5 Processes Every Football Coach Should Be Running This Season (And Why 2026 Is the Defining Year) Coaches are creatures of habit. They prefer to lead and operate the way they always have: Rely on memory, written notes, human labor, and leading from natural instincts. But the complexity of coaching, let alone leading an entire program and staff, has exploded. Old principles still work. Old processes won't. New technology has opened the door to new possibilities, but not in the way most coaches think. The competitive edge is still human, and it always will be. RIGHT NOW is your chance to get ahead. Here are 5 processes you should be running throughout this season starting today . . . 1. Voice record your film study notes out loud. Stop pausing tape to scribble notes. Instead, hit record on a transcription and talk through what you're seeing and thinking in real time: formations, tendencies, protection, ideas, concerns, etc. Let AI technology transcribe everything you say verbatim, study it, synthesize it, and organize it. Let it identify and list your action items and send the output directly to your staff. No interpretation gaps, no forgotten actions or responsibilities. The workflow: watch → talk → AI analyzes and organizes → you review → distribute. It will cut hours off of film review, write-ups, organizing, and action planning. The quality of your actual football learning, insight, and plans will be significantly better. 2. Record every staff and team meeting. Your team's realities, ideas, and most important decisions are discussed in rooms. Most of that is never captured in a truly useful way. They're left to rough disconnected notes, memories of multiple people with different interpretations, or they just disappear. When you record your meetings, technology can now recognize patterns, opportunities, and issues you might miss. It recognizes every to-do that requires action, flags conflicts or contradictions, and gives you a searchable record of every conversation throughout the season. There's no reason to ever forget anything anymore or not have access to everything you've ever discussed or considered as a staff or team. A career accelerator bonus? Meeting transcripts are game film on you. Use your meeting transcripts to give you feedback on how effectively you lead and participate in them, how you teach and speak to your team, how you come across, how you might be perceived by people in the room. Behavior is still the #1 thing that produces results. Your behavior more than others. This process raises your self-awareness of how good your skills are or aren't and helps you improve significantly faster. The workflow: record → review summary and next steps → assign and execute action items → learn about your leadership and coaching skills from your own transcripts. No more losing the thread between Sunday's game-planning, Monday's staff meeting, Tuesday's practice, and Wednesday's adjustments. 3. Keep a private coaching journal and use it daily. Not a notes app. Not a text thread. A private, confidential and secure, voice-recorded journal where you dump everything rattling around in your mind: what's working, what's not, player observations, staff tensions, things you can't say in a meeting, things you don't get to talk to anyone else about. Talk everything out, all of it, in your coaching journal. Coaching points for drills, plays, or techniques. Leadership lessons, team messaging ideas, questions, insights you learned from a social post, podcast or book. Speaking it out loud forces clarity in a way that spinning in your head never does. It gets more value the more you do it. By week three of the season, you have a documented record of your thinking. Dozens and dozens of private, searchable notes that you can learn from, with or without the assistance of technology. By the end of your season, you'll have more knowledge of yourself, your experiences, skills, opportunities, struggles, and team than you've ever had in your career. The raw material of your coaching philosophy, values, impact, and frictions. You'll have your head coaching manual already, written in your real talk, descriptions, thoughts, feelings, and experiences. 4. Get a tech-powered coaching advisor that knows the art of coaching, you, and your program specifically. Generic AI tools provide generic answers and solutions. Tools like ChatGPT and Claude are powerful but don't have enough depth of knowledge about you. The bits and pieces you might provide in chat prompts are not enough. They don't know your team, your staff, your philosophy, the specific situation you're dealing with at 10pm on a Thursday of game week or any of the dozen factors that led to it over the past two weeks. A tech-powered, 100% confidential advisor that's been trained on your journal entries, meeting recordings, and coaching context gives you something coaches have never been able to get before: a thinking partner that actually knows what you're dealing with, understands, and can help you. A simple use case: "Our best corner, who we need, keeps showing up late, forgetting his assignment, and emotionally disengaging. His parents are divorcing and he's struggling with it. Not sure how much stability or attention he's getting at home. How do I handle this without losing him or the room?" That situation and that question needs a ton of context about you, him, and the team to answer well. If you're keeping a daily journal, now you have it. 5. Start building your personal coaching knowledge base now before the tools get even better and swarm the coaching industry. Coaches don't realize how much better technology and "AI tools" for coaches are going to be in 2027. Or how normal, useful, and common they'll be by 2028-2029. Game planning, player development, scheme analysis, operational processes, and more. The coaches who will benefit most will be the ones who document everything THIS YEAR! Every meeting, every film session, every coaching observation, thought, idea, struggle, friction, and opportunity. Because that documentation will become the knowledge base future tools run on in 2027, 2028, 2029, etc. Coaches who start recording now will have a two-year head start on all the coaches who don't. If you wait, you'll be empty handed when the best technology in history is ready to use. Technology doesn't replace your role, your behavior, your instincts, or your relationships. But it does change your processes because it changes what is possible. Technology has made things possible today that have never been possible before in the history of the world. Recognize that. This is a legendary opportunity. The coaches who figure that out this season will have a compounding competitive advantage that will grow even bigger next year. All 5 of these workflows are built into our Zone 1 app, a tech-powered platform for competitive coaches committed to excellence. The Zone 1 Advisor, Journal, and Meetings features are built to integrate and serve how coaches actually think and work, learn and grow, compete and perform. They're timeless coaching tools for personal and professional development executed through newly available technology. Subscribe free and start today at Zone1.coach. iOS app available soon. Win games. Make an impact on people's lives. Accelerate your career.

