Off-Season Coaching Growing In Importance
By Jerry DiPaola

The draft is over, free agency has been reduced to largely insignificant signings and training camps don't open around the NFL for nearly three months. That doesn't mean the sweat has stopped flowing at the Steelers' training facility on the South Side.

After a weekend minicamp that began May 2, Steelers players will gather later this month for almost daily on-field and off-field sessions with their coaches and teammates. It's the equivalent of spring football camp that colleges have held on campuses nationwide for years.

In the NFL, it's a relatively new endeavor, designed to acquaint players—old and new—with changes in the coaching staff, lineup, play-calling and schemes.

It leads up to the main week-long minicamp that opens early next month, the last gathering of players and coaches before they report to training camp at St. Vincent College in July.

The May coaching sessions are especially important for Steelers' defensive backs, who for the first time will have two coaches watching their every move. Former Steelers and Penn State safety Darren Perry was hired this offseason as an assistant to secondary coach Willy Robinson. The idea is to teach players important habits and playing techniques without the shadow of a game looming on the weekend.

"What you do is you try to get as much teaching as you can in during a less stressful environment," Perry said. "It's not as high-pressured. It really gives your young kids an opportunity to focus in on learning the defense. It gives your older guys a chance to get back on their techniques and get their minds back on the defense ... and any new things you want to experiment with."

The sessions will be critically important to Robinson and Perry, who direct the only unit on the team that struggled consistently late in the season. The Steelers surrendered a total of 740 passing yards in two playoff games. Plus, they must find a replacement for strong safety Lee Flowers. Getting Chris Hope, a third-round pick last year, ready to play—either as a top backup or a starter—will be one of Perry's chief duties between now and the start of the season Sept. 7.

"The main thing is to get yourself reacquainted with the players in a little bit more relaxed environment where they can ask questions," Perry said. "You want to learn as much as you can about the guys you are going to be working with, really hone in on individuals and kind of have a feel of where they are at."

The Steelers have held coaching sessions during each of the previous 10 years of coach Bill Cowher's tenure, but attendance is more strongly encouraged today and more material is covered.

It sounds like overkill—football practice four months before the first game?—but Perry said, "It is becoming pretty standard in the league. As competitive as this league is, anything you can do to help yourself get better, I think you have to take advantage of it."

Perry is part of a significantly altered Steelers' coaching this season that is larger and more specialized than at anytime in franchise history. Tom Clements is entering his third season as quarterbacks coach—a position that didn't exist on the Steelers staff for nearly 30 years—and Perry's position was created this year to complement Robinson's teachings.

Perry will be mainly responsible for coaching the safeties, but he said he also will work with the entire group of defensive backs. "The important thing is Willy and I work together. The more we can think alike and see things, the more we can go to a guy and he can hear the same thing."

Perry, an eighth-round draft choice who became a starter for the Steelers at free safety as a rookie and ended up starting almost every game for seven seasons, should be able to relate as easily to the starters as he can to less heralded players.

"That's one of biggest things you bring to the table," he said. "You can validate it. You got the numbers and the facts to back it up. That's all good, but the bottom line is getting those guys to go out and perform at a high level."

Jerry DiPaola covers the Steelers and NFL for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.