Where do high school football coaches get the names for their plays?

If you went to a high school football 7-on-7 event this summer, closed your eyes and just listened, you would have heard:

• A coach chewing out some poor kid.
• Someone complaining about the soul-searing humidity.
• A random string of English-language nouns and numbers barked out by a quarterback or an offensive coach.

With NFL quarterbacks more mic’d for sound than ever, football fans are increasingly in tune to the out-of-left field names assigned to football plays. Remember Peyton Manning and his machine-gun shouting at the line of scrimmage a couple years back?

“Omaha! Omaha! Omaha!”

After hearing a coach call a play named “malamute” at a 7-on-7 last week, I had to ask: where do they come up with this stuff?

Protecting play calls

The starting point for naming plays tends to be random.

Great Falls coach Kenneth Schofield has been around high school football for ages. He said he names his plays after “things I’ve seen, things I’ve done, combinations.”

Schofield hasn’t changed his offense in many years, but he does swap out the nomenclature from time to time.

“Tried to use professional teams,” he said. “Ran out of those. So we’re using anything that comes that matches up. We’re trying to use different states and things.”

Lewisville coach Will Mitchell said he doesn’t change his play names every year, but does make changes – in his estimation – “more often than I should.”

NFL reporters never got to the bottom of what Manning’s “Omaha” call truly meant, but it was likely a version of the good ‘ole “hut, hut, hike.” One SB Nation story about the “Omaha” call said that it was probably one of a series of verbal cues that Manning and the Broncos changed on a weekly basis.

Doing that at the high school level is impossible, but coaches do worry about their calls being decoded. Many didn’t want their current plays mentioned in this story.

“You worry about people sometimes stealing calls, but the bottom line is you usually worry more about yourself,” Mitchell said. “Usually you do something wrong on your side to lose.”

One team that doesn’t have to worry about play calls being hacked is Clover. The Blue Eagles huddle on every play so their play calls are extensive and descriptive. They are also heard by their 11 players, unlike spread offenses that shirk the privacy of a post-play huddle. Each Clover call tells which gap to run the ball in and the blocking scheme.

“We’re very descriptive,” said Clover coach Chad Smith. “Oddly, we’re much more like a pro attack than a lot of spread teams are, in the way that we huddle.”

Bunch learning

In most cases, the play names are deliberately assigned to make learning and retention easier for the players.

“You try to do what they call ‘bunch learning,’” said Mitchell.

Example: a group of plays – called a package – would all be named after types of dogs, or cars, or whatever. The name cues help the players remember what kind of play they’re supposed to run. If a team named a play “Ferrari,” it would probably have something to do with speed.

“You want to put them in families, in concepts, so the kids can make connections,” said Mitchell.

Many high school football coaches, including Northwestern’s Kyle Richardson, use similar methods. Several years back, the Trojans had a group of pass plays all named after sport fish, “tuna” for example. Richardson randomly selected fish for that season’s package, after using cars and NBA teams in previous years.

Packages become more important for no-huddle offenses. Communication is often conveyed down the line of scrimmage with hand signals or signage. Schools that give their players wristbands with plays listed on them can often get more creative and expansive with the terminology, because the wristband is there to fall back on. As weird and random as the names get, Rock Hill coach Bubba Pittman has found words superior to number systems, which were more common when he played.

“They would have to relate a protection with a certain number, they would have to relate an inside route with a certain number, and an outside route with a certain number,” said Pittman, whose Bearcats wear their plays on wristbands. “Those kind of things were confusing for kids.”

Picked up along the way

College team names might be the most commonly used nouns in naming high school football plays, in part because they are pretty easy for the players to remember.

Indian Land doesn’t yet have a play or defensive scheme called “Pittsburgh” or “Panther.” The Warriors’ defensive coordinator, Horatio Blades, was a star linebacker at the University of Pittsburgh, but hasn’t yet put his personal stamp on the Indian Land playbook.

“I piggyback from all the coaches that I learned from, from high school on,” he said Thursday. “That’s normally what coaches do anyway. You just pick the best out of all the coaches you have and make your own thing.”

Mayer’s first paid coaching job out of college was with the 1993 Gaffney football team. He hasn’t changed the names of his running plays in the 22 years since. As Clover’s Smith said, there’s nothing new in football play-calling. Many play names come from a coach’s first gig.

But Smith was particularly curious about Fort Mill coach Ed Susi, whose offense is highly regarded in the area for its variability. Yellow Jacket offensive plays usually have three or four possibilities based on the quarterback’s decision. That could make communication cumbersome.

“Either his kids are extremely intelligent or he’s figured something out nobody else has,” said Smith.

Fort Mill’s potent offensive scheme uses tags on the end of play calls to tell certain players what to do, but it’s not the revolutionary method of communication Smith suspected. Susi still uses the exact same passing play calls from when he started coaching 31 years ago at his high school alma mater, St. Francis DeSales in Ohio.

“I’m not as complicated as these spread (offense) guys. They’re too smart for me,” said Susi, guffawing. “I’m a dinosaur, buddy.”

“No Gamecock”

Often, coaches name plays after schools or places near to their heart. Mayer, a big Clemson fan, naturally has a “Tiger” play. But, he said, “we have no ‘Gamecock.’” And never will, he added.

Susi, Mitchell and Mayer all mentioned instances in which their coaching staffs allowed kids to name certain plays. Susi recalled player-created calls that included “Rambo,” and names from the Bible. Mitchell’s kids at Chester named their fake punts “Eric B.,” and “Rakim,” after hip-hop artists that were popular at the time.

“If the kids make it up, they’ll remember it forever,” Mitchell said.

But the reason that tradition never got rolling at Indian Land explains why many coaches keep the play-naming duties for themselves. Mayer’s kids gave their plays sexually suggestive names, negating the possibility of shouting the words out during a game, and especially of using hand gestures to signal in the plays from the sidelines.

This story was originally published July 18, 2015 at 5:29 PM with the headline "Where do high school football coaches get the names for their plays?."