By Jim Catalano
Jim Catalano is an Associate Editor at Coaching Management.
Coaching Management, 9.4, May 2001, http://www.momentummedia.com/articles/cm/cm0904/scoutmaster.htm
To most high school football coaches, knowledge is power. Sure, coaches dream about working with a rifle-armed quarterback or a fearless linebacker, but in an environment where the roster is limited to those who attend the school, coaches have to make the most of their personnel and adjust to their opponents. According to many successful coaches, the key to knowing what the other team is up to—and what will work best for your own team—is scouting.
“It’s extremely crucial to know your opponent’s strengths and weaknesses,” says Jim Walker, Head Coach at Redlands (Calif.) High School. “You’re living in the past if you don’t keep up with trends in football, and scouting has become of utmost importance.”
“You have to scout to have a chance to compete—you can’t just go in there cold,” agrees Chuck Mizerski, Head Coach at Southeast High School in Lincoln, Neb. “Twenty-five years ago, everyone played a 5-2 defense, and it was easy to prepare for. Now it’s a lot more involved—some teams play a 5, some play a knockdown 5, 5-3, 4-3, 4-4, 6-2, and so on. If you don’t know what they’re going to do, it’s impossible to plan for the games.”
Rules limiting scouting vary from state to state. In some states, teams are allowed to videotape their opponents’ games. In other states, videotaping is prohibited but in-person scouting is allowed; teams often then swap their own game videos with other teams. Some coaches prefer to double-team the process, sending scouts to a game in hopes that they find something that won’t show up on tape. Whatever the method, the goal is the same—predicting what your opponent is going to do, and planning an effective counterattack.
The First Steps
Whether you’re a veteran coach or an up-and-comer who’s just taken his first head coaching job, you must first make sure you and your staff all regard scouting with the same importance.
Walker gets the ball rolling at the beginning of each season when he meets with his staff. “You have to emphasize its importance and devote resources to it, because it’s very time-consuming,” Walker says. “You have to come to an agreement of what you’re going to do scouting wise, because the whole staff has to be dedicated to putting in the time and doing it the right way.”
George Mangicaro, Head Coach at Liverpool (N.Y.) High School, agrees: “How much time are you going to commit to that goal? The more time you spend analyzing what your opponent does, the better chance you have of being successful. But you have to make the time.”
Next, you must determine what exactly you need to learn from your scouting efforts. Do you want to come up with a strategy for targeting your opponents’ weaknesses, figure out ways to counter their strengths, or compile a detailed portfolio on their personnel? When you’ve decided what you want from a scouting report, the challenge is conveying that to the staff. Coaches who have worked together for many years may already know what the head coach wants to see in the scouting reports. But make sure to bring a new coach up to speed before sending him out on his own.
“We don’t have much turnover here, but when we get new coaches, the first thing I do is tell them that scouting is an important part of their responsibilities,” says Mizerski. “We always send out a new coach with the more experienced coaches. The new coach takes a less active role at first—for example, he’ll take notes while other coaches rattle off observations in our terminology. After a while, the new guy’s able to rattle them off, too, and then he can take turns with the other coaches.”
Mangicaro also likes to pair up new coaches with a veteran scout. “It’s not smart to send out two new coaches together,” he says, “because you’re never sure if you’ll get good information or not.”
Mangicaro likes to work a new coach into the system by assigning him to an opponent that Liverpool is familiar with and providing him some background information. “If we’re scouting a team we’ve played before,” Mangicaro says, “I’ll show him what to look for and give him a pre-game scouting packet that has their basic offensive and defensive formations. And we’ll have him break down a videotape to teach him our terminology.”
T.J. Mills, Head Coach at Permian High School in Odessa, Texas, also uses video to help his coaches learn how to scout. “I tell them, ‘Here’s a film—sit down and draw out exactly what they do,’” he says. “If they come back with only nine guys written down on a play, or they don’t show what the backfield action was, then we need to teach them that.”
Mangicaro suggests starting coaches out by asking them to asses a few basic areas, such as personnel, substitutions, and formations. “Try not to complicate it too much,” he says. “Keep it very basic. What are the other team’s favorite formations and favorite plays out of each one? What is their base defense and what do we have to do to attack it successfully? Then they can build on that knowledge.”
Sending Them Out
Most coaches try to scout their opponents in person at least once, if not twice, each season. “We always get a minimum of at least two looks in person,” Mangicaro says. “Whenever we can, we send our varsity coaches to scout on Friday nights or Saturday afternoons, when we’re not playing. On some Saturdays, we split the staff to check out two games.”
Schools that are permitted to videotape opponents usually send a three-man crew to games—one coach shoots the video while the other two chart the offense and defense. But if you’re not allowed to tape your opponents’ games, in-person scouting becomes that much more important, especially since you don’t always know what quality tape you’ll get in the pre-game swap.
And even if you get a game tape that would impress coaches from the Big Ten, there are some things to look for that you can only pick up in person. “A few of the things you should always look for at games aren’t even on the field,” Walker says. “For example, do the coaches go over adjustments with the players as they come off the field? How do the players act on the sidelines—is there any dissension? Can we pick up their snap count from the stands or sidelines? Even in the pregame warmups, are the players organized? These are all things you won’t see in a regular game film.”
