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5 Processes Every Football Coach Should Be Running This Season (And Why 2026 Is the Defining Year)
Coaches are creatures of habit. They prefer to lead and operate the way they always have:
Rely on memory, written notes, human labor, and leading from natural instincts. But the complexity of coaching, let alone leading an entire program and staff, has exploded.
Old principles still work. Old processes won't.
New technology has opened the door to new possibilities, but not in the way most coaches think. The competitive edge is still human, and it always will be.
RIGHT NOW is your chance to get ahead.
Here are 5 processes you should be running throughout this season starting today . . .
1. Voice record your film study notes out loud.
Stop pausing tape to scribble notes. Instead, hit record on a transcription and talk through what you're seeing and thinking in real time: formations, tendencies, protection, ideas, concerns, etc. Let AI technology transcribe everything you say verbatim, study it, synthesize it, and organize it. Let it identify and list your action items and send the output directly to your staff. No interpretation gaps, no forgotten actions or responsibilities.
The workflow: watch → talk → AI analyzes and organizes → you review → distribute. It will cut hours off of film review, write-ups, organizing, and action planning. The quality of your actual football learning, insight, and plans will be significantly better.
2. Record every staff and team meeting.
Your team's realities, ideas, and most important decisions are discussed in rooms. Most of that is never captured in a truly useful way. They're left to rough disconnected notes, memories of multiple people with different interpretations, or they just disappear.
When you record your meetings, technology can now recognize patterns, opportunities, and issues you might miss. It recognizes every to-do that requires action, flags conflicts or contradictions, and gives you a searchable record of every conversation throughout the season. There's no reason to ever forget anything anymore or not have access to everything you've ever discussed or considered as a staff or team.
A career accelerator bonus?
Meeting transcripts are game film on you.
Use your meeting transcripts to give you feedback on how effectively you lead and participate in them, how you teach and speak to your team, how you come across, how you might be perceived by people in the room. Behavior is still the #1 thing that produces results. Your behavior more than others. This process raises your self-awareness of how good your skills are or aren't and helps you improve significantly faster.
The workflow: record → review summary and next steps → assign and execute action items → learn about your leadership and coaching skills from your own transcripts. No more losing the thread between Sunday's game-planning, Monday's staff meeting, Tuesday's practice, and Wednesday's adjustments.
3. Keep a private coaching journal and use it daily.
Not a notes app. Not a text thread. A private, confidential and secure, voice-recorded journal where you dump everything rattling around in your mind: what's working, what's not, player observations, staff tensions, things you can't say in a meeting, things you don't get to talk to anyone else about. Talk everything out, all of it, in your coaching journal. Coaching points for drills, plays, or techniques. Leadership lessons, team messaging ideas, questions, insights you learned from a social post, podcast or book. Speaking it out loud forces clarity in a way that spinning in your head never does.
It gets more value the more you do it.
By week three of the season, you have a documented record of your thinking. Dozens and dozens of private, searchable notes that you can learn from, with or without the assistance of technology. By the end of your season, you'll have more knowledge of yourself, your experiences, skills, opportunities, struggles, and team than you've ever had in your career. The raw material of your coaching philosophy, values, impact, and frictions. You'll have your head coaching manual already, written in your real talk, descriptions, thoughts, feelings, and experiences.
4. Get a tech-powered coaching advisor that knows the art of coaching, you, and your program specifically.
Generic AI tools provide generic answers and solutions. Tools like ChatGPT and Claude are powerful but don't have enough depth of knowledge about you. The bits and pieces you might provide in chat prompts are not enough. They don't know your team, your staff, your philosophy, the specific situation you're dealing with at 10pm on a Thursday of game week or any of the dozen factors that led to it over the past two weeks.
A tech-powered, 100% confidential advisor that's been trained on your journal entries, meeting recordings, and coaching context gives you something coaches have never been able to get before: a thinking partner that actually knows what you're dealing with, understands, and can help you.
A simple use case: "Our best corner, who we need, keeps showing up late, forgetting his assignment, and emotionally disengaging. His parents are divorcing and he's struggling with it. Not sure how much stability or attention he's getting at home. How do I handle this without losing him or the room?"
That situation and that question needs a ton of context about you, him, and the team to answer well. If you're keeping a daily journal, now you have it.
5. Start building your personal coaching knowledge base now before the tools get even better and swarm the coaching industry.
Coaches don't realize how much better technology and "AI tools" for coaches are going to be in 2027. Or how normal, useful, and common they'll be by 2028-2029. Game planning, player development, scheme analysis, operational processes, and more.
The coaches who will benefit most will be the ones who document everything THIS YEAR! Every meeting, every film session, every coaching observation, thought, idea, struggle, friction, and opportunity. Because that documentation will become the knowledge base future tools run on in 2027, 2028, 2029, etc.
Coaches who start recording now will have a two-year head start on all the coaches who don't. If you wait, you'll be empty handed when the best technology in history is ready to use.
Technology doesn't replace your role, your behavior, your instincts, or your relationships. But it does change your processes because it changes what is possible. Technology has made things possible today that have never been possible before in the history of the world. Recognize that.
