This longer section helps answering these questions:
What are competitive identities and tactical models?
How do they help focusing and produce useful plays?
How do I create a fundamental tactical model?
The first thing to consider is your competitive identity.
Sounds fancy, but it is the one or two sentences you tell a fellow coach if they ask what type of offense or defense you run. Something like
“pressure offense,”
“bend-but-don’t break defense,”
“we’re a smash mouth, run-first team,” or
“we play scorched-earth defense.”
All this is quite vague, but creates some understanding of general direction.
Your competitive identity describes your attitude. It outlines the philosophy that you want your team to have towards the opponent.
The second step is to develop the tactical model according to your chosen identity. This model describes your “philosophy” in greater detail. It serves to generate elements of offense and defense that you would put in the playbook.
This is a powerful thought, so it is worth repeating: Your tactical model helps to generate your offense and defense.
Here is how the model works, using my template: For each side of the ball, there are a number of tactics (A.1, A.2 etc.). They have a number of sub-tactics (A.1.1, A.1.2 etc.), and they have unnumbered sub-sub tactics (running with the ball, short passing, etc.). For example:
You get to the next more detailed level of tactics by asking “how do I want to accomplish that?”. For instance, you could say: “On defense, how do I want to contest possession of the ball? By forcing difficult passes.” And then again: “How do I want to force difficult passes? By forcing medium-to-long throws.” and so on.
You can also read it from the most detailed level up. “On offense, we will use short-breaking routes, because we want to pass the ball quickly. Why do we want to pass the ball quickly? Because we must keep possession of the ball, especially when we’re up.”
Do not give in to the temptation to put every tactical element there that you know about. The tactical model should reflect your “rather” thinking:
“If I only had one choice, I’d rather do X and not Y.”
It is not a manual for how to win games of your sport in general, but of exactly how you would like to win games. If you try to develop all possible tactical corners, you will end up being mediocre in all corners. To be great in a few aspects, develop them and only them.
Once you have made all these decisions, you know exactly what to put in your playbook. You also know what not to put there. For example, you would not draw up many plays to throw the ball deep if you decided your main tactic to be short passing.
You might get carried away in all the awesome possibilities of an empty sheet of paper. Hence, you should return to your tactical model to check if it agrees with your newest, greatest play of all time.
A little side story: I once worked with a coach on a flag football team that had great success running the ball. If you know flag football, you might think that’s close to impossible. Yet, running with the ball won them two consecutive championships. So I thought I could integrate their running attack into my playbook. Taking a look at my tactical model revealed that this would be a mistake: I had made a decision early. I decided to put my best athletes on defense, and have my best pass catchers on offense. So my runners would not have great success with the run plays because they were not very fast and agile.
Yet, there are situations where copying might be a good idea. Ask around in your club or athletic department. Coaches of other, older or younger teams often already have playbooks. The are happy if you copy some of their stuff, for this could mean less teaching.
Don’t be surprised if they cannot answer your questions about their tactical model. They often have these things in their heads but did not think of it explicitly. Thus they have a hard time talking about it. You will often find inconsistencies in their playbooks. That is because they did not develop their tactical model enough.
