I'm the coaches adviser for a youth football league and the local HS coaches are new and are doing things different than have been done around this town for the last 40 years. This is their 2nd year and so they invited all their feeder program coaches (middle school/youth league) to come to their clinic to learn what they are trying to implement as a program in hopes that we will soon adopt their schemes, play calling, etc so that by the time the players are in HS it will be second nature for them.

So this is the Northern Illinois area and the head coach himself is a graduate of this same HS he is coaching at now so pretty much nobody at this clinic is from anywhere else. In fact I may be the most foreign to them all as I was born about 150 miles from here and then moved 2 states away to finish HS, joined the military serving from Texas to Wash DC to AZ then to Southern Illinois. When I got out of the military I moved to the Northern Illinois region and eventually I moved to this town I live in now about 10 years ago. I and my family are still after 10 years considered the new guy/outsider when it comes to school and the community (thank goodness it isn't that way at Church). As a side note - one of our youth coaches has been coaching in our league for over 30 years now and most of the coaches at the HS, MS and youth program, etc were on his teams growing up.

Almost everyone there had a shirt on sporting a team at different levels (youth/MS/HS) from our town with the exception of 3 people. 1 Bulls shirt, 1 cubs shirt and then me in a BYU Football shirt.

So early on they're walking us through their base defensive formation and I'm starting to think I know this defense but not with this name. Then at one point the coach wants me to move into a different spot and he says "Hey you, Bronco, take 3 steps back". I turned to him and thought what? My name isn't Bronco! Then I looked down at my shirt and realized why he was calling me Bronco he was teaching everyone the 3-3-5 defense that they are running but they call it the Buc 3-3 Stack.

So during break I'm talking with the defensive coordinator and the head coach and he said they were modeling their defense off of Bronco's 3-3-5. They being Bears fans know that Brian Urlacher played a safety position in a 3-3-5 under Bronco at NM and had loved his defensive tenacity as a coach.

Note they have also implemented a spread, read option offense but did not mention Robert Anae or GFGH

They mentioned and taught different techniques they'd learned from coaches at clinics at Wisconsin (specifically Barry Alvarez - not GA), Michigan St and ND over the years which was cool.

At any rate, who would have thought "out here in the mission field" with a bunch of non-LDS coaches in a town where people pretty much seem to live cradle to grave in this one county and rarely go anywhere else that they'd be fans of Bronco and his defense. Really kind of cool in my book to have this kind of an experience tonight.