Author: Coach Alercio

I recently saw a promotion for another football camp and on it was the quote “Learn From The Best.”  One can safely assume, they are not the best coaches in the world.  Were they proclaiming to be the best in their region, state, or town?  

When American Football Monthly did an article on me and “the Heel Toe philosophy” of OLine steps I teach, the editorial labeled me as a “guru of offensive line play in the northeast part of the country.”  Did that make me the best?  The best in the northeast?  Maybe one of the best? Satisfying though the thought may be, I’m reminded to be a true “one in a million,” on a planet with nearly 8 billion people, means there are 8,000 more out there just like you!

What is it to be the best?  Surpassing all others in excellence, achievement, or quality?  If so, then I am clearly not the best.  Is being the best giving your all into what you love to do every single day and striving to be the best you can be?  Then maybe I am my best. Each of us in our own way has to contend with the difference between being “the best” or being “my best.” Given the simple statistics, and recalling the serenity prayer and “things I can control…” I think it’s fair to say we have a far greater likelihood of being our own best self rather than chasing some other essentially arbitrary criteria over which we have little control.  

I have spent most of my adult life learning the skills and techniques of offensive line play and simplifying them into ways to teach players.  One of the most flattering things I heard was a comment from Mike Kuchar, co-founder of XandO Labs when he said “The clarity of your teaching simplifies the game tremendously.”  On the campus of the Hun School of Princeton this Sunday, I will teach the complicated techniques of offensive line play in simple terms players can learn.  Having devoted my life to learning, teaching, and guiding student-athletes, I’m committed to being my best, sharing what I’ve learned from so many, and doing so in a way I hope will help others become their best when they square off on gridirons around the Mid-Atlantic this coming fall.

Coach Rich Alercio is available to discuss coaching philosophy, X’s & O’s, or teach his O-Line “techniques in the trenches.” Contact Coach at richalercio@gmail.com and share http://www.olineskills.com with your colleagues and friends. Thanks for supporting this blog and joining our conversations, and as always, thanks for your time!  

I recently read a blog post from a proud father after his son received an award at the United States Naval Academy Sprint Football banquet.  The award is named after former player Brandon “Bull” Barrett, a Marine Captain who made the ultimate sacrifice in the service of our country in Afghanistan.  Regrettably, I do not know the young man who received the award nor do I know the hero who it is named after, but the description of the award struck me as it so perfectly encapsulates what it is to be a teammate.  This award goes to the individual that plays for neither glory nor accolades but for the men on his left and right flank. A teammate, a brother, and the man we all want in our corner.  

I wonder if the recipient of this prestigious award is an offensive lineman because it so perfectly explains the job description.  There is no glory in the position.  Their reward is when the five work as one for the benefit of the team and the protection of their teammates.  At the end of every Alercio OLine Clinic, we circle up and I remind the players why they are so exceptional.  In a few short weeks, I will share these words with a group of young men who will come together at the Hun School for the Spring 2023 Alercio OLine Clinic. While the preponderance of the day focuses on physical nuances, skills, and the thought processes around execution, we’ll also take the opportunity to reinforce elements of team building, character, and concepts we expect to go far beyond the gridiron. I genuinely hope and pray these student-athletes will take a team-first, selfless approach to the betterment of their respective teams, but even more so, I look forward to them carrying that mindset forward to the families, schools, and companies that make up the teams of their future.

Coach Rich Alercio is available to discuss coaching philosophy, X’s & O’s, or teach his O-Line “techniques in the trenches.” Contact Coach at richalercio@gmail.com and share http://www.olineskills.com with your colleagues and friends. Thanks for supporting this blog and joining our conversations, and as always, thanks for your time!  

In the Fall of 2001, the head football coach at Hunterdon Central high school, Jim Meert, visited my office at The College of New Jersey to share an idea:  Host a 1-day offensive lineman-only camp and do it in the Spring.  My first thought was, “That’s crazy.”  I wondered, “Who would come to an offensive lineman-only camp in the Spring.”  At the time, no one was running 1-day specialty camps, but the more we talked the more excited I got.  Jim was right.  On a Sunday in March of 2002, 333 offensive linemen and scores of their coaches came to TCNJ to attend the inaugural Alercio OLine Clinic.

