Friday, April 18, 2008

Coaching Clinics

Air Force football coaches are on the road this week, taking some time to learn from their peers.

Offensive coaches visited West Virginia spring practices and now are at the University of Arizona. Defensive coaches are visiting Clemson and UCLA.

The Falcons’ coaches are making these visits to watch how other programs work and to see if there’s anything they are doing schematically that might work well at the academy. “Professional development,” is how Calhoun explained it.

Air Force’s coaches were unable to make such trips last year because Calhoun had just been hired and was scrambling to get settled. But he wants to make visiting other schools an annual activity, along with watching plenty of film of other schools.

“I just think it’s really healthy to do, and sometimes you pick up things where you think, ‘Hey, maybe in two, three years when so-and-so and so-and-so are juniors at the academy, that’s something that could work pretty well for us,’” Calhoun said via phone from Arizona Thursday afternoon. “I just think you’ve got to do it.”

Calhoun said “a couple” teams visited Air Force this spring, “and that’s something we try to encourage – let them know they’re welcome.”

But something tells me Navy and BYU coaches wouldn’t exactly be greeted with open arms.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The Air Force Academy is fortunate to have one of the best coaching staffs in the nation. This is yet another example of their quest for excellence. It's exciting to imagine where they might take the program after a few years to bring in their own recruits and fully implement their systems.