When I was a boy, maybe 13 years old, I loved to sit in the stands of the football stadium and watch my home team play. It was the mid-80’s in Germany, and American Football was a sport nobody knew about. A school teacher had introduced the sport to my classmates and me. We were playing sandlot football during recess.

So I sat there and watched, and it all seemed like choreography: many parts, all moving as if they all had a plan. I learned that they actually had a plan, described in a playbook. Somebody a lot smarter than me told me to watch the man on the sideline that carried a clipboard. “He’s the one signaling the plays.” they told me. Fascinating. 

So I tried it out with my school team. I created my first playbook: a bunch of very smart plays that would smash any opponent, for sure! I also started telling my classmates what to do. I acted bossy and mean, with all my super knowledge about my choreography, yet it did not do very much. The opponents did not care about all my intricate details, nor did my classmates. We drew a ton of delay-of-game penalties, and lost most of the games, of course.

Since then, I created many more playbooks, for my own team and other’s, and learned along the way. Many things that I dreamed up did not work in the end. We always finished a season with some elements of the playbook in play, but not the whole thing. The main mistakes I made come down to this:

• I did not understand what I tried to do with the system (to my team, to the opponent). 

• I had no idea of what kind of teaching would have to take place to make my ideas work.

• I laid out beautiful systems, without testing them before I started implementing them. 

But you can do better, I distilled almost three decades of creating playbooks and teaching tactics in this short online course. This course will teach you what a playbook is and what it can do for you (and what it can’t do). It will also give you a list of things you need to check before you can develop a successful playbook. Team identity and tactical considerations are the foundation of a good playbook. Finally this course will give you tacit advice on when to stop developing ideas. This moment usually is a lot earlier than you might think. It will tell you how to communicate it to your staff and athletes.

Enjoy!