Over 20 years later, I have been blessed to work with over 5,000 players hosting clinics in New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Vermont.  As I have said in so many previous blogs, one of the most extraordinary things about the coaching profession is the willingness to share with others.  I have had the good fortune of working with and being mentored by some of the greatest OLine coaches in the game.  The Alercio OLine Clinics allow me to pay it forward on a large scale. This spring marks the 40^th anniversary of my graduation from high school and knowing the impacts my coaches had on me at that age, I’m hoping there will be a player (or players) who go on to start their own tradition of service as high school (or higher level) coaches in communities far and wide. 

I look forward to returning to the Hun School of Princeton on April 23 for the New Jersey Alercio OLine Clinic.  With a registration fee of $40 per person for a team bringing 5 or more players, we have maintained a goal of keeping the clinic affordable for everyone.  And as always, we continue to welcome coaches to attend at no cost.  

Coach Rich Alercio is available to discuss coaching philosophy, X’s & O’s, or teach his O-Line “techniques in the trenches.” Contact Coach at richalercio@gmail.com and share http://www.olineskills.com with your colleagues and friends. Thanks for supporting this blog and joining our conversations, and as always, thanks for your time!  

I have a good friend who likes to ask thoughtful questions. One of his favorites is “What’s something you’ve changed your mind about, or think about differently than you might have 3-5 years ago. While many of us could come up with some interesting answers, I turned the question back around on him. His answer was, “I no longer ask why something is the way it is, or why people act the way they do,” he said. “I ask what are the incentives?” The point is if we understand the incentives (or disincentives) we typically have the answer to “why?”

As a follow-up to last week’s post about the shortage of officials, many parents speculated on why there’s a shortage? One of the most common comments received reflected on parents and their conduct. In far too many cases, parents’ conduct acts as a disincentive. In fact, Dr. Karissa L. Niehoff, chief executive officer of the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHSA) in Indianapolis, Indiana, commented “the shortage of officials continues to be a major issue across the country – and more supportive parents who are encouraging their sons and daughters from the stands rather than questioning the officials’ calls would go a long way toward retaining more individuals to officiate contests.”

Speaking of incentives, I think it’s clear, no one goes into officiating high school sports for the paycheck. In most cases, volunteers are looking for ways to give back to sports and programs that meant so much in their own youth and early adult development. Such mental/emotional capital born of purpose, gratitude, and a desire to pay forward the support offered by predecessors years or even decades before, is the real incentive.

Unfortunately, such incentives can be drowned out by those who in moments of emotion, forget the limits of their perspective, eyesight, and angel of view, and are compelled to criticize and amplify the criticisms launched by others. I don’t mean to suggest there’s never a bad call, but it’s important to remember high school officials are doing their best, volunteering more time than you’d expect, and really are trying to get it right.

When I find myself stuck in traffic, I’ve been known to shift lanes left or right in the hopes of making a little more progress than if I had just sat still. My wife, whose patience is far more a virtue than my own, will sometimes whisper, “stay in your lane…” Though sometimes easier said than done, I know she’s right….

We are all emotionally invested in our children and the sports they/we love. When we combine the two, it is often challenging to inhibit our emotions. However, if the goal is for the children’s development, experience, and fun, we need officials and need them to want to come back. Once again borrowing the highway analogy, if we think of the lanes as Coaching, Playing, Officiating, and Supporting.  We’d probably all do best to follow my wife’s advice, pick a lane and stay in it… And while we’re at it, take a moment to say thanks to an official. Without them, we’d have no game to enjoy in the first place.

Coach Rich Alercio is available to discuss coaching philosophy, X’s & O’s, or teach his O-Line “techniques in the trenches.” Contact Coach at richalercio@gmail.com and share http://www.olineskills.com with your colleagues and friends. Thanks for supporting this blog and joining our conversations, and as always, thanks for your time!   

