The ‘art of coaching’ is a phrase that exists for a reason.
Aside from that, a baseline must be established in terms of the athletes work habits and trainedness. There’s no way I would have provided the current leeway in previous seasons. We have now come to the point in which the majority of the program runs itself.
You would be hard pressed to accomplish this at the high school level because there is so much physical development that lies ahead.
In my case, while the player’s development is varied, I have a handful of players who are as physically developed as they’ll ever need to be at this level or the NFL.
That’s not the end of it, however. The players who have much more room to go are aware of it and I like to think that the way that I interact with them inspires the proper courses of action to be taken.
Don’t think that it’s a free for all though. Our program is very well run and I provide more structure for those players who have not proven themselves to be as responsible as I require.
Remember, January up to Spring Ball and May, June, July, are highly structured months of training. So we can afford to loosen things up, appropriately, during camps and the season.
As I stated earlier, while auto-regulatory options are in place, there’s more structure when the game season starts.
For any deeper discussion I’ll direct you to my two most recent lecture DVDs as they contain charts, graphs, and example sessions.