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Green Standard Time
Back in the day, we did our summer conditioning at 6:30 AM. We chose 6:30 AM for three reasons. First, what the heck else were teenage boys doing at 6:30 AM? A few worked, but we were always...
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2006 Summer Conditioning Theme: The Keys to Success
Keys to Success… Winners do the things losers will not do. Being successful often means working harder than the next guy. Having success builds success within the individual and the team. Filed...
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Touch The Sign
When I was just starting out as a Rule 10 football coach at Clay Center Community High School back in the year 2000, I was a mild mannered, timid, and completely clueless football coa…SCREEECHHH. Sorry...
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The Snap
The sound. The sharp snap of a chin strap being fastened. It is a beautiful sound; a quick click of metal fastening to metal, followed by the crisp echo as the sound waves move through the plastic...
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Apples and Crackers
When it came to coaching football, I was stupid. Seriously, most of the time, I was too oblivious to things going on outside of football while we were supposed to be doing football. Case in point,...
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Attitude & Confidence
It’s been awhile since the last Coach Hays rant. I am getting older, wiser, and possibly even settling down into a maturity level fitting of my middle-aged-ness. Well, maybe not completely. We, as a...
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This Is Our House
“This is our house.” You hear this quite often in sports. Home field. The home field advantage. At the western gateway of Clay Center we have our sports houses. We have Unruh Stadium for football. We...
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Over. Done With. Gone.
Logically, our high school football season would end either when we lost our playoff game or we failed to make the playoffs. Makes sense, right? Game over, mope around a couple of days, check in...
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Coach Wilson
I pulled an old t-shirt from the drawer to wear for our walk last night. It was one from the deepest, forgotten bottom of my shirt drawer. It brought a smile to my face and unleashed a flood of good...
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COACH LANE’S OVERALL PHILOSOPHIES (circa 2000)
Every year about this time, I go to my space in the basement, pull out the tubs and boxes of old football coaching materials, and make an attempt to cull things that no longer justify the space they...
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Sports Fields
There’s something special about a sports field. I could go Wide World of Sports and talk about the “thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” types of activities which occur on a sports field but it...
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Culture
I ran across this list, 17 Ideas for the modern world of work from altMBA, and it has me thinking. Dangerous, I know. But it’s summertime and my head is less likely to explode sitting on the back patio...
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Leaders
An often overlooked fundamental of good organizations is leadership. By overlooked, I don’t mean ignored. We have leadership out the ying yang in our society. Presidents, governors, mayors,...
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The Best Decision I Hated
After high school baseball practice my first spring as a Rule 10 coach in 2000, I dropped off a book to newly promoted head football coach Paul Lane and assistant football coach Matt Brenzikofer as...
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Imperial March Mode
There are hundreds of different high school offensive and defensive schemes in the football world. I could stack coaching books from floor to ceiling and still probably not have all of them covered....
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Gates
As a former offensive and defensive line football coach, one thing I always look for when watching a game or scouting a game is open/closed gates. What is a gate in football? It’s the ability to stay...
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Fun? What do you mean, fun?
There’s been a coaching riddle that has perplexed me since 2002. The concept of “fun” in sports. It started way back when a very talented group of players were underachieving and had fallen into poor...
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Walking Through Your Door
In professional football, a team of scouts determines which athletes from a pool of thousands of athletes fit into their team’s systems and they draft them. In college, coaches scour the region and...
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The End of the Era
The USD 379 Board of Education is moving forward on building a new football stadium and selling Otto Unruh Stadium. Unruh Stadium will likely be demolished as the land becomes a commercial venture....
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