Like another assistant coach

Coach’s Office is a user-friendly program that allows football coaches at all levels to do in a matter of minutes on the computer what used to take hours manually.

Middletown, OH – A veteran in the coaching ranks, Steve Hagan remembers the days not so long ago when long hours were spent drawing diagrams and handwriting details on reams of paper that composed bulky, spiral-bound playbooks.

The repetition involved in redrawing the same plays and retracing the same practice diagrams each week was simply part of the game. So was the arduous task of breaking down an opponent’s games and manually searching through the tapes to locate specific plays which the video department then transformed into cut-ups.

“It was a process that took hours of work and detracted from time we could spend coaching our players,” said Hagen, the Cleveland Browns’ quarterback coach who spent 17 years at the college level, before joining the Browns staff as tight ends coach in 2001.

For Hagen and a growing number of NFL coaches, the days of drawing and handwriting information for playbooks, play cards and game plans are history. New computer programs are changing an NFL coach’s day-to-day tasks for the better. Chalkboards, VCRs and thick playbooks stuffed with hand-produced schematics are becoming obsolete as more teams are turning to laptops, digitized game film and computerized playbooks.

Using laptops and specialized software, coaches can focus on key plays of opponents, project play diagrams and make assignments. The software that Hagen uses prints play cards from practice scripts and helps produce game plans.

Created by Stan Webber, president of Middletown, Ohio-based Graphware Inc., Coach’s Office allows coaches to build playbooks, play cards and game plans. Coach’s Office also offers the ability to digitize videotapes of a team's games. Coach's Office software packages range in price from $95 for simple play drawing to $1,245 for a complete package that includes video services.

Webber developed the idea for his coaching software after discussions with Bob Wylie, who at the time was part of the Cincinnati Bengals coaching staff and is now offensive line coach with the Arizona Cardinals. Initially, Webber developed a program called Quick Playcard to produce play cards for Wylie and the Bengals. Then coaches from the New York Giants, Minnesota Vikings and Green Bay Packers joined the list. Webber expanded on Quick Playcard and introduced Coach’s Office, a complete software suite that he says is “like Microsoft Office for football coaches.”

"I stumbled upon this niche football market quite by accident after a short meeting with Bob," Webber said. "He had a $5,000 laptop on his desk yet was spending hours each day manually drawing play cards for their practices.

"I couldn't believe that, with the technological advancements, coaches were still writing plays by hand," Webber said. "I felt it would be much easier and less time consuming if there was an automated process that would allow them to do the work on a computer."

His client base is not limited to NFL teams. The last four NCAA Division I national champions – LSU, Ohio State, Miami (Fla.) and Oklahoma –use Coach’s Office. So does Division III football powerhouse Mount Union (Ohio) College, which has won multiple national titles.

"We compile our game plan and share it with the players using the slide show component, which is like having a dry erase board on the wall,” said Vince Kehres, assistant coach at Mount Union. “Coach's Office has allowed for information to be more readily shared with the players in less time, which helps our productivity on and off the field."

When preparing for a game using Easy Scout XP, a supplemental program of Coach’s Office, coaches can call up hundreds of examples showcasing opponents running specific plays. Specific situations such as goal-line plays, nickel and dime pass coverages and red zone work are now at a coach’s fingertips. Want to know how often an opposing team runs on first down? It's there. How about how many times they run right, as compared to left? The information is there as well. With these programs, coaches can even research opponents’ tendencies early in the game and late in the game, and determine what they do when they are ahead or behind.

"Before computers, there were so many hours when we did busywork instead of coaching," Hagen said. “It would take me a couple hours to do play cards for a practice.”

Today, he says he can do it in 45 minutes or less. The bottom line: The new technology allows coaches to spend more time teaching and preparing, which makes them more productive and the players more efficient.

Hagen is in his first season as quarterbacks coach with a new signal caller, Jeff Garcia. The availability of computerized play books, play cards and game plans – and digitized video where he can access plays from any game situation – has made Garcia’s learning curve a little smoother.

“You still have to make the plays on the field,” Hagen said. “The software program will not throw a touchdown pass, but it does make the teaching and learning process more efficient.”

“NFL coaches still work long hours, we just spend our time differently than we used to,” he added. “Instead of spending hours drawing diagrams by hand, sifting through bulky playbooks and scanning through videotapes, we can get what we need with a point and a click. It allows us to devote more time to actually coaching.”

