Coaching Football Successfully

In Coaching Football Successfully, Bob Reade shows you how to build and maintain a successful football program. You'll learn techniques, tactics, and drills for coaching offense, defense, and special teams. Reade also shows you how to teach the skills and strategies used at each offensive and defensive position and presents a wide variety of offensive formations and defensive alignments. In addition to Xs and Os, Reade emphasizes the other important aspects of coaching, including philosophy, communication, motivation, planning, and program evaluation.

Coaching Football Successfully is a publication of the American Coaching Effectiveness Program (ACEP), a multilevel national coaching education program. This book is one of a series of sport-specific texts designed by ACEP. Through the series, expert coaches like Bob Reade show how philosophy, psychology, and teaching and management methods, as well as Xs and Os, can be applied successfully to their sports.

Bob Reade was the head football coach at Augustana College in Rock Island, IL, from 1979 to 1995, where he won an incredible 87% of his games—the highest winning percentage of any college football coach at the time he retired, and second only to Knute Rockne on the all-time list.

Reade's Augustana teams put together impressive strings of victories and championships, including 4 straight NCAA Division III national championships (1983-86), 10 straight NCAA Division III play-off appearances (1981-90), 8 straight conference titles (1981-1988), and a record-breaking 60 games in a row without a defeat (1983-1987). Reade's success on the field helped him earn distinction as National Coach of the Year four times and College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin Coach of the Year seven times.

Before coming to Augustana, Reade was head coach at J.D. Darnall High School in Geneseo, IL, where he built a similar football dynasty. In 17 years, he compiled a 146-21-4 record, which included a 52-game unbeaten streak and three straight Class 3A state championships. He was also named Illinois High School Coach of the Year four times.

Reade retired from coaching in 1995. He lives in Geneseo, IL, where he enjoys spending time with his family and boating.