An Interview With The Angry Coach
By
Dave Tate
The Angry Coach is the newest member of the Elite Fitness Systems Q&A Staff.
I first met this guy at a seminar back in 2005, and I was immediately impressed
with his life experience, his training knowledge and his ability to communicate
the things he felt were right and wrong with both athletics coaching and the
fitness industry. Over the next few years, we stayed in touch via email and the
phone, and we continued to meet up periodically at seminars, where I was always
struck by his enthusiasm for the players he coaches.
The idea to get him on the Q&A struck me back toward the beginning of this
football season. We’d planned to hang out and do a few things one weekend, but
he was so preoccupied with the things his athletes were doing that we couldn’t
really do anything. The high school team he coaches had a game that Friday
night, and then we spent Saturday afternoon watching a couple of his college
guys. He had another guy in action on Saturday night, and then he got on the
internet and started looking stuff up.
When I asked him what he was doing, he said, “I’m looking up all the box
scores for my guys playing in college to see how they did today. It’s what I do
every Saturday night.”
Then, on Sunday, we watched another guy he coached in high school line up as
a starter for an NFL team. I said to myself, “Why don’t we get this guy on the
Q&A? He’s got the knowledge, he’s got a track record of producing players, and
he’s an actual coach who works in a team setting every single day.”
I’ve asked several coaches to be on the Q&A, and if you’ve been reading the
site for a while, we’ve had our share of great ones, including one who’s
currently a major contributor. The anonymity thing has always been a limiting
factor, though. Most coaches don’t want to be on the EFS Q&A because they’re
worried about not being able to say what they want to say, which leads me to my
first question:
Why did you agree to this knowing you’d have to stay anonymous to protect
your job and possibly your reputation?
First of all, Dave, thanks for asking me to be on the Q&A. EFS is easily the
best resource a coach can possibly have on the internet, and it’s been the
source, or at least the starting point, for just about a hundred percent of what
I know about the strength aspect of coaching athletes. If I didn’t find
something here – an article, a post, or one of the books, manuals or DVD’s on
this site – I usually found a link to something else I could use here. This site
made my career, so I guess you could say I’m a guy who “came up through the
system.”
As far as the anonymity thing goes, yeah, it’s a pain in the ass. I don’t
like it, and I think it’s f-ing ridiculous. When you asked me to be on the Q&A,
my eyes had dollar signs rolling around in them like you’d see in a cartoon. I
figured, “I’m gonna write e-books, make DVD’s, do seminars, sell tee shirts and
make a mint off this.” I had visions of telling all the kids I coach to go do
hang cleans for a year while I make like Feruggia and sell products on the
internet while I spend my winters in Cabo.
If I’m going to say what I want to say, I have to keep it under wraps for
now. I don’t want to dick around with my “career,” – if you can call it that –
and I don’t want to offend anyone I work with. I’ll rip some of the guys I coach
with and against, but I do that in person, too, so I’m not violating any code of
integrity or anything like that. I just have a lot of stories and shit that I
think I can share with other coaches that I think they’ll be able to identify
with.
Since we got that out of the way, can you give us some background on what
you do?
I’ve been the head strength coach and a positional coach for seven years at a
successful high school football program in a tough league. Before the current
staff got there, this school had been a total doormat in the league since the
80’s. In fact, before we came in, they went 1-15 in two years. Three years
later, we won the school’s first league championship in over twenty years. The
way we did this was pretty straightforward. We brought in guys who gave a shit,
kept an open mind about what we were running, and made a commitment that no
matter what we did, nothing was going to be done half-assed.
Since we’ve been there – and I’m not using the bullshit “royal we,” because
I’m talking about a whole staff – we’ve put out almost fifty guys who’ve played
some form of college football, including our share of D-1 guys. We have two NFL
guys, too – one guy who got to a couple of training camps, and one who’s
currently a starter on a pretty good team.
What about your own background?
Without getting too much into it, I was a moderately successful college
football player who could’ve been a lot better. I think the best piece of
writing about this was Jim Wendler’s thing a few years ago about guys who
bullshit and piss and moan about why they never made it in sports. I “made it,”
to an extent, but the fact that I didn’t go further was a product of me not
knowing my ass from my elbow at the time. I could play, and my career was
decent, but I didn’t listen, I was lazy, and to be perfectly honest with you, I
was more into getting drunk and getting laid in college than I was into taking
advantage of the opportunity I had. When you combine “probably not good enough”
with “doesn’t work very hard,” the results can be brutal.
That’s why I’m drawn to coaching, and I think it’s why a lot of us are,
because I know all the mistakes that can be made, from the lowest 9th
grader up through the head coach, and I can keep kids from doing the same stupid
shit I did. I f----d up some pretty good opportunities back when I played, and
it led to a life of having to do some pretty unpleasant shit in order to pay the
bills and support my coaching habit. The fact that I played at a reasonably high
level helps me as a coach, too, because I can point to that and guys know I’m
not bullshitting them. They trust you from the get-go because you know what the
game feels like, as opposed to some “Yoda” who thinks playing on the tennis team
and learning some anatomy qualifies him to coach football players.
What position do you coach?