The 2023 Vermont high school football season will kick off under the lights on the campus of St Johnsbury Academy on the last Thursday in August.  

We embrace the honor of being the state’s first game, but it is due to necessity and not desire.  Vermont, like so many other states, has such a shortage of football officials that we cannot have all of our teams playing on Friday nights and Saturday afternoons.  Each week this season at least one school will host a Thursday night game.  To keep player safety paramount, the VFCA has unanimously voted that opponents playing a Thursday night game will not have played on the previous Saturday to allow players adequate recovery time.

My lifelong friend and former high school teammate who is now a North Carolina football official informed me that they are playing varsity games on Thursdays and Sundays to combat the shortage of officials.  

 A couple of years ago, I heard that a shortage of softball officials would cause many JV games in the state to be canceled so that varsity games could be staffed, so I became a Vermont softball umpire and have thoroughly enjoyed the role and the camaraderie of my fellow umpires.  Needless to say, I did not play high school softball, so you do not have to be a former player to be an official.  I encourage you to contact your local association and sign up to be an official.  In Vermont, those interested in helping the game of football by becoming an official can contact Paul Trono at paul.trono@gmail.com

We’ve often talked about the benefits of High School Sports and how the lessons and experiences encountered on the field, in the locker and weight rooms transcend school echoing through the lives and communities of players for decades. Leadership, teamwork, character, ethics, resilience, and empathy all stem from team sports and athletic experiences. Please consider helping foster such growth and benefits for today’s youth, as they will very shortly be tomorrow’s leaders.

Coach Rich Alercio is available to discuss coaching philosophy, X’s & O’s, or teach his O-Line “techniques in the trenches.” Contact Coach at richalercio@gmail.com and share http://www.olineskills.com with your colleagues and friends. Thanks for supporting this blog and joining our conversations, and as always, thanks for your time! 

We wrap up our Spring Football practices this week and are fortunate to have an indoor fieldhouse since our outdoor turf field is covered in several feet of snow!  Our focus has been teaching fundamentals, team building, and having fun. Working together, we can accomplish these objectives regardless of location.

Spring practices provide an outstanding opportunity to bring a diverse group of people with different skills together to accomplish a common goal. We do so while fostering mutual support, and build the program increasing task difficulty until players realize they are better off working together than going alone. Fostering such recognition reinforces the value of teamwork through experiential learning.  Football, unlike baseball, basketball, hockey, and soccer, brings together players with vastly different skill sets and body types. The offensive lineman and the wide receiver have entirely different job descriptions.  Emphasizing each other’s strengths and knowing one cannot succeed without the other cultivates interdependence, reliance, and dependability, all of which contribute to team-building.   Lastly, but perhaps more importantly, we want the players to have fun, so we end every practice with a 10-15 minute period where we play a game.  However, we don’t play a football game.  Any player-led, competitive game that fosters inclusion while requiring communication, cooperation, and decision making is the baseline requirement. Additionally, we want to see character components such as leadership and followership, as well as athletic components like acceleration, deceleration, and rapid change of direction during play.  Besides being entertaining for our coaches to watch, it is a great opportunity to observe and evaluate players’ athletic abilities and other desirable qualities.  

We start strong with clear guidance, expectations, and goals. By ending each practice incorporating fun, we hope student athletes depart feeling both like they accomplished something during training, and with the smiles and fond memories of fun likely to entice their return both the next day and ultimately this summer and fall to commence next season.

Coach Rich Alercio is available to discuss coaching philosophy, X’s & O’s, or teach his O-Line “techniques in the trenches.” Contact Coach at richalercio@gmail.com and share http://www.olineskills.com with your colleagues and friends. Thanks for supporting this blog and joining our conversations, and as always, thanks for your time! 

The Vermont Football Coaches Association will gather tomorrow (10 March) for our Spring meeting followed by our annual coaches clinic.  We will gather at Rutland High School with an agenda including honoring our divisional Coaches of the Year, voting for our state Coach of the Year, discussing rules changes, reviewing our new league and divisional alignment, approving our budget, getting updates on our state all-star game, and discussing state championship day sites.  