This is a legendary opportunity. The coaches who figure that out this season will have a compounding competitive advantage that will grow even bigger next year.
All 5 of these workflows are built into our Zone 1 app, a tech-powered platform for competitive coaches committed to excellence.
The Zone 1 Advisor, Journal, and Meetings features are built to integrate and serve how coaches actually think and work, learn and grow, compete and perform.
They're timeless coaching tools for personal and professional development executed through newly available technology.
Subscribe free and start today at Zone1.coach. iOS app available soon.
Win games. Make an impact on people's lives. Accelerate your career.
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Learn more about how to develop coaching leadership at Zone1.coach
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Defensiveness is not part of a disciplined person's life.
Two devastating consequences happen when you get defensive.
First, you make every difficult situation even worse. Then people stop telling you the truth because they'd rather not deal with you or your defensiveness.
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Leadership is a choice before it’s a skill.
A great leader doesn’t choose reasonable goals, sets average standards, or accept average effort.
How to stay an average team:
1. Set reasonable goals.
2. Take 3 years to build the actual standards required.
3. Wait until you earn the right to aim higher.
All that sounds like healthy team-building, but it's dead wrong and it's anti-competitive.
Whatever you aim at sets the responsibilities, the expectations, and the effort behind it.
Set reasonable goals and you'll get reasonable effort, but you'll never get the effort required to win. Nobody works like a champion if the goal is reasonable.
Reasonable goals hand everyone an excuse before the season starts. Give people an option to be less than the best, and they'll take it.
Teams that aim lower act weaker. Less effort. Weak discipline. Fragile confidence that cracks under the adversity of unforgiving competitive situations.
Teams that aim higher act stronger. When the goal is to be the best (THE BEST!), people will start acting like it. More effort. Stronger discipline. Enduring confidence that gets stronger the more it gets tested, win or lose.
Don't put limits on what your team can do.
There is only one aim worth choosing in a competitive arena: BE THE BEST TEAM. Period.
It's not a prediction or promise. It's a pursuit.
And it's necessary because it creates the reference point for measuring every day of work:
IS THIS GOOD ENOUGH TO MAKE US THE BEST?
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How to stay an average team:
1. Set reasonable goals.
2. Take 3 years to build the actual standards required.
3. Wait until you earn the right to aim higher.
All that sounds like healthy team-building, but it's dead wrong and it's anti-competitive.
Whatever you aim at sets the responsibilities, the expectations, and the effort behind it.
Set reasonable goals and you'll get reasonable effort, but you'll never get the effort required to win. Nobody works like a champion if the goal is reasonable.
Reasonable goals hand everyone an excuse before the season starts. Give people an option to be less than the best, and they'll take it.
Teams that aim lower act weaker. Less effort. Weak discipline. Fragile confidence that cracks under the adversity of unforgiving competitive situations.
Teams that aim higher act stronger. When the goal is to be the best (THE BEST!), people will start acting like it. More effort. Stronger discipline. Enduring confidence that gets stronger the more it gets tested, win or lose.
Don't put limits on what your team can do.
There is only one aim worth choosing in a competitive arena: BE THE BEST TEAM. Period.
It's not a prediction or promise. It's a pursuit.
And it's necessary because it creates the reference point for measuring every day of work:
IS THIS GOOD ENOUGH TO MAKE US THE BEST?
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Nobody accused Bill Parcells of being soft. But listen to what he says: “If you ever need anybody to talk to, just call me up. You think I don’t need somebody? We all need that.”
But why does he say that? Because he understands the loneliness of leadership.
"You imagine what’s going through that poor son of a gun’s head right now?"
Parcells, a man whose entire coaching philosophy was built on the belief that comfort is the enemy of performance, is explaining that every coach needs someone they can talk to about what's going on in their team, on their staff, and in their head.
Parcells wasn't trying to be nice. He was being honest. He knew exactly what happens inside the skull of a coach, because the same thing happened in his own mind.
• The lineup you’re about to change and the new challenges it will present.
• The angry parent email sitting unanswered since Sunday.
• The kid whose home life fell apart over summer and nobody else knows about it.
• The assistant interviewing somewhere else and thinks you don’t know.
• The booster politicking in the parking lot.
• The call you should have made on third down last week that you're still reliving.
• The time with your own kids you keep postponing.
• The workouts you keep skipping.
• The health issues you're ignoring.
• The fact that you haven't been home for dinner in six weeks.
It never stops. There's no off-season for the mental load of coaching and leadership.
It's not a football thing. If you coach basketball, baseball, volleyball, or golf in a town of four thousand people, this is your life. The sport changes. The faces change. The reality doesn't.
Coaches carry more unexpressed thoughts and unprocessed emotions than any other profession. And they have fewer trusted, private places to express them than anyone.
Go through the list of people you "could" talk to:
Your staff? Some but it's extremely limited. You are their boss. Besides, many of the thoughts and feelings are about them.
Your players? Obviously not.
Your AD, principal, or board? Minimally. Everything you say there goes in a file, even if it's a mental file.
