The Hard Lessons From Our 2025 Season

What I learned the hard way, and how it’ll make us dangerous moving forward.

Even after nearly 2 decades of coaching, it’s easy to fall into old traps.

Our team was very young. We had made the semifinals two years in a row, but those groups were gone, and in there place was a talented but inexperienced young group.

Today I want to look back at some of our mistakes and how we navigated a tough season.

4 coaching mistakes that hurt our team in 2025

Our team had good players, but we still struggled at times. I tried to help our young players by giving them more tools.

But adding too much made things harder, not easier.

Conventional wisdom says keep things simple when you have a young team. Fewer plays. Fewer tags. Not as much new stuff.

We did that part well. Our main ideas stayed simple. We rooted in Wide Zone, sprinkling inside zone and counter to protect it. Adding a simple passing game off of Deep Choice/Vertical reads, with some horizontal stretches mixed in. (Flood and Dagger)

The trouble came from our implementation of those ideas.

Here were our 4 biggest mistakes.

Mistake 1: Too many formations, not enough structure