This is the inception year for the Vermont Football Coaches Association and thus my first year in the role of President, I look forward to gathering, not as adversaries as we do in the Fall, but as colleagues working together for the benefit and development of football in the Green Mountain State.  Just as we coaches bring players from diverse backgrounds together to build a team and strive for collective success, we need to gather as coaches, come together, and work on improving the game, our programs, and communities.  Doing so is something we all share in common, and with a common vision we look forward to “moving the ball.”.

After our meeting, we will begin the clinic portion of the event with coaches from Husson, Bowdoin, Norwich, Plymouth State, Middlebury, University of New England, Castleton, Bellows Falls HS, and Queensbury HS.  With 3 presentations every hour, we will ensure one of our coaches is in attendance at each presentation so the information they gather can be shared with the rest of our staff.  I am particularly looking forward to seeing my former player, Paytton Hobbs from Husson University, and my son Shane’s former Coach from UNE, Kenny Treschitta.

Lastly, I look forward to our staff joining coaches from all over the state for a coaches’ social at Applebee’s.  With our busy schedules, it is challenging to get our SJA coaching staff together socially.  Further, given the distance between our schools here in the Northeast Kingdom, it is even more challenging to gather with fellow coaches from other schools. I find the camaraderie we felt with teammates when we were young can often be replicated through gatherings like this. Working together, learning together, and socializing together so that we can better the game of football in our towns and throughout the state. 

Coach Rich Alercio is available to discuss coaching philosophy, X’s & O’s, or teach his O-Line “techniques in the trenches.” Contact Coach at richalercio@gmail.com and share http://www.olineskills.com with your colleagues and friends. Thanks for supporting this blog and joining our conversations, and as always, thanks for your time! 

The NFL Combine kicks off this week.  Prospects will be measured for height, weight, arm length, hand length, body fat percentage.  They will be tested for speed, strength, power, and agility with a 40-yard dash, bench press, vertical jump, broad jump, shuttle, and 3-cone drill.  Then they will take an intelligence test to measure cognitive ability and problem-solving aptitude.  

On the field, football players need to react to ever-changing circumstances, solve complex problems, and make sound judgment calls all under time constraints.  (A great training ground for the events and pressures players will face later in life.) Playing football requires a great deal of concentration, resourcefulness, and spatial reasoning, all tested by the NFL with the Wonderlic test.  The Wonderlic test, created in 1936, contains 50 math, vocabulary, and reasoning questions.  Each question is worth 1 point and a score of 20 is considered average intelligence.  A good score is 26+.  There has been one perfect score; a Punter from, as you might expect, Harvard.

The average scores by position reveal that the Offensive Linemen score the highest on the Wonderlic. Offensive Tackles average a 26, Centers are a close second at 25, Quarterbacks come in 3^rd with a 24, and Guards round out the top four with a 23.   Although it may surprise some, it comes as no surprise to us OLine guys who have for years served as the quiet professionals who consistently deliver performance without pursuit of accolades or attention. 

Come learn more about OLine play and the quiet professionals who excel in these roles at the Alercio OLine Clinics at the Hun School of Princeton (NJ) on 23 April and St Johnsbury Academy (VT) on 11 June.  (Register here: 2023 Alercio O’Line Clinic Brochure)

Coach Rich Alercio is available to discuss coaching philosophy, X’s & O’s, or teach his O-Line “techniques in the trenches.” Contact Coach at richalercio@gmail.com and share http://www.olineskills.com with your colleagues and friends. Thanks for supporting this blog and joining our conversations, and as always, thanks for your time! 

The Golden Rule is to treat others the way you want to be treated.  The biblical pretense to the Golden Rule comes from Mathew  “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them.”  But there is a better way to treat people.

In celebrating Valentine’s Day this week, I am reminded of a test a life-long friend and high school teammate once shared with me.  The love language test that I encourage everyone to take with their spouse or significant other (link to the quiz follows below). Reviewing your spouse or partner’s results allows you to better understand how they want to be treated.  You will learn despite your best intentions, he or she may want something very different from you. Whether acts of service, words of affirmation, physical touch, quality time, or gifts, once you understand their perspective you’re more likely to deliver on the intent behind the golden rule.  