####

Stan Webber is in the business of letting football coaches focus on football — not scripts, playbooks, Xs and Os.

Those coaches include Shane Montgomery, offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach at Miami University.

Montgomery once had to ready 75 to 100 scripts before practices, taking one to two hours of his time. Now those scripts — and the diagrams illustrating the moves behind the scripts — are a mere mouse click away, thanks to software Webber has developed, dubbed “Coach’s Office.”

“It saves you a lot of time, once you get it in,” Montgomery said last week.

Count Steve Hagan, quarterbacks coach for the Cleveland Browns, as a satisfied “Coach’s Office” user.

“It’s been very efficient for us, functional for us,” Hagan said.

Setting up the program — initially pairing scripts and diagrams on the computer — takes time, Montgomery said. “There’s a lot of front-end work you have to do,” he said.

But he hasn’t regretted that investment in effort.

“Once I get that in, it’s pretty easy to change,” Montgomery said.

Hagan isn’t complaining either.

“He wants it to be right,” Hagan said of Webber. “And he wants you to be efficient.”

Mosiman Road resident Webber, 56, has spent so much time rubbing elbows with big NFL names that he doesn’t give it much thought any more. An early session with the Bengals’ Bob Wylie and Ken Anderson in 1998 was an eye-opener. Coaches wanted greater playbook flexibility, and the former Armco Research employee thought he had a way to give them that.

“I saw an opportunity there, a niche market,” Webber said.

He and his wife, Vikki, were operating a Web site company, Graphware Inc. On Sunday evenings, he was helping Wylie — then the Bengals offensive line coach, today with the Arizona Cardinals — transfer home game videos to hard drive, driving to Cincinnati to pick up the videos and taking them home.

In 1998, Webber said, that was “cutting edge” stuff.

But he knew there was a better way than diagramming plays by marker. He likened that to using typewriters in modern newsrooms.

“This is the typewriter to them, going through and drawing these things up by hand,” he said.

Webber believes he was the first software maker to offer something like this to the NFL. To this day, he said, “I have no competition for this.”

In the late 1990s, Wylie proved to be Webber’s crucial connection to other NFL coaches. He quickly found that dropping Wylie’s name on the phone opened doors that otherwise might have stayed shut.

“Everyone knows Bob in the NFL,” Webber said.

Now quite a few coaches know Webber. The Maryland native’s customers have included the Giants, Jets, Packers, Cowboys and Steelers. He has also worked for colleges like Miami and high school powerhouses like Archbishop Moeller and Roger Bacon.

He declined to give sales numbers, but said growth has been steady and strong — gross sales have grown 65 percent each year for at least the last four years.

Said Webber, “I want to put something together that everyone can use.”

tgnau@coxohio.com (513) 705-2833

Middletown, OH - January 5, 2004 - While the debate on the "real" National Champion may go on forever, football coaches from around the world have chosen their champion when it comes to time-saving coaching tools. It's called Coach's Office®, a suite of coaching software tools that includes playbook, drawing, script, scouting, video, and slideshow presentations.

While teams have spent countless hours practicing, watching video and designing plays that will lead them to victory, coaches of the top programs rely on Coach's Office to help keep them out of the office and on the field.

In fact, four of the top five teams going into the Bowl Season use Coach's Office to help them reach this level of success.

"I've been using the drawing, scripting and practice card features of Coach's Office since 1998. The program has cut our practice preparation time by 70%... I'd recommend it to any coach," said Kevin Wilson, a coach for the Oklahoma Sooners.

Rather than spending hours each day drawing plays by hand or manually on the computer, Coach's Office streamlines the process and saves valuable time. Coach's Office is used to diagram plays, prepare coaches and players for practice, produce a playbook and game plan - even view digitized video from within a playbook. It's bringing football into the 21st Century.

And it's not just the "name" teams who are succeeding with Coach's Office. NCAA Division III power Mount Union College has won three Division III National Championships since using Coach's Office, as do several NFL teams, high school and Pop Warner league teams. Coach's Office has even gone international, with the Canadian Football League and NFL Japan.

"Coach's Office has allowed us to compile our football notebook in a very sharp format," said Vince Kehres, a coach for Mt. Union College. "We compile our game plan and share it with the players using the slide show component which is like having a dry erase board on the wall. Coach's Office has allowed for information to be more readily shared with the players in less time and has helped our program substantially."

Coach's Office has been made affordable so coaches at all levels can use it.

