The Scout Team Solution: How the Coast Guard Fixed the Biggest Practice Headache

John Snell (00:00)
We’re here with Coach JB Wells, the Hanson ratings offensive coordinator of week presented by Tully for week three. Coach, congratulations on a big win and a record setting performance for you, your staff and your players. ⁓ Before we get into the idea that you’re sharing today, JB, can you talk about your staff and maybe the way they prepared your offense for this week’s challenge?

JB Wells (00:27)
Yeah, sure. Thanks, John. It’s great to be here. It’s an honor always to represent the Coast Guard and in our football program. Yeah, so our staff, we our head coach, C.C. Grant, ⁓ coaches over on defense. So he kind of lets the offense kind of do what they want to do a little bit. ⁓ You know, when I was hired, he said he just wanted to be able to run the ball and score some points. And I think we’ve done that. ⁓ But our staff is, you know, we’re we’re kind of a unique situation here at Coast Guard. We’re kind of

short staffed little bit. You know, we don’t have a lot. We don’t have a large staff. Three of us are government employees. ⁓ And one of us is what they call a NAFTY employee, which is a not appropriated funds. They’re paid out of a different, different pool. ⁓ And then we have some volunteers and it’s kind of how we make up our staff. So offensively, I’m the coordinator and I coach the offensive line. Coach Kyle Smesco, who has been coaching for a long time too.

⁓ Kyle is our quarterbacks coach, works with the quarterbacks ⁓ and does a great job. ⁓ He’s done an amazing job this year with a new kid having to step into some pretty big shoes. ⁓ And then our receivers coach is Lieutenant Hudson Dunaway. Lieutenant Dunaway played here at the Academy and then his active duty in the Coast Guard. He was assigned back to the Academy as an instructor. And so now he is on campus as an instructor.

here at Coast Guard and then he volunteers his time to come down. He referred to himself as the world’s highest paid GA, ⁓ but is a really, really good coach. Does a great job with our receivers and special teams and recruiting and everything. He just is ⁓ really passionate because this is his life. know, the Coast Guard is his life. And then ⁓ we have our running backs coach is a retired Coast Guardsman. ⁓

player here at the Academy and instructor here, a long time instructor here at the Academy in engineering, retired and has been volunteering for the last, I think, 25 years here as the running backs coach, Pat Knowles. And then our tight ends coach is pretty unique. He is a volunteer from the United Kingdom. He’s from Wales and I’m friends with some guys over there. I have a lot of connections in the UK with, with British football and coach Keon.

made a request to come over and through some friends, mutual friends, he’s come over and he’s volunteering his time. He’s ⁓ over here on a three month visa. And so he’s going to coach the season and head back. But he’s been the tight ends coach at the university of West England. They’ve won four national championships over there. ⁓ And he came over here because he wanted to try to do it. What he says, we wanted to do it for real. And he’s getting all he can handle right now. So, but a really, really good young coach, great with technology. ⁓

John Snell (03:17)
You

JB Wells (03:22)
does a really good job with the tight ends. So I got a great staff. They worked their butts off and make my job a lot easier than it could be.

John Snell (03:30)
Awesome. Well, before we get into ⁓ your idea again, as you know, we want to share an idea that can help our listeners. ⁓ You had mentioned Tempo and the Scout Team solution. If you don’t mind talking about that and sharing with our listeners, that would be great, ⁓

JB Wells (03:52)
Yeah. So, ⁓ so we, when, when I got to coast guard, ⁓ you know, we’re very, very limited on time. ⁓ the guys have a lot of responsibilities here. And as a, as one of the four military academies, us, and then our big brothers at army, Navy and air force, ⁓ our time is, is kind of precious. So our guys days are very, very, very, ⁓ segmented, ⁓ where they have their academic time, they have military training time, and then they’re given a block of time.

in the afternoon from about four to six, that’s athletic time. So we don’t have the luxury of having meetings every single day. ⁓ We’re able to meet with them about two to three times a week. That’s it. So we have to use some technology to kind of teach our guys. And so I knew coming in that we would not have a lot of time and that we don’t, wouldn’t want to run anything too complex. ⁓ So our offense is fairly simple. I don’t think it’s very complicated. We don’t do a lot of things.

We just try to do them really well. ⁓ But one of the things and one of the things that we’re known for is that we’re to run at a high tempo. And it gives a place that our performance fitness, our physical fitness exam that the guys are given every year, they have to be in great shape. Typically our linemen at the Coast Guard are not going to be as large as some of the lines that we go against. Although this year, I think we’ve grown up a group that’s pretty big right now and they’re, but they’re in tremendous shape. ⁓

So why knew that I could take advantage of that? And so tempo became kind of our calling card. So if we can do a couple of things well, and we can run them really fast, and we have great discipline, which our guys do, ⁓ we thought we could put an offense together that would be pretty good. And it has been for us. things with us are all surrounded around tempo. How fast can we play and play well? So the first thing that we kind of talk about during the course of practice, just some practice ideas on if you want to go fast.