Just such a lesson was reinforced early in my career when I was coaching (in a very loud and direct voice) a player we recruited out of a rough neighborhood.  After practice, he very courageously approached me and said that he had some bad life experiences with males yelling at him and that if I yelled, he would just tune me out.  I was coaching him the way I liked to be coached and not how he wanted to be coached. If I wanted his best, I needed to shift my perspective. 

One of the superpowers I think we as coaches (and many of us as adults) can cultivate is empathy. Empathy starts with believing in the dignity of others. If we believe in others’ dignity, we’re predisposed to giving the benefit of the doubt and investing in their wellbeing. Part of the investment is in getting to know the player, student, mentee, etc., and understanding where and how to engage, motivate, and guide them to achieve more than they ever believed possible.

In returning to the Golden Rule, I think it’s fair to say we’d like to be treated in ways that best help us realize our potential, and we should apply a similar lens to those in our care or influence.  Ultimately, we both end up better for the effort.

More on the Love Language Quiz here: Love Language

Coach Rich Alercio is available to discuss coaching philosophy, X’s & O’s, or teach his O-Line “techniques in the trenches.” Contact Coach at richalercio@gmail.com and share http://www.olineskills.com with your colleagues and friends. Thanks for supporting this blog and joining our conversations, and as always, thanks for your time! 

This week’s blog comes as a follow-up to last week’s discussion of Cost Benefit Analysis and how we try to assess the “benefit” of a given play during games vs the “cost” to install and refine plays during practice. I’ve noted on several occasions how fortunate we are as coaches to enjoy a culture of shared knowledge and experience amongst coaching colleagues. The following response once again reinforces my point.

Coach Frank Francisco, a longtime friend, mentor, and author of “Evolution of the Game: A Chronicle of American Football,” responded to last week’s blog offering the following:

Coach,

This is not meant, in any way, to be critical of your recent OlineSkills blog. What you are doing is a great approach.  I’ve always been a strong believer in doing a “post-season self-scout.” A lot of coaches move right on to the next year with only a cursory, subjective evaluation without doing any real cost-benefit analysis. However, I have found the analysis doesn’t always provide an accurate measure of play success vs. input/practice time.  I’m going to give you some things to think about using additional variables that might increase the accuracy when coaches measure play success. 

Measuring Success:  Five yards on third-and-4 are more difficult to get and consequently more valuable than five yards on first and 10; and much more valuable than five yards on third and 12.  Red zone plays are probably worth more than plays in other locations of the field. Certainly, it is easier to gain five yards in the middle of the field.  There are a number of other factors that can differentiate one five-yard run from another.  Are you up by two scores in the fourth quarter (4-minute offense) when the play is called, or are you down by two scores (2-minute offense) and trying to catch up? Also, a play gaining five yards vs. the defending state champions is more difficult and more valuable than five yards vs. a team ranked near the bottom of your league. 

Coach Francisco, a former Division 1 coach, offers a much deeper dive into play analysis.  Referring back to my college statistics class, I have used descriptive statistics for play analysis which summarized data using indexes such as mean, median, and mode.  Coach Francisco’s ideas offer additional value or weight to a given situation and the potential to attribute greater or lesser benefit over the course of a season. Although a more complex and potentially arduous process in play evaluation, his inferential statistics approach should yield more accurate predictions from the data, and offers an interesting point of comparison.  

As February’s arrival signals the heart of winter here in the Northeast Kingdom, perhaps some time perusing spreadsheets and statistics will help us prepare for Spring practice and better reinforce success.

Coach Rich Alercio is available to discuss coaching philosophy, X’s & O’s, or teach his O-Line “techniques in the trenches.” Contact Coach at richalercio@gmail.com and share http://www.olineskills.com with your colleagues and friends. Thanks for supporting this blog and joining our conversations, and as always, thanks for your time!