Smart Coaching Blog

Solutions for Smart Coaches and Athletic Directors

Archives for November 2016

Use Google Slides to Create the Call Sheet You Want

by Leave a Comment

call-sheet

I have developed a fairly quick and easy way to put together a call sheet for Friday night that has all the information that I need in a format that I like.

Before stumbling upon how to do this, I was always either copying other people’s call sheets or spending a lot of time trying to figure out how Google Sheets and/or Excel work.

Here’s what I came up with:

A quick outline of the above video:

  1. Create the information that you want on the sheet in Excel or on Google Sheets.
  2. Take screen shots of the information you want to include on the sheet using Jing.
  3. Insert and organize on Google Slides.  Remember to go to “page set-up” and select the custom size if you want a vertical axis to your call sheet.

Google Slides is now my preferred method of creating scouting reports, play books, coaches and player handbooks, etc.  It’s so easy to insert pictures, text, headings, etc., that it really beats the pants off of using a regular word processor for these tasks.

Flip Your Meeting

by Leave a Comment

urban-meyer

If you haven’t watched the video of Urban Meyer at the Ohio Football Coaches Convention, I highly recommend it.  In his presentation, he detailed the “on edge” teaching approach that his staff uses with the Ohio State football team.  Keith Grabowski wrote a great blog post on applying some of these ideas to your football program.

Those of you who are professional educators have probably heard of the concept of the Flipped Classroom.  Recently, I read a post on the You Can Do More blog that outlined using screen casts for scouting reports and putting a meeting in the pocket of your team.  The last few weeks, we have been doing this and I thought I’d share the process.

We typically will meet on Mondays before practice to watch a little film of our upcoming opponent and to go over any issues we had the week prior.  In the past we’ve shared the time for the offense and defense.  This can make this meeting longer than I’d like and push back the start of Monday’s practice.

For the sake of reducing time in the classroom, I created both digital scouting reports/game plans to share with the team/coaches as well as a tutorial for a package that I wanted to install for a particular opponent.

Here are the resources that I use to create a digital game plan for my players:

  1. Jing by Techsmith to take screen shots of formations, fronts, etc.
  2. HUDL to create playlists, diagram plays and to telestrate.  We also use the HUDL message function to send a link to our players/coaches of the screen cast.
  3. Google Slides for outline of the content for the kids and coaches.
  4. Screencast-o-matic to record your screencast.  I also use Camtasia and I guess you could use Jing if you’d like but Screencast-o-matic is free and works well for this.
  5. Save your screencast to Google Drive or Dropbox and create a link for your players to access the video.

Once I’ve completed watching the film of our last game and our next week’s opponents, I create a quick outline on Google Slides that I will refer to during the screen cast.  I will then bounce between HUDL and the Google Slide presentation to cover the information.

If you like using HUDL’s presentations, you could put your outline in a playlist you share with your kids but, I don’t really like using theirs so I just go back and forth between the two.

Once you’ve completed the screencast, you need to save it someplace secure.  I have used both Google Drive and Dropbox to do this.  Once I’ve created the link, I share it using the HUDL messaging function.  I like using Dropbox because you can set the link to expire at a customized time.