The first thing is that we do a period every day before we go into individual called green deck and green deck in the Coast Guard is, know, when they’re getting the helicopters ready to fly out and save somebody’s life in the middle of the ocean, when they get the Helos all fired up and everybody’s ready to go, that’s called green deck. And so green deck for us is, you know, let’s, let’s get lined up. Let’s go fast. And so it’s an on air period that we just marched the ball from the 50 into the end zone in about four or five plays.

And we just try to get the calls in from the sideline, go as fast as possible and get the guys really kind of sweating and getting going. It’s a good kind of way to start practice. But we would just usually line the balls up and the guys would go 10 yards each clip and that would be your period. But that’s not reality. And I was finding that early on our guys were having a hard time, I think, understanding the mechanics of tempo. And so what we did was this is we took the backup quarterbacks.

So if we had three quarterbacks that were rotating through groups, our starter would have the first group of offense. Our backup quarterback would be the umpire would line up as the umpire and would place the ball. And then our third quarterback would become the line judge on the sideline. So you had three guys in red jerseys. So it’s nice. They stand out, but, ⁓ it allowed our guys to kind of understand how the tempo mechanics work. The offensive line kind of operates off the center and the center has to find the line judge. So he’s working.

John Snell (07:04)
you

JB Wells (07:14)
to the hash that the ball ended up on, but he’s looking at the sideline for the line judge because they’re marking where the ball is going to be. So our center got conditioned to look for the line judge. So now we have a line judge there. It’s one of our quarterbacks. So our center is looking for the line judge. Our, our skill guys are all taught that they have to get the ball to the umpire, whether it’s running in and handed to them if they’re close or a short toss. If they’re not, ⁓ we don’t, tell them no long throws.

You know, lot of umpires are former linemen. They don’t catch the ball real well. So we want to make sure we get the ball. ⁓ if you can’t get the ball to the umpire, our guys will get the ball to our center and the center will give it to them. But we generally have that other quarterback. So that quarterback acts as the umpire. If the ball’s not in his hands, he can’t place the ball ready for play. So they, they mimic that real time tempo. And you know, if I want to go real, real fast, I’ll just say go every 10 yards and we’ll put a bunch of footballs down. But at the end of the day, I want it to be real.

So that kind of starts our guys off with that mentality that this is how we play fast. And this is what the mechanics are playing fast for the line and for the skills. So that’s kind of how we start with this green deck period. Probably we’ll go probably five minutes, maybe seven minutes ⁓ and try to get three groups through that as fast as we can. And then we’re off to individual. Then as practice goes along, by the time we get down into ⁓ like our team period where we, we,

that Coast Guard because we have good numbers. have about 90, 95 players, but ⁓ we feel that like, I’ve always felt this as a head coach. When I was a head coach, I always wanted to kind of work my best players against my best players. My older players against my older players is probably a better way to look at it. Right. And so anytime you’re putting your first offense against your first defense, you’re probably going to get better reps. You know, it’s going to be better competition and there’s times you want to do that. And there’s times you don’t want to do that. But for the most part,

If we can go against our defensive group and not a scout group, we’re probably going to get a better period. So I lobbied with the head coach to have team period one, be offense will scout for the defense. We’ll run our, we’ll run our opponent’s offense and the defense will scout for the offense. And so then we have a second team period. That’s later on that’s separate, but that period for us then becomes against scouts. And what we do is we line up two scouts.

We line up two scout teams about 15, 20 yards apart. So we’ll have a team, say on the 40 and a team, say on the 25. In our offense, we’ll bounce back and forth between those two groups. And they’ll go as fast as they can. I can call the plays from the sideline. My quarterback’s coach is running one defensive group. My tight end’s coach is running the other group. And so they’re going to work back and forth between the two groups. And we’re going to go as fast as we can against two defenses. ⁓

It allows us to get a lot of reps, but then you get into the problem of that everybody has. I try to share this with as many. didn’t invent this. I picked it up. think I got it from Matt drink hall way back when he was at like Kansas Wesley. And, ⁓ it was a, it was an idea and I call it the scout team solution. And how many times do have a young coach? When you were a young coach, you had a scout card book and you had to run the scout cards and it was the worst job you ever had. Nobody’s ever happy.

Right. They don’t get lined up right. They don’t follow. Can’t you follow a line? You know, like it just drives you nuts. So, you know, what we did was we said, when we go to scout team, this is how we’re going to run it. We’re going to give, we’re going to have the front seven. We’re going to have them line up in the core look that we’re going to get that week. So whether you got a, you know, a four, two look or a four, three look or whatever, or you got a three, four look or a three, three stack, whatever it is, we tell them to line up in the core look.

And then we give the guys instruction. let’s say we’re just looking at a base four, two look. We tell the two interior tackles. We don’t care where you line up. You can line up in a three, a two, a two eye. You can line up in a shade. You can line up. The only thing we don’t want is two shades. So while the team is going against the other front, you guys are talking about what you’re going to do. Maybe, Hey, I’ll be the three. You’d be a two eye. Whatever. ⁓ the defensive ends are told you’re Seagap players.