12 powerful truths on the value of giving more praise as a leader (or parent / spouse): DISCLOSURE WARNING: I put the most important and valuable insights near the bottom of this list on purpose. #6, #7, #8, and #9 specifically. Doom scrollers will never see these. Disciplined readers and leaders will. 1. When you see courage, integrity, discipline, responsibility, patience, excellence . . . any good at all . . . point it out and call it out. Don't let what's admirable pass unacknowledged. 2. Your praise reinforces what your group promotes and reproduces. What you praise, you get more of. What goes unpraised slowly dies. Praise honesty, get more honesty. Praise every act of excellence you see and watch standards rise. 3. Be generous with who you praise and how often. Some people hoard recognition like it costs them something to give it out, as if acknowledging something good in someone will stop them from continuing to do it. That's a poverty mindset. 4. Celebrating the good in people is an act of social responsibility. Recognition encourages people to pursue excellence. It establishes and reinforces what you and your group values. Withholding praise when people do good harms the person and harms the group. 5. Praising the good does not mean: • Fake compliments for average effort or mediocre results • Never pointing out flaws, mistakes, or gaps • Pretending everything is great when it isn't • Manipulation through flattery 6. When you see someone do something genuinely excellent and you say nothing, maybe because you're trying to be tough or maybe because acknowledging their excellence feels like it diminishes you, you starve excellence of the recognition it needs to grow and flourish. Multiply that experience across your culture and watch what happens. It's disastrous. Good goes unrecognized. Excellence goes unrewarded. Mediocrity becomes normal because there's no difference in the experience. Average becomes the acceptable standard. People stop pursuing excellence, or even good, because nobody acknowledges it anyway. 7. Some people withhold praise as their default because they think it makes them discerning. It doesn't. It makes them distant, disconnected, and resented by the people around them. People stop even trying for excellence because they're in an environment where good is hardly ever acknowledged. 8. When you see genuine good, give attention to it and take action on it. Specifically and publicly when you can. "That took courage." "That was freaking awesome." "What you did was so good. We need more of that." Watch what happens when people start receiving, and seeing other people receive, this kind of praise. The person lights up, not from ego but from having their best effort recognized. Others notice it, too. This is what excellence looks like. This is what gets valued here. Standards in the group start to rise because people crave that experience, recognition, and results. People pursue excellence when they see it gets acknowledged. 9. You establish culture through what you observe, recognize, and act on. That especially includes praise. Praise problem solving, get more problem solving. Praise decisiveness, get more decisiveness. Praise having difficult conversations faster instead of letting them fester, people will have more difficult conversations faster instead of letting them fester. Be strategic about driving and shaping what your culture values and reproduces. 10. The good you praise, you get more of. The good you ignore dies of inattention. 11. Don't be stingy with compliments, praise, and celebration. When something is genuinely good or truly excellent, speak well of it directly, loudly, and publicly. 12. Your acknowledgment reinforces what benefits everyone. It's how you aim your culture at what matters and what works.

A coach’s role is to set the standards of the program. It’s the defining responsibility. All results come from how well any coach does this. But a coach can’t set standards by explaining them. They can only set standards by demonstrating them. In everything the coach does. And everything matters! Athletes don't always listen to instruction and lectures. But they always watch coaching habits. They watch, hear, and learn the ways their coach acts in response to situations. If a coach expects disciplined players but the coach demonstrates loss of self-control when things go wrong, the expectation of discipline instantly loses integrity and credibility. Teams follow a coach’s demonstration more than a coach’s explanation. If you demand excellence but settle for acceptable, they'll settle for acceptable too. The standard you’ll accept is the standard they’ll aim for. Show your team — staff and players — the standards through your own actions. Demonstrate in yourself the standards you expect of them. That’s the defining responsibility of a coach.

Is this true or an overreaction?

Growth is realizing that discipline looks like the right, not the left.

Three sentences can change your past, your present, and your future: The responsibility you take matches the story you tell. You can tell yourself a story to raise your responsibility or tell a story to lower it. What story are you telling yourself now?

Daily Zone 1 app Journal prompt: • "What moment from this past week made you proud to be a coach?" • "What does that tell you about what's important beyond winning/losing?" • "How can you create more of those moments?"

Daily Zone 1 Journal prompt: "What decisions am I hesitating to make because they're uncomfortable, even though they're necessary?"

An absence of discipline does more to undermine your team than anything your opponent does.

The E+R=O Mindset: Event + Response = Outcome "I am the only one in control of my Response. I can be influenced, pressured, commanded, or constrained, but not controlled. No one thinks for me. No one feels for me. No one chooses for me. No one acts for me. No matter what Event I'm experiencing or what Outcome I'm pursuing, my Response is always 100% my responsibility."

Daily Zone 1 Journal prompt: • Talk through your offensive or defensive starters one by one Describe: - Where you trust him/her - Where you don’t - Why

Talent is common. Discipline is rare. The combination is elite.

Daily Zone 1 Journal prompt for coaches: 1. "What strengths of our team are a reflection of my leadership?" 2. "What weaknesses of our team are a reflection of my leadership?"

Character requires courage. Not a single act, but repeated acts of courage. • Action creates evidence. • Repeated action creates a pattern. • Patterns of behavior become character. • Character becomes identity. It's more than a choice of what you're going to do. It's a choice of who you are and who you're going to be.

There are two kinds of people in this world: 1. Those who pull responsibility closer 2. Those who push responsibility away Make sure you’re absolutely clear which kind of person you are. And make sure you know which kind of people are around you.

Listen and try not be slightly overwhelmed by the experience and the excellence.

Character is a choice. And it’s one decision away. One courageous act and you are suddenly a courageous person. One dishonest act and you are suddenly a dishonest person. Every choice is a character choice.

Sam Leavitt is experiencing an SEC baptism. How will he respond?