Thad Wells

12 years ago I read John Wooden’s definition of success for the first time. But it took over a decade of coaching high school football, winning a state title, and a global pandemic to figure out the real meaning of success and how to build a winning program.

I recently sat down and built a framework using Coach Wooden’s definition and other lessons I’ve learned over the last 12 years. What resulted were these 12 lessons.

This video is over an hour long and it was recorded during one of our most important coaching meetings of 2020.

So what is tempo when it comes to football? The word gets thrown around all the time, but do we really understand it?

Tempo in the football world is the pace of play at which an offense chooses to play at. It's a decision that must be made on every down.

Not too long ago there was only one tempo really used. Today there are a lot of tempos to choose from. Here is a list of possible tempos:

• Traditional Huddle
• No-Huddle (Fast)
• No-Huddle (Slow)
• Sugar Huddle
• Dynamic Huddle
• Freeze
• Look
• Repeat
• Play List
• 2 Minute
• 4 Minute

So which tempo should your team use? And if you’re a defensive minded coach, can your system handle each tempo?

Going by data is very hard in the game of football. But just relying on your beliefs can also be challenging, especially when your beliefs may just be dogma that have never been examined. 

So what’s the answer? 

One option is to develop a strong understanding of all tempos and a strong understanding of your team. Once you have both of these you can make the best decision for the pace of play at which your team can execute. Ultimately the pace that will put your players in the best position to be successful.

This video shares thoughts on tempo. It covers all the tempos listed above and poses questions that we should all think about to gain an understanding of tempo. 

The video also goes into specifics on a new type of tempo, the Dynamic Huddle.

A good head coach or coordinator spends more time designing practices then probably anything else during the season. How you go about doing so is a major decision for the success of your program. Since most coaches have been doing it the same way for decades, this is an area you can get an advantage over the competition.

The Advanced Practice System is an improvement on the old standard spreadsheet system coaches have been using for decades. 

The main improvements are:

1. More space to write in notes for coaches.
2. Adjustable print sizes so a coach could put the schedule inside of a wrist coach or print it off larger to fit in a sheet protector if desired.
3. Easier ability to create templates for each day, week, and phase of the season.
4. The use of checklists to create reminders and make scheduling practices faster.
5. The ability to give schedules to more people within the program, including specialist, so everyone is organized and efficient.

Also included in this course is a discussion on the principles of practice. This discussion includes research from some of the top books on the topic of increasing talent level. You will also get a list of 16 books that Thad recommends for improving your team’s practices.

After gaining full access to this course you will receive both a Google Sheet template and an Excel file. The system works best with Google but will also work in Excel.

What you spend your time on is what you prioritize in life. Most coaches list Faith, Family, and Football, in that order, but their time commitment is the reverse. This course is for coaches who are looking to streamline their game planning and gain time back to devote to their other priorities in life.

In this course you will get:

• Advice on being effecient and effective on the weekends.
• Thad's Scout Checklist that his coaches fill out on the weekend to form a game plan.
• Thad's Weekly Checklist of everything that must be done each week.
• Thad's Life Schedule, which can be used to keep you on task and focused every day.
• Thad's Itinerary Template for planning gameday minute by minute.

If you're looking to be more efficient for yourself and the people involved in your program then this is the course for you.

Note: All files can be used as either Google Sheets files or Excel files.

Scout Checklist Sample

Weekly Checklist Sample

Itinerary Sample

***   50% Off Today   ***

The P.I.T.A. Package

This package was purely created to steal time from the defense. But the first time we ran it we scored a 60 yard touchdown and stumbled on to something bigger.

The idea behind it is to force the defense to practice something that you only have to invest 5 minutes of practice time into yourself.

It's an offensive (or special teams) package that can be added to any existing offensive scheme. It doesn't matter what you run.

We started off with a very basic concept that you can learn for FREE in the first video of this course.

We then advanced the system to something that has been very versatile and a major pain in the butt for our opponents. 

In the advanced video you will get:

• Our rules for creating unlimited chaos for the defense.
• How we delegated this to our P.I.T.A. coordinator.
• How we taught our QB to manage this.
• How we shift in and out of it.
• How we use this with our STs.
• How we turned this into a complete dynamic huddle system (a new genre of tempo that nobody else is using right now.)
• How we practice this with a fun game that helped with conditioning.

Right now this course is 50% off but the discount is about to expire.

Tom Brady have been relying on this play in big moments of big games for the last several years.

Why?

It has built in answers to every single coverage you could ever see, making it great no matter what you face week to week. You can also call this on 1st, 2nd or 3rd down, which makes it an easy play to call no matter the situation.

The concept can also be incorporated into almost any offensive system. Once your players learn this concept, you can carryover the fundamentals to several other routes.

This concept is a combination of some of the most used route combos against each type of coverage you can face. By adjusting one or two receivers during the pre-snap process you will create a combo that is good versus the coverage you face each play. We have been doing this at the high school level for years.

In this course you will get:

A basic overview of the play (using NFL footage)
3D playbook installation overview
Detailed information on each player's route
How to communicate the play between the coach, QB and WR's
How to practice the concept
How to disguise the concept
How to use it as a full field concept
How to use it as a back side or front side tag
How to use it as an RPO
After getting access to this course, feel free to contact Thad on how he further utilizes this concept in his offense, or with any other questions you may have.

Books have changed my life as a coach.

Several years ago I started to notice a pattern among the world's most successful people throughout history. Over and over again I would hear stories about how important reading was to their success. So I decided to follow suit and it has turned out to be the best decision I could have made for my career.

I now read about 75 to 100 books a year. Most people think this is impossible for a coach who is married and has three kids, but I make it a priority. I wake up at 2:59 every morning in order to get 2 to 3 hours of reading in before I start my day. I mostly read non-fiction books on a wide range of topics.

I put together my list of the 101 most influential books that I have read so far in my life. They are ordered in terms of importance for me. The point of the list is to not encourage you to go out and read all of these books. Instead, I just want to provide an idea of all the different types of books that I believe could potentially help a coach. Pick one and just get started. After you read a few, stop looking at the list and just ask questions. Then go find a book that can help you answer the questions you face.