It changes every year based on what we need. I’ve coached every position on
both sides of the ball, so I’m like the utility guy. I’ve even been a
coordinator, but I didn’t have the time to keep that up because I’m not a
teacher and I have to actually work for a living. Assistants come and go, so
after every year, we figure out what we’ve got and I’ll take the positions
either that nobody wants or that we don’t have a guy to cover. That helps me
with the strength coach aspect of it, too, because I’m a big advocate of keeping
things specific. If you asked me seven years ago, I had no idea what to do with
a wide receiver, because I never played the position. Now, after coaching it,
getting clinic-ed, and doing clinics of my own, I know like twenty different
release moves and I can work up shit for that in drills and the exercises we
develop for our guys.
What’s your training philosophy with your team?
I’ve swung from one end of the spectrum to the other, and now I think I’m in
the middle a little bit more. I started out obsessed with a “less is more”
philosophy, and I’d piss and moan at my head coach about how he was working the
guys too hard, and not “accounting for stresses.” Then I swung around to the
“MPQ” system. That’s Make Pussies Quit. Now I’m more in the middle of things.
I’m always reading and studying stuff that people recommend to me, and for the
past few years, I’ve been a big advocate of the Eastern Bloc stuff because I’ve
seen it work with my own eyes. Guys like Buddy Morris, James Smith, Mark
McLaughlin, Tom Myslinski and others – not to mention all the authors they’ve
introduced me to – have made me realize there’s more to coaching football
players than walking around with medium sized polyester shorts with my nuts
hanging out and screaming at kids while they do up-downs.
You have to balance things out. I love all the scientific stuff, and if
anyone wants to send me an Omegawave, I wouldn’t mind trying one out, but
football is a fight. At least that’s the way I’ve always gone into it. The whole
repetitive effort thing the “science guys” preach, to me, is 95% of the battle.
You want your kids to be able to keep going and going and going, the way Mark
McLaughlin talks about, but there’s also going to come a point in some games
where your head and your nutsack take over and you have to make a f-ing play.
Where it goes together is that a superior strength program makes it easier to
think when you’re “under fire,” but you still have to make sure kids can do it,
and there’s a certain old-school aspect to it that most successful programs I’ve
seen share.
I’ll put it to you this way. The team that wins the state championship almost
every year in one of the states next to mine is a nationally respected program
that doesn’t even have a strength coach. I think we send more guys to play in
college than they do. I’ve seen them play, though, and it’s f-ing scary how good
they are. They have eleven guys on both sides of the ball who are concerned with
nothing other than doing their job and beating their guy on every play That
coach has tapped into something, and I’ve been spending the past seven years
trying to figure out what it is. Actually, I know what it is, but I’m too busy
arguing with my dumb f—-k of a head coach to actually put it in place.
What do you do with your own training?
I doubt anyone will give a shit about this, Dave, but I’ll give this one a
shot. In my powerlifting life, I’ve squatted a little over 700, benched 500 and
pulled in the low 600’s. Big f-ing deal. My numbers could have been a lot
better, but I never really sold out to powerlifting and did everything I needed
to do to get my lifts all the way up. Plus, although I have nothing against gear
because it’s part of the sport, I don’t want to wear it. I could make a million
excuses, but the only one that counts is that I don’t want to be a competitive
powerlifter right now.
Like a lot of other guys on the site, I just recently did something of a
“transformation” where I went from being an oafish 285 pound out-of-my-class
powerlifter down to 230 and in WAY better shape. I work with some other athletes
in private besides my high school guys, and a lot of them are very successful at
what they do. I felt that by being a fat f—-k, I was a hypocrite who wasn’t
“walking the talk,” so I dieted down and busted my ass training. Shelby Starnes
is a phenomenal resource on this site, and everyone looking to do anything with
a diet should shoot him an email.
I have two goals now. I want to be stronger than all of my clients –
including my NFL guy – and all the kids I’ve ever coached, which, thankfully, I
am. I also want to be able to run around with my athletes. If I say, “Do this 42
inch box jump,” I want to be able to walk over to the box and demonstrate it. I
had a kid who’ll be playing college football next year challenge me to a 40 in
camp this year, and I lit him up. He was a lineman, but he’s still half my age,
so you had to consider me an underdog.
What can we expect from you on the Q&A?
I want to go at things on the Q&A from a real world perspective, as someone
who’s had success being thrown in with 50 kids at a time instead of having the
luxury of training guys one or a few at a time in a custom-built gym. My
reputation, such as it is, depends on winning games and getting guys ready to
play. If that doesn’t happen, I can’t just say, “F—-k it, let me go count my
money,” because if a kid screws up, a lot of it is my fault. A lot of it is also
the fault of the dumbass sport coaches we have to deal with, and I’m free to get
on here and address that in ways that some other guys might not be able to.
I also want to contribute to the Q&A by offering the perspective of a guy
who’s in my position. I want to tell athletes and coaches what works for us, and
why, instead of telling them to box squat, do some GHR’s, push the Prowler and
go home. There’s more to it than that, but there can also be a lot less to it
than the Omegawave-type stuff when you’re in a team setting with asshole coaches
breathing down your neck and you don’t have time to do a DNA scan on each
individual guy when you have 50 kids on your hands and an hour to get your work
done.
I’ve also worked with athletes from a variety of other sports, including
basketball, baseball and lacrosse, and I’ve actually done some things with a
couple of UFC fighters, so I’m looking forward to the give and take there, as
well. I’ve hit on some things that have worked, and if I can be useful and “pay
it forward” the way it was done for me, I’ll be happy with that. I got into
coaching because I wanted to help athletes and make sure they don’t get f----d
over, so the thing I remember most is that it’s about them, and not about me.
