SMU defensive coordinator Van Malone on THSCA, #TXHSFB and year two on The Hilltop

[caption id="attachment_24095" align="alignright" width="198"]Cgl2pXcVEAAOQyD Photo courtesy SMU[/caption] A short time ago, SMU defensive coordinator Van Malone was one of the thousands of high school coaches in attendance at THSCA Coaching School. He would sit in the seats and watch college coaches analyze schemes on a dry erase board. Monday, Malone was one of those college coaches speaking to his former peers. “I started out as a high school coach. Luckily, on our staff at SMU we have a lot of guys who were former high school coaches in the state of Texas, including our head coach. I remember sitting in those seats and listening to the college coaches and dreaming to be up there giving the speech one day. It was surreal for me,” Malone said. “It is a great honor for me because there are a lot of guys walking around this convention who helped get me to where I am today and I hope to be that for some of these younger coaches.” This event is about football, sure, but it’s mostly about ideas. From new technology to new training systems to old-fashioned chalk talk. Thousands of coaches come together to share ideas, learn from their peers and take that information back to their program. It is something uniquely special about sports. “With all that is going on in the world today, I always tell people we’d be better off if people treated others like we do inside teams and the football community. We’re all competitors and we all want to win this fall, but the process is important. The people involved, the players, those guys are important. We’re in the business of making young men and it would be selfish of us to not want to help grow the game,” Malone said. “These types of events grow the game. I learn so much from these coaches every single year. I learn more than I teach.” Malone spoke for 30 minutes about “Quarters Coverage” in the defensive secondary, which is basically four-deep zone to prevent vertical routes from beating defenses over the top. He spoke about leverage, reading coverages and using boundaries to decide sides of the field instead of personnel. He broke down the coverages and how the secondary should react based on patterns ran by the offenses. After the speech was over, Malone moved to a different board and continued taking questions and breaking down scenarios with fellow coaches off to the side. It was a perfect illustration of what this event is intended to be for coaches. [caption id="attachment_24099" align="alignleft" width="300"]maxresdefault-2 Photo courtesy SMU[/caption] “I always tell coaches who come visit us at SMU, ‘I’m going to get more from you than you will from us’ and that’s all coaching is. It’s just stealing. This game has been around for a long time and there are still just 11 dudes on the football field for each unit and there’s only so many ways to align them all,” Malone explained. “It’s all about getting better at what you do. Try to find ways to communicate it a little bit better with your players than you did last year or last week or yesterday.” SMU was 2-10 in Chad Morris’ first year at the helm. It was a growing process for all involved, Malone admitted. The Mustangs had a first-year head coach, offensive coordinator and defensive coordinator leading the charge in 2015. The hope is that those growing pains turn into actual growth. “We’re starting to see a change. No one has credibility at a new situation when the losses outnumber the wins. We didn’t have credibility with them yet and they didn’t have credibility on the football field. We had to build that together and we’re starting to see growth,” Malone said. “I tried to pour the whole playbook on them in year one and that was a growing process for me. We slowed it down this spring and each one of my players told me they felt improvement with that move. Coaching, just like playing, is about improving and getting better. That’s what we’re doing at SMU, and the players are starting to follow our lead and are now leading themselves as a team.”

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