Tennessee concluded spring football practices under first-year head coach Josh Heupel with its annual Chevrolet Orange & White Game on April 24.
Steve Svendsen took in Tennessee’s spring game at Neyland Stadium. He served as Heupel’s head coach at Central High School in Aberdeen, South Dakota.
The offense Heupel played in under Svendsen was a combination between the run and shoot and West Coast.
Svendsen served on Houston’s staff from 1988-92. The Cougars ran a run and shoot offense that produced quarterbacks Andre Ware and David Klingler. Ware won the Heisman Trophy in 1989.
“That whole run and shoot was adjustments on just about every route that they ran,” Svendsen said on the show “Tennessee Two-A-Days.” “It was a great learning experience for me and I had nothing but a foundation built on the passing game by just learning the run and shoot and watching Coach (John) Jenkins call the offense, and those guys work at every position. It was just a phenomenal time.”
When Svendsen left Houston to become the head coach at Central High School in 1992, he was taking over a program that ran the wishbone.
Svendsen slowly implemented his own offense of combining the run and shoot with the West Coast.
“When I got there, they were a wishbone team, so you talk about a transition and a culture shock,” Svendsen said. “There had to be an easy transition as to getting that system in play and trying to get the passing game implemented in.
“It was a transition that needed to take some baby steps, and the one thing that we did is, yeah I had a lot of run and shoot, things that I learned, but I also implemented a lot of West Coast offensive stuff. It was a hybrid between the two and kind of came up with my own system after learning from Dennis Miller who worked with the offense at BYU and head coach at Northern State at that time. I got to know him and understand his passing game and what BYU did out there, so kind of hybrid and both of those together, and just put them together. It was a good time.”
Svendsen discussed how Heupel was part of the offense’s success at Central High School.
“I have never had another kid as smart as he is in being able to understand what the defense is presenting to you on the field while you are playing and looking at your reads,” he said of Heupel. “He understood so much about the defense and he understands so much about the game. That is what is going to take him a long ways in progressing that (Tennessee) program.”
The entire show with Svendsen can be listened to here or below.
[vertical-gallery id=35203]