You can play loose, you can play tight, can box, can wrong arm, you can do whatever you want. So we just told those guys, just line up, just get lined up. It’s okay. No one’s going to yell at you. Linebackers, you’re reading the back of your side and you’re playing football. So it’s not like we’re telling the linebackers they got these complicated reads, read the guards, read this. No, just get out there and play football. It’s like being in the backyard again. Then the coverage is called by the coach and we met, we call the coverages what our defense calls coverages.

Cover two, cover four, cover six, cover one, cover blah, blah, blah, right? So our defensive backs just play what they normally play. And if there’s something special that they do, that’s different. Our coaches can coach them up on that. And we can generally get something that resembles what we’re going to see on Saturday. But even if it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter because if you’re playing at a high tempo, they’re not going to line up right anyway. So it’s always where, geez, we thought the three technique was going to be with the tight end and the kid lines up in a two eye. Well,

You got to block it. You know, so it’s, it’s a little bit of chaos theory with that, where it’s like just chaos. Now this week, I was just saying to John, same to you, John, that, you know, we’ve got a team that’s going to play a little bit of both. They play some three down, they play some four down. So one, how is it to be three down? One, how is it going to be four down? And we’re going to run as many as plays as we can in that team period, going back and forth. And then I’m going to coach them off the film. And that to us on a, on a Tuesday has been tremendous for us, you know,

And then we’ll use those things. We’ll use that kind of scout team solution whenever we have to have a scout team. Because I just got tired of yelling at guys. I got tired of being mad all the time at kids that were just, they were never going to be right. They were always going to, and it would make those kids miserable. And I don’t want those kids to be miserable. I want them to be happy about playing, playing scout team and giving us a great look. And this allows them to give us a better look. ⁓ it’s, realistic for the game.

So we’re mirroring kind of, we’re trying to mirror what we’re going to see on Saturday. Hey, when we get into green deck, let’s get some mechanics going. So we understand how, how it works to go fast. All right. When we go to scout team, let’s go fast in scout team and get as many reps as we can and get us working when we’re tired. But let’s not, we don’t wear out the defense. So they’re fresh. So we get great looks. And I think that those, those things kind of put together have allowed us to be a team that, that

runs a lot of plays. We’re going to be one of the top teams in the country in amount of plays run. And to me, tempo is all about like the more swings you get at it, the more chances you have to hit a home run. So, you know, that’s kind of been our philosophy here. And, you know, if anybody wants any more information on that, they could certainly reach out to me and I’ll send you like the little slides that I have when I teach it to the guys. Like I said, it’s not rocket science. I didn’t invent it. Give a shout out to Matt Drinkhall, you know, all those years ago, sharing that with me.

And it’s made us a better tempo team.

John Snell (14:33)
love the scout team solution. JB, you’re right. It seems like you’re constantly yelling at the scout team players to get lined up right and go to the right spot. And you’ve you’ve solved all that, which I think is phenomenal. My one question about the offense going back and forth, are they they they run a play this way, then turn around and run the play that way. So the offense is in the middle between the two defenses. Is that correct? Yeah.

JB Wells (14:58)
Yeah.

Correct. Correct.

And sometimes it’s a long run for a receiver, you know, because if he catches a ball 10 yards down, like we run a pass and he catches deep ball. Well, sometimes we’ll say, Hey, that’s a deep ball. Get the other, get the other guy and another guy will run on. we generally don’t want to like in a game, wouldn’t necessarily, you wouldn’t do that. But for the sake of time and speed, if it’s a ball over like 20 yards, get the next guy on. And then he’ll just rotate back in when we hit the other thing and then keep going back and forth. So.

John Snell (15:05)
Yeah.

Yeah.

JB Wells (15:31)
It’s, good too. think like, you know, if you have, because receivers are the ones that sub, if we keep the receivers coach on the sideline with me, where he is on Saturday, he can sub those guys in. And so it kind of helps with the substitutions and, and stuff like that, you know, ⁓ a running back bus, the long run and you know, it, it’s, makes practice interesting and it gets us, it gets us what we need.

John Snell (15:44)
Yeah.

I think that’s great information. think it’s a great solution to some of the issues that you have at the Coast Guard Academy. And it is important to get enough reps and enough work and not have to spend all your time getting the scout team lined up. So great stuff, JB. ⁓ Thanks for, we appreciate you taking the time and sharing with us. Again, congratulations to you and the staff.

on a great win and putting up a lot of points. And we wish you the best as the season progresses. And thanks again for your time and congrats to you and the staff.

JB Wells (16:24)
Yeah.

Thanks, John. It’s great to see you and thanks to Keith for having me on and for Hanson for this honor. It certainly can’t be done without other people. It’s never a one-man operation in football. That’s why our game is so great. Not any one person can dominate the game by himself. all the credit goes to my coaching staff and obviously to the players because we’ve got some great players here. And to score 92, yeah, I didn’t score any of those points. I didn’t throw one block.

John Snell (17:00)
Thanks.

JB Wells (17:01)
So they did it all. was, it was tremendous.

John Snell (17:05)
Again, that’s a great job.