But the meat of most scouting reports is the Xs and Os, and coaches get those from a combination of live scouting and looking at videotape. And whether a coach is writing it all down as the play unfolds before his eyes or has the benefit of the pause and rewind buttons on the remote control, the most important things to look for remain the same.
“Our coaches have notebooks in which they write out the formation of every play, including hash mark and down and distance,” Mizerski says. “Then, of course, we chart the result—how did the play go?”
Ultimately, what you’re looking for are tendencies. “Do they run certain plays out of the same formation all the time?” Mizerski says. “When we’re on offense, do they always use the same stunts to defend us? Do they have a goal-line defense?”
Still, Mangicaro suggests, it’s impossible to prepare for everything. “My philosophy is that we’re not going to stop every play,” Mangicaro says. “So, we take their four or five best plays out of their most-used two or three formations and approach that team as if those are the plays we’ve got to stop time after time.”
But simply charting Xs and Os doesn’t provide enough information for most coaches. Who those Xs and Os represent is just as important, if not more so, than where they’re drawn on your charts. Mizerski advises, “You want to see who their best lineman is, who they run behind on third down and short, and how far their defensive backs play off the ball. We also want to know who are their emotional leaders on defense and offense and who plays both ways.”
Video does offers some advantage over in-person scouting reports, however. It catches everything that goes on during a football play—allowing a coach to break down on film anything he missed live. “I’ve proved this to myself several times,” says Mills. “I’ve taken notes in person at a game, then gone back and compared them to what was actually on the film, and I was wrong. In the heat of battle, it’s hard to get 22 players in a drawing and show exactly what happened.”
Video also has the advantages of rewind and slow motion, which is especially helpful when trying to analyze what is happening in the middle of the mass of bodies collapsing along the line of scrimmage. “Video makes it easier to get all their blocking assignments—are they pulling, trapping, or full blocking?” Mangicaro says. “They might have a great player, but if the action goes away from him, he might take the play off. If a kid has great quickness east to west, do you have to run at him to have a chance to beat him? On tape you can catch stuff like that, where at the game it’s over in 10 seconds.”
Assembling the Package
Regardless of how the information is obtained, the real work begins after the game ends and the video is watched. The process of distilling this collection of information into a form that can be used to devise a game plan takes time—usually much more than the scouting itself.
Some coaches rely on simple computer spreadsheets to manipulate their data. “I like to go back and enter everything that I just scouted from video into the computer,” Mills says. “I start sorting it by down, distance, passes versus runs, stunts, and so on. Then I break it down even further. I keep playing with it and sorting it until I start seeing trends.”
Utilizing more advanced technological devices may make your play charting and number crunching more efficient. “We use computer devices to cut down on the time it takes to input information from a game,” Walker says. “And that’s the key with technology—trying to save time. We all have families and like to go home on weekends. Because of that, you like to make coaching meetings as productive as possible.”
And with technology making rapid advances each year, more sophisticated tools are becoming available for increasingly lower prices. “We do video cutups, but they’re time consuming,” Walker says. “We went to digital Super 8 cameras last year for clarity, so now we’re looking into a digital editing system. It’s technology that has trickled down from the pros, where it’s been used for 10 years. Colleges started getting it about five years ago, and now it’s coming down to the high school level.”
Still, some coaches prefer their tried-and-true methods. “We’re probably one of only two or three teams in the state that doesn’t use software,” Mizerski says. “We do everything with pencil, paper, and eraser. I’m sure software would be quicker, but it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks. Also, when you do it by hand, you go through it over and over again, so you learn more than by just getting a printout.”
Postseason Preparation
Scouting is especially important in the postseason, when the stakes are higher, the pace is faster, and the likelihood of facing an unfamiliar foe increases. “We don’t do things much differently,” Mizerski says, “but we have to do it in a compressed amount of time. So we just stay a little longer in the office breaking down tapes.”
Throughout the season, Walker builds up his team’s film library in hopes of accounting for any potential opponents. “On nights we’re not playing and no one on our schedule is playing, we’ll send a camera to another school that we might meet in the playoffs,” he says. “In postseason, we’re required to trade only two tapes, so if we can have another three tapes on file we’re better prepared. But it’s extra work for staff, and our varsity coaches are the ones who do it, not the lower level. We assign one- or two-man scouting crews to important games throughout the season.”
Despite the pressure of the postseason, coaches stress that it’s important not to get lost in a torrent of scouting data. “It’s a more intense time, so you want to make sure of what you’re seeing,” Mills says. “Sometimes you get so much information that you can’t see the forest for the trees. You’ve got to narrow it down.”
“You can accumulate so much information that you go crazy trying to stuff it all into your scouting report,” Mangicaro agrees. “So what we do is look at our previous playoff game against a team, if there is one—what worked and what didn’t, what defense did we use and what defense should we stay out of? If we played them during the regular season, we’ll go back to the video and see if we should throw out any plays. We don’t break it down, but we look to see what worked against that particular opponent.”
Whether it’s the state championship against an upstart from the other end of the state or the season opener against a familiar opponent, there’s one truism about high school football—you can never rest on your laurels. “We’ve won three of the last four state championships, and we still scout as hard as ever,” Mizerski says. “In high school, you can’t take anything for granted—you’re dealing with 16- to 18-year-olds whose emotions can run high and low. You can’t ever think it’s going to be easy or you’ll end up getting stung.”