“Okay, rather than going too deeply into a match review, I've got two really major pieces of advice that you can dig into immediately to become a waaaaaay better coach instantly. Plus a third one that will really help.

First, your assets. You seem to have a good understanding of the official mechanics of this game. You did a good job setting up 2d blocks, and you didn't generally do premature moves. You also saw the opportunity I presented when my block on your carrier went sour and did a good job taking advantage.

1) Action Economy. Actions are your major currency in this game. Any time you take an action to do something suboptimal, you're reducing your power. Never ever ever click "stand up and end turn" or "recover from stupidity/gaze and end turn" unless you consider everything else you could do with the player and go, "nah," to all of it. Never take a Move action into contact with a Vampire, always Gaze if you're going to do that, even if you're not counting on the gaze, don't think it will work, and don't really care.

2) Contact. The main skill in this game is not getting blocked. When kicking, only ever put three players on the line of scrimmage. Don't move players into contact unless you can meet one of three criteria: they can't (or shouldn't) get a good block back on you, you intend to blitz them so they won't be there at the start of their turn, or making them block you is situationally superior to letting them run free. Don't stand prone players up in contact unless you meet those criteria; if you are just going to get punched a lot, you should either "sunbathe" (remain prone and just don't act) or dodge away, unless you think the other side punching you a lot is a bad idea for them.

3) Interface. Shift+Click on each of your players before every game to make sure they're properly marked. How you mark stuff is up to you, but it's SUPER IMPORTANT to remember what everyone has all the time, and even if you have every single position's starting stuff memorized, improvements can be humongous. Specifically, you will not enjoy yourself or thrive if you do not know where the +ST, Block, Wrestle, Dodge, Guard, Tackle, Mighty Blow, Side Step, Stand Firm, and Fend are, and while you're at it you'll quickly realize nearly every skill is like that.

So yeah, you seem to have the mechanics down but not the best practices. That's my assessment. You'll be a pretty good coach if you stick at it, and you could quickly jump up to high mediocrity if you just take the above three points to heart. From there, trucking along to mastery is only a matter of time and it could easily be just a few hundred games.

Good luck in your journey, feel free to hit me up for advice whenever you like. I can invite you to JR's School of Block when the second season opens up on Saturday. It's not a league, more like a little sewing circle within the 145 club.

— JR (real name's Matt)

PS: where are you in the world? We played in NA time, if you're American I can invite you to an awesome league community: it might be a bit late to get in for the season that starts today, but it's basically a 4-month cycle, so the next one is never that far away.”