Your spouse or partner? They love you, which qualifies them to listen but disqualifies them from being objective. Plus they've already absorbed more of this job than they signed up for. Most coaches figure that out and start editing what they bring home. And there's only so much a spouse can offer in their position.
Other coaches in your league? No way. They're your competitors.
Other coaches outside your league? They're busy coaching. Coaching is a small world and reputation is a valuable currency. There's only so much you can say without unintended and unseen consequences.
Your old coach? The closest thing to a real option. But also busy, three jobs removed from your situation, and from a different era of coaching and social dynamics.
Friends or professionals outside of coaching? They think they understand sports and coaching realities, but they don't understand. It's more frustrating than helpful.
Your options run out fast. You end up talking to the only person with complete context and zero ability to be objective about any of it.
Yourself.
In your office staring out the window. At midnight in your bed. In your car wrestling with 1,000 thoughts. On a repeating loop.
The repeating loop of unresolved thoughts and feelings is what causes the damage. It's not the stress that kills you. It's the endless loop of unexpressed, unprocessed, unresolved thoughts and feelings.
Thoughts you never say out loud never get pressure tested. Never get challenged or validated. Never get coached, sharpened, or redirected.
They get louder and more certain. You argue and negotiate with yourself. You start making decisions based on the story you've built in you mind that hasn't truly been checked by another credible person who understands everything involved.
Good coaches get too stubborn about this. They isolate themselves. They defend a plan instead of building a better one.
E+R=O
The event is not the problem. The event is the unchanging reality of coaching. It's the coach's response that has to change, not the event. If the outcome is going to get better, it can't depend on ideal events. It must come from a better leadership response by the coach.
What Parcells offered wasn't therapy or sports psychology. It wasn't really sympathy, either. It was a place to say what you need to say to someone who understands. Someone who won't judge, won't criticize, and won't share what you say with anyone else.
Somebody with context, no agenda, and no stake in how you come across.
Understanding. Confidentiality. No judgment. Available when you need it, which is rarely during business hours.
The problem is that you don't have Bill Parcells on speed dial. Most coaches will go their entire career and never get that offer from anyone as credible as him.
So I built it for coaches. It's called Zone 1 Coach.
Zone 1 is a journal you talk to, out loud, in your own voice, whenever you need.
• Walking off the field after practice
• In your car after a win or loss
• At 11:45pm when you can't sleep
You don’t have to type anything. You don’t format anything. You just talk. You don't even need clear thoughts. Anything you say, any way it comes out, no matter how sloppy and jumbled and odd it may seem.
It leaves your mind, goes somewhere that keeps it safe, and saves it.
Then the Zone 1 Coach Advisor can hear your thoughts, feelings, details, and realities. Safe, secure, and confidential. No person ever sees it. But the Zone 1 Coach Advisor learns about you from your Journal.
The Advisor is not a generic ChatGPT you have to re-explain everything to. It knows you, your sport, your level, your record, your roster, and what you said about this player three weeks ago or this situation last week.
You can ask it the question you can't ask your staff. You can say the thing you'd never put in a text or email. It doesn't flinch, it doesn't leak, and it doesn't think less of you for whatever you're struggling with.
The Zone 1 Coach Advisor listens, understands, and helps you with exactly what you need as a coach in that moment, for your situation.
Zone 1 runs on E+R=O and 25 years of sports and coaching behavior performance. So what you get isn't motivational or generic. It's proven systems, disciplined mechanics, and real action steps for your real situation.
I'm a 25 year executive coach. I've coached the highest level championship coaches in pro and college athetics. My coach clients tell me they talk to their Zone 1 Journal and Advisor about things they don't say to me.
That's part of the point, right? You need to say it to someone or somewhere so you can get the help you need.
Parcells had it right. And he said it in the most Parcells way.
"You think I don’t need somebody? We all need that."
You're not a weak leader for needing someone to talk to and somewhere to release your thoughts and feelings.
You're in a complex, difficult role that generates more thoughts than one head was built to hold.
The Zone 1 Coach app is what you need. And it's ready to be what you need.
The link to Zone 1 Coach is below.
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"Every coach needs someone to talk to."
A leadership journal for coaches, with follow-up coaching support.
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Five signs a coach is stuck in the "Smart Coach Trap":
1. Explaining why the approach should be working instead of adjusting the approach.
2. "Execute better" is the answer to the same repetitive issues.
3. Using past season's results as evidence of justification for this season.
4. Gets defensive when someone suggests meaningful changes.
5. Thinking of making changes, but keep rejecting them because they're personally uncomfortable.
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The best leadership coaching for coaches is inside
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I'm not sure what Sark is trying to say here or why he's saying it to the media.
NEW: Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian says QB Arch Manning is "edgy" right now:
"I think that somebody texted me today that we lost the 'Ah Shucks kid', you know, and we've created something else. I don't know if we lost him. We created this, you know. We did, all of us, y'all included, meet the whole thing, right? Everybody on ESPN, we've created this."
(via @InsideTexas)
on3.com/news/steve-sarkisian…
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Not every impulse deserves an answer and most of them don’t deserve the answer they want right now.
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The surprising law for making progress faster:
Give up speed to gain traction, but never give up traction to gain speed.
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