OPTION CENTRAL

Editor's Corner

Mike DiMatteo-Managing Editor

Collecting Counters

One of the originators of the Option game in Illinois, and a member of the Illinois High School Football Coaches Hall of Fame is Coach Jack Leese.  He won a state title in 1977 while coaching at East Leyden High School.  I have had the good fortune to have an association with Coach Leese over the years as I not only grew up in the community where he was the head coach, but got to know him on a more personal level as I moved up the coaching ranks.  I have a couple of good "Jack" stories, but that's for another column.

When Coach Leese and I saw each other after I landed my current head coaching job at Lake Zurich High School, I told him that we were planning on running the spread option.  I told him how I had seen Georgia Southern run it and since I was looking for something unique for our school, this is what I had settled on.  During my "discourse" I mentioned that one of my good friends was on the staff and that we were going to have the opportunity to have a clinic on it given by my friend for our entire staff.  I went on about how flexible the offense is, how it fit our personnel, and how we were excited about the play action opportunities that it was going to present for us.  I was really excited to show him, the original "option guy" from my point of view, how we were going to follow in the great option tradition. 

Coach Leese listened patiently, I even thought that he cracked a small smile.  When I was done, he looked at me squarely in the eye and said six words, "Make sure you run some counters."  I told him that I had a good one in the works, and he repeated that for the option game to be as successful as it could be, I needed to make sure that I had an excellent counter game.
"That's the key to the whole thing." 

I took his words to heart.  When someone of Coach Leese's status gives you a suggestion, you tend to listen.  As a result, we made sure that we had a base counter off of our base play (inside veer) as well as a couple more that we will adjust from year to year depending on what we think our next best plays will be.  Our counter off of the inside veer has been our most consistent non-option play in our offense over the last 5 years, and one of our biggest gamebreaking plays as well. 

I even keep a small playbook of just counters that I run across during my discussions with other coaches, clinics, etc.  We don't use them all, but it does make a good library of supplementary things that we may draw on from time to time.  You never know when one may come in handy.

Yours in Option football,

Mike DiMatteo