Central Cambria

[CCDevil2012]

Coaches need quite a few years for things to come together and to develop culture change from peewee up to varsity, but the school also has to do well for itself. This certainly plays hands in where you're going to live and have your kids go. 5-10 years to change a program into something close to elite. Typically, you need the coach to be faculty to help with kids coming out. That's not always easy to find the right choice.

100% agree with the timeline. It takes a top to bottom approach to establish a culture where kids buy into everything from weightroom to technique early on. There are instances where coaches need to be let go sooner, and that would be poor participation, toxic environments, a significant lack in progress being made (no weight room, no summer sessions, no film review, etc), essentially things that lead to a lack of long term success.

[Goldeneagles12]

The thing with Franco and why it works at Tyrone is because he understands the Tyrone kids. He can get the most out of them because from day one when he got to Tyrone he made it a family environment. Which he is doing all over again. The system at Tyrone went into a complete tailspin when he left. When I was in pee wee and youth we ran his offense so when we got to varsity we already knew it inside and out. The results speak for themselves. The culture is almost back to where it was the future for Tyrone football is very bright.

[CoffinCorner]

Do you think given time Franco could have made Penn Cambria relevant?

[CoffinCorner]

Landis at Somerset is another good example, everyone loved him when he had the athletes, then he was a terrible coach. So they bring in Basile who had some success at BM and hasn’t done anything to right the ship.

A better question to ask is who is available to coach?

The entire problem is that getting a coaching job is political. Prime example is Rich Price at Blacklick, only hired because of ties with administration / school board. Has done little to develop the program. Was not even third best applicant for position. But when you know the right people.

[Goldeneagles12]

Do you think given time Franco could have made Penn Cambria relevant?

I think so. Penn Cambria didn't win any games year one and won 4 in year 2 and were a yard away from making the playoffs. I know people say we'll he couldn't do it at Altoona I'm not really sure what the problems were. I just think he connects better with the smaller school players. I'm glad to have him back the program from top to bottom is stable once again and we have some nice looking players coming up the pipe.

[Manfred]

The past couple pages have really shown a lot of knowledgable posts, and a number of good to great coaches mentioned. But the gist of it all is no matter what school district, no matter who the coach is whether a new hire or a long time stalwart, if you don't have the athletes, you don't have successful programs. You can't make chicken cacciatore out of chicken caca. Some schools have a great run of numbers of successful consecutive years, but that is more unusual than the norm. Norm is maybe a couple years with a couple great individual athletes, sometimes from the same family, but then the pendulum swings the other way. Look at any school. Yes, feeder programs like peewee football help, and a busy weight room helps, but you have to have the athletes to compete.

[Goldeneagles12]

The past couple pages have really shown a lot of knowledgable posts, and a number of good to great coaches mentioned. But the gist of it all is no matter what school district, no matter who the coach is whether a new hire or a long time stalwart, if you don't have the athletes, you don't have successful programs. You can't make chicken cacciatore out of chicken caca. Some schools have a great run of numbers of successful consecutive years, but that is more unusual than the norm. Norm is maybe a couple years with a couple great individual athletes, sometimes from the same family, but then the pendulum swings the other way. Look at any school. Yes, feeder programs like peewee football help, and a busy weight room helps, but you have to have the athletes to compete.

True true.

[EnzoLigoniere]

Anyone else think that the mindset of having to running the spread, Air raid, shotgun offense has done in some of these teams who have struggled? The days of seeing wing t, I formation , wishbone are gone, it seems like every game I go to is qb in the pistol or shotgun and they run some variation of the RPO. I think teams like Bedford and Windber are on to something with the systems they run. I remember reading some comments from the Steel Valley coach last year after they beat Bedford talking about how challenging that offense was because they had not seen anything like it all year in the wpial.

[CCDevil2012]

Anyone else think that the mindset of having to running the spread, Air raid, shotgun offense has done in some of these teams who have struggled? The days of seeing wing t, I formation , wishbone are gone, it seems like every game I go to is qb in the pistol or shotgun and they run some variation of the RPO. I think teams like Bedford and Windber are on to something with the systems they run. I remember reading some comments from the Steel Valley coach last year after they beat Bedford talking about how challenging that offense was because they had not seen anything like it all year in the wpial.

I think some of this is A.) It’s harder to tackle in space than it is in a pile and B.) most teams locally lack the depth up front to run power football. Schools who have low numbers usually don’t have 15 lineman and 5 skill guys on a roster of 20. So they play to their strengths. If you had the line to do it, you could run I formations and wing T between the tackles every play and win football games.

[EnzoLigoniere]

I don't think Portage has ever had a BG sized line. But through usage of motion and misdirection, they run the ball as well as anyone. And seem to win regularly.