Lou Howard – on “Playing for something outside of self”
“I feel that the difference between champions and almost champions is the ability to play for something outside of self.
Lou Howard – legendary H.S Football Coach
SPIRIT: THE SECRET OF WINNING FOOTBALL
THERE IS A WHOLE NEW HORIZON ON THE Coaching of modern football. Call it psychology if you will. I feel, however, that the new area lies somewhere between the practice the communists call brainwashing and the thing we call spirit or morale. Rockne of Notre Dame had it in the old days. Warren Geise of South Carolina, Forest Evashevski of Iowa and Ara Pareghian of Northwestern have found its use in present-day football. We shall refer to it as team spirit, though it goes much further.
The dictionary defines spirit in many ways: as the breath of life; in the abstract, as life or consciousness, viewed as an independent type of existence; or, as the enthusiastic loyalty that we know as college spirit. Real spirit is indefinable. You feel it, you see examples of it in every game, but what is it?
Spirit Quotient
If we as coaches could weigh a boy from the standpoint of “spirit weight” as well as physical weight, in many cases we would select the little fellow before the 200 pounder. The most important factor in winning is not how big you are but how spirited you are! Although 90% of the coaches will agree with that statement, they will consistently select the bigger of two candidates, not remembering that big football squads are not always successful football squads.
When we as coaches learn to determine a boy’s spirit quotient we will have arrived in a new realm of teaching. Unfortunately, as yet no scales have been devised to weigh or evaluate a candidate’s spirit. The late Charles Caldwell of Princeton was another coach who had long recognized this important area, and Caldwell, like so many others, learned it from Rockne. Caldwell referred to it as the Human Equation. He once said, “The longer I coach, the more I work with boys, the more clearly I understand that the seemingly small incidents – often chance happening – are largely responsible for those decisions which shape an individual’s career. In m own case, it took a great team, and the master coach of them all, Knute Rockne, to convince me that football was for me, that coaching was a profession requiring the same kind of intense study and lifelong devotion demanded of teachers, lawyers and even doctors.
“No, I never played for Rockne. I played against him or against his 1924 team that included the celebrated Four Horsemen, Elmer Layden, Harry Stuhldreher, Jim Crowley, and Don Miller. It happened in Palmer Stadium on a sunny October Twenty-Fifth and never before in my life had I spent such a frustrating, disappointing afternoon. We were beaten, 10-0, and the final score could have been 28-0, or possibly higher. The score didn’t bother me – it was the way in which Rockne’s men handled us, particularly me.”
In dealing with boys, the area of keying for a season or a game is the most important part of football coaching, but because the emotional phase of football is so intangible it is often neglected.
The following story in a way exemplifies this point: During the construction of one of the East River bridges in New York, the engineers were baffled by an old sunken barge embedded in the river bottom. Engines and steel derricks were powerless to remove the obstruction. A young man fresh from engineering school received permission to try his hand. At low tide, he had a large barge towed out to the spot and the end of it fastened to the sunken derelict. As the tide came in from the Atlantic, the barge rose, bringing with it the submerged wreck. The young engineer had linked to his task the limitless powers of the ocean tides. In this story the power of the tide, of course, is the intangible….Spirit!
Sometimes the things in life which we cannot see or explain are the most important. No one will argue that team spirit is not important, but many will differ as to the degree of importance. I feel that the difference between champions and almost champions is the ability to play for something outside of self. This is true work – hence spirit wins championships.
We tried to instill a boy with this intangible. Actually we tried to “brainwash” him, if I may use that word, into believing he was going to be a great back. He had all the attributes, but each time he got into the game he would fail because of insecurity. By constantly putting our arm around this boy, confiding in him, telling him how good he was, we encouraged him enough so that he turned in a fine job for us. He just needed to be convinced that someone cared about him.
Boys will produce if they believe in you.
This story is an excerpt from the book, The Shotgun and the Modern Short Punt, by Lou Howard
Available now in a fully “digital” edition, The Shotgun and the Modern Short Punt is a full implementation of the 2002 publication by one of the recognized authorities on the topic, Lou Howard. Lou self-published a limited quantity of the book in paperback format. Like its predecessors, the paperback edition of the Third Printing will soon be a highly sought after reference on this Offensive system that seems to gain in popularity each year with football coaches from Pop Warner to the NFL.