Plays
“Forty-four down, you should all know it by like the back of your hand by now!” Coach Dolhon exclaimed. Forty-four down, like all plays, requires learning, understanding, and execution. In order to learn plays, players need a coach to teach them. Players need to understand the plays so everyone is on the same page during a game. Players also need to execute plays to win games and be successful. Forty-four down is a simple play; right up the middle. For most football players it is usually the first play they will ever learn. Brandt exclaims that everyone needs a sponsor in their life to teach them the basics which is a teacher, a book or a coach. Literacies and plays are similar in the way they are done in a process. Coach Dolhon is more than a coach in my opinion. He put in a lot of extra time into our team to make us better by helping us learn understand and execute what he wanted done.
Learning plays will get difficult over time so coaches make ways to make them easier to remember by making playbooks and using repetition. Coaches will usually make a playbook early in the spring or early summer to ensure that the players have a full understanding of what offensive and defensive scheme the team runs. Repetition is vital to learning plays because the more the team goes over them the better they will understand and get comfortable with the scheme. Coach Dolhon will go over forty-four down, the simplest of simple plays, hundreds of times until he thinks it is one hundred and ten percent perfect because he is my teammates and I sponsor. We walk through the halls of our school and whenever we pass by Coach Dolhon’s room he pulls us inside and show us what plays we will be running each week. The repetition is constant and not just at football practice. Repetition is important with writing because in order to improve, the writer must practice more and more until he or she is satisfied with their work. Bradbury would spend hours in the library and at his neighbors houses reading books to improve his literacy. Although he did not have much of a human sponsor the library and books can count as a sponsor. Coaches will go over play film before and after games watching new plays, old plays, and even other teams. Coaches do this so the players can learn what the plays are supposed to and not supposed to look like. Also teams watch other teams to see what competition they will be playing on Friday or Saturday. This can be related to literacies because writers need to be aware of other styles that they may like to adopt or adjust to.
Understanding what is going on in football is vital so an individual player does not mess up the entire team. One player can mess up a play if they jump off sides, run the wrong route, or even just be totally lost. Understanding plays goes back to learning plays; learning plays the right way will help the team understand them thoroughly. Coach Dolhon runs play film every single day during the season. He makes sure that all the starters, second team, and even the bench players know what is going on. Coach Dolhon has us understand not only our plays and schemes, but the other teams too so when the other team forms up we may have an idea of what play they are going to run or what side the ball is going to. This can be related back to Ray Bradbury because a team makes up its own scheme different from any other team and that is like a writing style. Everyone, according to Bradbury has their own writing style that is unique to them. A writer must understand what goes on in a book so that they can write a successful review or piece on what they read. If a writer writes about something but all of the info is wrong, then that is an unsuccessful piece; if a player is lost or confused on the field during a play then that player is a failure at what he or she is expected to know. Just like Brandt, coaches have the knowledge to teach the players that “do not know anything” so the coaches sponsor them to make sure they understand what is going on.
Executing plays is vital to winning games and having a successful season. In order to execute plays properly the teams needs to learn and understand what is going on by using playbooks, repetition, and field awareness. Playbooks will help the players with where they need to be on the field at a given point during a series. Coach Dolhon gives us our playbooks in May and we know them by June. He would put in time in the offseason to put together a playbook so we could hit the ground running by the time doubles starts in August. If a player is out of place, then the whole team is out of place because football is such a team sport. Repetition will help the players know what their duty is during certain plays. The players need to know where to line up on the field, or where to make their cut when running a route. Different places that players can line up are on the bottom or top of the numbers, on a hash, or ever at mid field depending on what type of route the receiver is running. Execution with literacies is similar to football because if something does not go the right way, such as writers block, the writer should just move on to another topic according to Bradbury. If a writer runs into writes block it is not good to just sit and stare at the paper or computer screen. In football, the team can call timeouts but they cannot just sit and stare at the field hoping for something good to happen.
All plays require learning, understanding, and execution. In order to learn plays, players need a coach to teach them. Players need to understand the plays so everyone is on the same page and up to speed during a game. Players also need to execute plays correctly to win games and be successful within their season. Forty-four down is a simple play; right up the middle. For most football players it is usually the first play they will ever learn. There are plays like strong trips left three sixty quick out which take time to learn. Learning plays starts at a playbook and builds up to understanding them which leads to executing them on the field. Coach Dolhon does all of these things for our team to have a great program every year. If he did not do these things our football program would go right down the drain. Each part of a play is process just like a literacy. A literacy starts in the mind of the writer and makes its way onto a brainstorm sheet and then on to paper for others to read. Bradbury talks about literacies being a process because he claims a paper is never done. This relates to football because a team is never at their full potential. In a paper and a team there is always room for improvement which makes both of these things a process. Coach Dolhon is one sponsor that is important in my life because he teaches at all times of the day and always looks to improve his players and students. I not only learned to play football through this man but I also learned how to be a young man.
Reflection:
I enjoyed this essay because I was able to look at football in a technical perspective and apply it to a course I am taking. I never looked at football the way I did with this prompt.