Creating a Significant Learning Environment

Being that my occupation is a sport, learning through play is natural. Thomas & Brown (2011) take it a step deeper when they talk about homo ludens, as humans who play as part of who they are, not just how they learn. Ironically, not everyone involved in the traditional American sport of football would be considered homo ludens yet, based on their resistance to change, particularly in their teaching and coaching methods.

If you have been keeping tabs on me over the last few months, you would know that I lost my job with the UCLA Football team earlier this year, when my supervisor left for a different opportunity, and I was not retained by the new staff. This is a normal occurrence in business, but especially prominent in the business of football. I was in the middle of the Lamar University Digital Learning and Leadership program when I was let go, so I was not able to follow through with my Innovation Plan of incorporating a virtual reality football simulator into the training protocol with the coaching staff and team. I am happy to know though, that the football program is continuing with the project and are completing the construction of the million dollar virtual reality system very soon. Creating a change in methods and learning environment would have been and is easy at that level of college football. There are unlimited resources and an expansive staff that are proactive and have the ability to stay on the cutting-edge of technology and the pedagogy of football.

This past week was the first week of EDLD 5313, the next class in my grad school program, for which this blog post is an assignment. This week was also my first week at my new job as the Quarterback Coach for Moorpark College, a junior college near me. Going into my 19th season of college football (20 years overall), I have the most college experience, and have worked at the highest level among the staff. This will be quite a different experience for me as the budget to run the team for the year is less than what my previous program would spend on JUST FOOD in ONE WEEK. Literally. I will coming from a program that had around 75 people working with football to about 15. My personal challenge is not going to be the work - I am used to working. It is not going to be the fact that there is not much continuity with the players, as you only get them for a year or two, and for a short amount of time each day - I am actually going to enjoy that challenge. It will be getting on the same page with coaches that all have another job to make a living, that may not have as much experience, but have been "doing the same thing" for 15 years. I am no expert or guru by any means, but like a lot of my cohorts in this graduate program, I will be dealing with some coworkers that are slow-to-change. I will admit that I am a little stubborn too, but I also feel like I could help explain what coaches at higher levels of football consider to be best practice.

Part of this challenge of working with coaches that might be slow-to-change is that I am coaching the quarterbacks. Quarterbacks are the players on the team that have the best idea of what coaches go through, getting either too much credit for the team's performance or not enough. Both receive a lot of criticism, and everyone else becomes an "expert" if something goes wrong. On the first day of practice, we had three different coaches tell the quarterback what to do after a particular incomplete pass, and all three were opposing coaching points. This can be very confusing for a player for many reasons. I am not the head coach, so I am not going to tell the other coaches what to do, but I will have to find a way to make sure the quarterbacks get a consistent message from the staff.

Dr. Harapnuik, who co-directs the Digital Learning and Leadership program at Lamar University, really helped me out in our last class in a one-on-one session. He guided me to understand that to create sustainable programmatic change, it has to start with the teachers, coaches, and administrators. Thought at some point, the students need to be part of the process, creating change from the student/player level often only hits the surface.

It is clear that the learning environment for the both the students and the coaches at each of the schools is going to be different. The major differences from a student learning and training standpoint will be the access to facilities and equipment, the nutrition for the students (from more than half a million dollars in food per month to none), the availability of support like athletic training, strength and conditioning, academic support, and the access to the coaches which affects the student academically, athletically, and personally. Because most coaches have a 2nd job, the main differences at the coaches level will be time to organize and meet as a staff, time to prepare for practice and player meetings, and fewer staff members and interns to help with all of those things. Many of our organizational and schematic staff meetings happen through group text chats or email. What is similar with the coaches at both institutions is that we want to help these young men achieve to the best of their ability on and off the field.

One of football's biggest petri dishes is the video used for opponent scout and self-evaluation. Prior to 2006, video was exchanged between big programs and the NFL teams through a courier service, by teams who could afford to send their (respective to time) reels, VHS tapes, or DVDs on a major airline overnight. We had to drop off and pick up the media at the cargo warehouse at the airport. High schools and small colleges would have to drive and meet the opposing coaches half way, or wait for FedEx/UPS shipping to arrive days later. After practices and games, it would take hours before coaches could watch the film, because it had to get transferred to multiple reels, VHS tapes, DVDs, or private servers. Around 2006, the teams with money were able to start sending their video using an internet portal which took hours. In 2008, I was one of the first, if not the first college coach in the West Coast to purchase a service called Hudl, which is now used nation-wide and has revolutionized the game of football. Hudl is an originally Nebraska-based company who created a fully online video database for football, and since has expanded to all sports that use video for teaching, exchange, and recruiting. Using Hudl, teams, coaches, and players have almost immediate access to their games and practices. Just like in education, the means of exchanging and acquiring knowledge in football is evolving rapidly.

Around 2003 or 2004, when video started going digital, there was the ability to add data to each of the clips. So on one play, you could merge (using Excel and matching up each play), the offensive scheme, the down and distance, the defensive front and coverage; whatever information you wanted to add. Additional to exchanging video, Hudl created the ability to add data to each of the video clips directly online, instead of having to merge the data; technology that had only been available for a few years. With that data, you could create cut-ups, meaning that with a few clicks you could pull up all the 1st down plays, all of the defense's blitzes, or every time a team lined up in a trips formation. The best thing about Hudl was that it only costed around $3000 relative to the $300,000 for the digital database and servers! There are still some advantages to the expensive system, such as buffering time, and some of the reports you are able to create, but of course, not affordable for smaller schools.

Now back to my original challenge: getting on the same page with my new coaching staff, and passing that down to the players with limited time... I have been using Hudl to communicate with our players, since there is such a limited amount of time. (See picture below)

I have since decided to make sure that the coaches see the notes I am making as well to make sure that we get on the same page. They can see what my coaching points are to the quarterbacks, and we can talk or text about it, if they have questions or if they think something should be adjusted. I have urged the other coaches to do something similar to make sure we all know what is being said to their players and we can learn, adjust, and converse accordingly. This would be a lot like Douglas Thomas's (2012) reference to Wikipedia, where this is another piece of context rather than content. The contexts in this situation are the different ways we could teach a play or technique, which could changed based on the way the players can perceive the play and situation. My job is to make sure that the content of the information that gets to the quarterback is consistent. The challenge has proven to be frustrating so far, but I truly enjoy the process.

Here's to another class, and the start of the a new season!

References

Thomas, D. & Brown, J.S. (2011). A new culture of learning: Cultivating the imagination for a world of constant change. Lexington, KY: Create Space.

Thomas, D. (2012). A new culture of learning, Douglas Thomas at TEDxUFM. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lM80GXlyX0U&t=153s