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Sports

Chapel HIll Coaches Learn at Falcons Clinic

Many of the Panthers football staff spent Friday in Flowery Branch leaning new coaching methods

head football coach Chris Parker and several members of his coaching staff spent Friday night in Flowery Branch participating in the Atlanta Falcons’ fourth annual GHSA Coaches Clinic.

Hosted by Falcons head coach Mike Smith, the four-hour clinic featured Georgia State head football coach Bill Curry, University of Georgia defensive coordinator Todd Grantham and Falcons tight ends coach Chris Scelfo, among others, and provided four separate learning stations for the coaches to glean knowledge from.

According to Parker, events like this provide high school coaches with incremental learning points rather than sweeping changes.

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“You usually pick up little things or some fundamentals,” Parker said. “Very rarely do you pick up a whole offense or a whole defense. A lot of times guys do something similar to what you do, but they’ve got this one little technique that they do differently. It’s these little things that you’ll pick up.”

That type of knowledge can come from keynote speakers like Curry or from a side conversation between peers, so putting 200 coaches in the same room leads an iron-sharpening-iron environment.

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“Football’s a great thing where people who play each other and try to kill each other are buddies. You know, Coke and Pepsi don’t share ideas, but we do,” Parker said. “So it’s interesting. It probably wouldn’t be near as good of high school football in this area if it wasn’t for that kind of relationship with the coaches.”

Parker generally attends four or five clinics each offseason, but this one stands out because of the quality of the instruction the professional nature of the setting.

“The uniqueness of this is the NFL and being sponsored by the Falcons and seeing some of the things they do. For lack of a better word, it’s just kind of neat,” Parker said. “Because it’s the Falcons and because they do such a great job, they can get some guys in here that we normally maybe wouldn’t get to hear. So we get some unique perspectives.”

The event was Mike Smith’s brainchild, largely because of his ties to the area from his years as the head coach at Tennessee Tech. The Falcons provide the clinic free of charge to the coaches.

Smith acknowledged the fraternal nature of the coaching profession throughout the game’s different levels and expressed his desire to invest in the high school coaching community.

“We want to give back to the high schools and the high school coaches are really at the core of setting the foundation for football players,” Smith said. “I think it's very important that we can interact with them and let them know how important their jobs are, in not only developing football players, but developing good, solid citizens.”

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