Jedd Fisch reflects on Post-it Notes to Steve Spurrier, entry into coaching

The college coaching ranks have exploded in recent years with the proliferation of support staffs, but it wasn’t always so easy to break into the ranks.

Just ask Arizona coach Jedd Fisch.

He had to essentially send college football love letters to Steve Spurrier in the mid-90s to finally get his break after being denied a spot as an equipment manager for the Florida Gators as a college freshman.

“Back then there were no student assistants, there were no volunteer assistants,” Fisch told On3’s Andy Staples. “You’re a manager, you’re a trainer, you’re not in the building. Those are your options.”

That wasn’t good enough for Fisch, having been denied the manager route, so he did anything and everything he could to elbow his way into a position around the game.

And, boy, did he get creative.

If you happened across Steve Spurrier’s car parked near the Florida facilities back in those days, you might have noticed some odd things piled on top of it. Fisch explained.

“Well they weren’t just like a random note,” he said. “There could be a postcard. There could be a Post-it Note. I remember leaving a youth football coach’s manual that I wrote when I was a high school senior for an independent study project. I remember leaving a gameplan that I used for when I was coaching high school football. I remember leaving plenty of notes.”

Eventually the cumulative effect of it all either wore Spurrier down or grabbed his attention. Fisch got his job as a student assistant.

Of course, that didn’t really mean he was considered a full part of the team. Not in those days.

“Just imagine being like the first-ever student assistant and asking for like a polo shirt. You were persona non-grata,” Jedd Fisch said. “I went to the bookstore. I told my parents I’m going to the bookstore to buy clothes that are going to match the coaches on gameday so when I’m on the sideline or in the press box as a student assistant they don’t think I’m some guy that’s just showing up.”

Making the break

Fisch did get his foot in the door, though. And the college football world he walked into was a whole lot different than the one you see today.

It’s no coincidence that as the size of staffs have exploded across the country and the revenue figures have kept climbing higher and higher that many aspects of coaching life have gotten easier. The demands are still high, but there are more solutions out there now.

Fisch relayed one way he helped make a name for himself, now on Steve Spurrier’s staff at Florida.

“It was so different,” Fisch said. “We had the very first time I went to coach Spurrier and I said, ‘Hey, I took this script for the blitz period and I typed it up for you.’ And you would have thought it was like I went, I flew to Seattle, met with Bill Gates, got full access to Microsoft and then decided to work some deal out that I was able to get a tight script of 24 plays.”

But the end product was enough to impress his bosses.

“It was amazing where you could separate yourself early in the profession in the ’90s, because if you knew a few things that other people didn’t, you could come across like so much better than you really were,” Jedd Fisch said. “It was that weird little deal of like, you know what, I can draw these blitz cards up on the computer and it’ll look prettier. ‘Oh, that seems like an impossible thing to do.'”

Advice for young coaches

While the landscape has shifted dramatically over the past couple decades, the basic tenets of how Fisch got his start remain applicable today.

He’s constantly talking with younger coaches about things they can do to stand out.

Innovation will always have a place. After all, Steve Spurrier himself was a man of habit and tended to stick to what he knew — well, outside of drawing up ball plays, anyway. He was always pretty innovative there, and he almost always took a look at things that were working elsewhere.

Still, he had his preferred way of doing things.

“Those guys, and you know them all, you played for them, they did it their way,” Jedd Fisch told Staples. “They did it coach’s way, and coach was hand-written drawings, everything was old school, stapled, maybe you would get a playbook, maybe most of the time you wouldn’t. If you could add some new stuff, I remember Buddy Teevens and I created the first-ever Florida Gator passing playbook on the computer. That took us like a year to do and coach looked at it, ‘Hey, yeah, this looks nice, OK.”

“But what it did was it just kept you employed, No. 1. And No. 2, when you’re doing that stuff, you’re learning a lot more than if you’re just clicking on the computer now and saying, ‘Give me this, or give me that.’ Doing the legwork makes you a better coach, and I’ll never not think that.”

Fisch shared one other story about the legwork he did as a student assistant at Florida back in the day, before he got his ‘official’ start in coaching as a graduate assistant in 1999.

It came courtesy of Florida receivers coach Dwayne Dixon.

“You’ve got to find the one coach that you know needs the most amount of help and that wants to do a lot of projects,” Jedd Fisch said. “And DD, he had VCR tapes from here to the ceiling of every NFL game. And what my job was for the first three months was to go through the game and any time they had an isolation cam on a wide receiver, put that on another VCR tape.

“So I sat there and I was like OK, wait, hold on, pause, record over here, get it on this tape and then label it by player. So then it was oh wait, this is Cris Carter, let me put this guy in. That’s how I got started down there.”

Post-it Notes, digital playbooks, VCR transposition.

Whatever it takes, right?