen, I think we’ve covered all the topics we aim to cover. Definitely appreciate you two guys coming on and talk a little ball, giving us some perspective from somebody besides me and Joe just talking at each other. Joe, do you wanna pay the bills again before we get to social media?

[01:13:31] Joe Daniel Yeah. JDFB Coaching Systems we you know, this is one of those episodes that’s more of a resource for coaches. It’s not about X’s and O’s, and it’s not about driving you towards getting the 4-2-5 defense system, but you know it’s there. 4-2-5 defense, 33 stack defense, 4-3 defense, the 3-4 defense system, which is just been updated for 2021. We’re going to be having a whole lot more stuff. We got our game film all getting tagged and ready, and it’s going to be doing a whole lot more updates, a whole lot more. Just had chalk talk last night. We doing kind of change in the format of those to talk about the future on the chalkboard forum, where you can ask questions as tons and tons of resources and JDFB Coaching Systems and the pistol power offense system. I might add as well. All of it’s in there, all of it’s available. You get access for $1 by going to join.JoeDanielFootball.com, check it out and see everything that’s available to you inside the system inside JDFB Coaching Systems so go check that out.

[01:14:31] Daniel Chamberlain Thank you, coach. Gentlemen, let’s start with Coach Weiss, where if someone was going to find you that they need to reach out and pick your brain, where’s the best place to find you?

[01:14:40] Bill Weiss I’m an email guy. Bweiss@isd2144.org. That’s the best way to get all to be.

[01:14:51] Daniel Chamberlain Perfect, sir and Coach Smith.

[01:14:55] Antoine Smith Same way. Email, Facebook. My email is my last name first name. My email is SmithAntoine@yahoo.com and Facebook, my first name Antoine Smith either or is a great place to catch me.

[01:15:11] Joe Daniel We’ll have all those in the show notes as well so everybody can find them, if you were not scribbling down emails while you’re driving your car, listen to podcasts.

[01:15:19] Daniel Chamberlain We did.

[01:15:20] Joe Daniel You shouldn’t do that. That’s not safe. Don’t do that

[01:15:23] Daniel Chamberlain Podcast on Twitter. Go ahead and coach.

[01:15:26] Joe Daniel Oh yeah. No, you do not do that. Tell them, Coach Smith.

[01:15:30] Daniel Chamberlain He’s looking. He maybe and standing outside your door.

[01:15:33] Bill Weiss Especially in Memphis, it goes

[01:15:38] Daniel Chamberlain The podcast has a Twitter page that is @theFBCP. I am @CoachChamboOK on the Twitter machine.

[01:15:49] Joe Daniel I am at @footballinfo on the Twitter machine, though let me very much stress when I say I’m on the Twitter machine. Don’t send like like business things or like I can’t find my password to my Twitter because you will not get logged in for days and days. You’re not safe. Send an email or use the support button on the website. That is, this is not delta and we do not handle support issues on the Twitter machine. As for the podcast, if this is your first time listening to The Football Coaching Podcast, make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss any future episodes. We have new episodes every single week and have for the better part of 12 11 years, 11 years or over 11 years now with the podcast, we’ve been coming out with new episodes and they are all over the place, all JoeDanielFootball.com and I think now in the feed, all the way back to at least episode 17. Everything from episode one through 16 with me and Nate Albaugh was so bad I just hit it away. They are on the website, though, but make sure you subscribe. What’s that?

[01:16:56] Daniel Chamberlain So I’m going to go give it,1 through 16.

[01:16:58] Joe Daniel 1 through 16 there somewhere on [01:17:00]June 11. [0.2s]

[01:17:00] Daniel Chamberlain If they’re so bad, it’ll put me to sleep tonight.

[01:17:04] Joe Daniel They will. They will definitely do that. If you’ve been listening for a while, please go and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. We are on Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, everywhere that’s out there, so check them out. If you’ve been listening for a while, please leave a review. It’s a great help in getting the word out. Coaches I really appreciate your time. Anything else you want to add? All right. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Football Coaching Podcast. Remember Coach simple, play fast, win.