ALLEN PARK, Mich. (AP) Mike Singletary hopes to coach again in the NFL someday. He has plenty on his plate right now, though.
Singletary was at minicamp with the Detroit Lions on Thursday. He said he doesn’t know Lions coach Matt Patricia that well, but he wanted to be there to check out the video screens Detroit is using at practice.
Singletary was hired earlier this year to coach high school football at Trinity Christian Academy in Texas. He also has been hired as coach of the Memphis franchise in the Alliance of American Football, which will start playing in February.
Singletary has coached for three NFL teams, including a stint as San Francisco’s head coach. The 49ers went 18-22 under him from 2008-10. Singletary was asked if he thought he could get another opportunity like that.
”I hope so. But for me, I’m going to work where I’m planning,” he said. ”Very excited to be where I am, and if that happens, great. If not, then I’m going to keep working where I’m at.”
Singletary says he learned some lessons from his time coaching in the NFL.
”It’s a long list of things. I think more so than anything else is how much I needed to do – how much work I needed to do as a coach and being able to coach my coaches and have them help my players. … Just getting more information, just getting more grounding as a head coach.”
A star linebacker with the Chicago Bears, Singletary was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1998. He clearly still enjoys being involved in the sport.
”It’s such a great game, such a great game when you have the right people involved, when you have the right coaches and you’ve got good kids,” Singletary said. ”I think all kids are good kids. … You’ve got to know which ones you’ve got to manage, and the ones that help the others. But it’s just such a great game, and so many life lessons, so very important game to me, in America.”
As for the video screens at practice, Patricia explained the purpose this week.
”You may have missed something on the field. You kind of look at it and see what happens. You see what went wrong on the play and can get that instant kind of correction to the player right away,” Patricia said. ”A lot of the times the players are trying to figure it out for themselves. So, they’ll see something and, `Hey, what happened right there?’ And they can look at it and reference it from that standpoint.”
—
Follow Noah Trister at www.Twitter.com/noahtrister
—
For more NFL coverage: http://www.pro32.ap.org and http://www.twitter.com/AP-NFL
25% Bonus via Western Union