"I stumbled upon this niche football market quite by accident after a short meeting with Bob Wylie, the offensive line coach for the Chicago Bears," recalls Stan Webber, who developed Coach's Office. "Wylie had a $5,000 laptop on his desk yet was spending hours each day manually drawing playcards for their practices." Since then, Webber has perfected the suite of coaching tools and built a large client list from pee wees to pros.

Coach's Office software packages range in price from $95 for simple play drawing to $1,100 for a complete package that includes video services. Coach's Office is available from Graphware, a Middletown, Ohio-based company now in its 22nd year of business.

For more information on teams and testimonials, go to: Teams Using Coach's Office and What Coaches Say.

Mount Union's win Dec. 14th in the Division III national semifinals was an NCAA-record 55th in a row. (more)

Call it the "Software of Champions."

If a client list is any indication of a software program's quality, then Graphware's Coach's Office is on a roll.

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers — the reigning Super Bowl champs — and the NCAA football champion Ohio State Buckeyes are among the users of the Middletown company's productivity software geared for football coaches.

And don't forget to add Mount Union College to the list. The Alliance, Ohio, school has won three NCAA Division III national titles and has gone 42-0 since the school began using Coach's Office.

While Graphware's President and Coach's Office creator Stan Webber can't take credit for all those titles, it still gives his small company a share of some bragging rights.

Even the University of Miami, which lost to Ohio State in the national championship game, has agreed to order Webber's software.

"They got the message after getting beat by Ohio State," Webber said jokingly.

Webber's software is designed to make game and practice preparation easier for coaches at all levels. While the professional and college teams often bring more recognition, Webber said his target market is the more than 14,000 high schools across the country.

The software allows coaches to create their team's playbooks on the computer, along with scripts, or lists, of plays that the team can use during practice or a game. The software has other features, including the ability to digitize videotapes of the team's games.

Without using software, coaches had previously done most of the work — like drawing up the playbooks and other materials — by hand.

"It's a great time-saver," said Vince Kehres, assistant football coach at Mount Union College. "You can do it faster and easier, and it gives a lot better presentation."

Webber, who has more than three decades of experience in software development, got the idea for Coach's Office in 1998 after going on a sales presentation with an associate at the Cincinnati Bengals' offices.

In a discussion with then assistant coach Bob Wiley, Webber learned that much of the work in designing playbooks and other materials was done by hand. He decided to try to create software that would automate the process for busy coaches.

"I couldn't believe there wasn't something like that out there," Webber said. "I decided to take a chance that this would be a marketable product."

So Webber and Wiley began meeting periodically to discuss some of the most pressing needs for coaches and how software could make that job easier. Although Webber had never coached football, his one year of semi-pro football experience for the Butler County Steelers helped him speak the language of football.

In his research, Webber said he quickly learned that a user-friendly design would be essential because many coaches are reluctant to embrace technology.

At Mount Union, for instance, the task of automating the playbook fell to Kehres, the 26-year-old son of Head Coach Larry Kehres.

"It's tough for some guys to adapt to the technology," Kehres said. "It wasn't tough for me because I wasn't used to doing it another way."

Since the software's release in 2000, Webber said sales have doubled each year, although he wouldn't reveal specific numbers. Still, the sales were brisk enough to encourage Webber to begin developing similar software for basketball and soccer coaches. The basketball version could be released sometime this year.

Packages of the software can range from $95 for a simple chalkboard that will allow coaches to draw individual plays to more than $1,100 for a complete package that includes video services.

Troy Everhart, head coach at Winton Woods High School, said the cost was what attracted him to the software. He said the cost was reasonable, and the software gives his busy coaches time to get more accomplished.

"It has made us a more effective coaching staff," Everhart said. "We're spending more time coaching instead of drawing up play cards."

Webber also said he wants to focus more on marketing in 2003 so that the program can reach more schools. He said his focus so far has been on providing service to existing customers, but he said coaches are becoming more confident in using the product.

"I'm not as aggressive as I could be," Webber said. "I've been focused on making sure everyone understands it."

Webber also spends some time on a campus helping a coaching staff get comfortable with the software. However, with one-third of NFL franchises on board, along with more than two dozen colleges and numerous high schools, Webber said he might need assistance to handle all the customers.

Congratulations to Larry Kehres and the Raiders of Mount Union College, Division III National Champions in 2000,2001 and now 2002. The Purple Raiders have won three national championships and maintained a perfect record of 44-0 since using Coach's Office.