Building A Champion

1. Former San Francisco coach Bill Walsh's book, "Building A Champion" is another must read. I've always marveled at his poise and composure watching him in the NFL films.

He was prepared and so were his teams. He always came across as a teacher.

Here are a few of his thoughts on building a champion that we want to apply as we prepare for the upcoming season.

• Leadership does not mean overt posturing. It's communicating under the most difficult circumstances.
• Egos cannot be a barrier in doing business.
• Work endlessly on the fundamentals of the game and how they apply to our offense.
• Isolate skills that we need and the timing necessary until we are very proficient in all phases of offense.
• Boxing parallel. Beat them to the punch. Their intensity and explosiveness would gradually wear down their opponents and bring them down late in the game.
• Everything in practice emphasized quickness, explosiveness and movement. Quick recovery is essential.
• Meticulous and long range planning.
• Four basic categories of team development
• Teaching of individual fundamental skills
• Choreographing the action of groups
• The development of team execution
• The implementation of situations
• Every logical situation that might occur in a game was isolated and strategy and tactics were accordingly devised.
• This is my personal favorite:
• Players must execute. They can't just depend on emotion to win. It doesn't matter how much we want to win the game. The bottom line is: Can we execute a series of plays almost flawlessly? It's the standard of performance that is the difference when the opponent is equally motivated.