I always love to start by learning about each coach’s background — how you got introduced to football, when you first fell in love with it, and what it meant to you growing up in St. Louis and playing for Vashon.

How did I get into football, man? Growing up, that was one of the main sports in our childhood. We played this game called Killer Man, where one person gets the ball and everyone tries to tackle him. That person’s trying to get to the end zone, and if you get tackled or touched, you’ve got to throw the ball up in the sky.

I also had a family friend — like an uncle to me — who I’d been around since I was five or six years old, Darnay Scott, who ended up playing professional football. He and Marshall Faulk were roommates in college at San Diego State, so I was able to meet Marshall when he was here in St. Louis through Darnay. But Darnay was really the inspirational one for me — he came up in the same neighborhood, grew up around my family, and I watched him go through his college days and then make it in the NFL and do well for himself. That gave me hope. I think I was about nine years old when I told my mom I was going to be an NFL player. From there I just started trying to learn how to play football. I started off as a quarterback, then moved to receiver after my freshman year of high school.

You were a big recruit coming out of high school. Did you always know you wanted to stay home and play at Missouri?

Yes. I had a couple of high school teammates and friends already there — Jimmy McKinney was already at Missouri, and my close friend Arnold Britt was already a receiver there. So for me, it was two guys I already knew on campus, plus my basketball team was a frequent flyer in Columbia, so I got a good feel for the town and the team. But honestly, the main thing was wanting to play with Damien Nash. He’d gotten to Missouri about a year before me and was one of the top guys in the area coming up, doing his thing before he left and came back. I wanted to go play with him. Once he was there, it made the decision easy. When Missouri offered me my junior year, I knew that’s where I wanted to go — even though my senior year, everyone in the country was coming through trying to persuade me otherwise.

You set some records there and had a great career at Missouri. How would you describe your time there as a player, and what was it like playing under Gary Pinkel?

Oh man, it was amazing, because it’s the epitome of how I structure myself now as a coach. My first season we went 5-6, and Coach Pinkel and the class before mine, along with my class, just kept doing all the right things. Sometimes it takes a while for everyone to buy in and for you to get the right guys in the building. Once we started getting the right guys and doing the things the culture demanded, we went from that 5-6 team to, by my senior year, the number one team in the country at the end of the regular season — something that hadn’t been done at the university. So being part of that journey showed my own development too, going from 5-6 catches my freshman season to walking out of there my senior year still top-six in the program in a couple of categories. It’s an amazing feeling knowing I played with some really talented receivers, and that there have been great receivers there since, but I left my mark in Missouri history — not just as part of a team, but individually.

Then you got drafted into the NFL. Very few guys even make it to the college level, let alone make it to the pros. What was your NFL experience like, and how did it compare across high school, college, and the pros?

That’s what I try to get guys to understand now. Through high school, middle school, and college ball, you always have help — someone pushing you along, continuing to get you to do and learn the right things. You can start to develop those traits, and they show up in college. But once you get to the pros, it’s truly about how you handle the everyday grind on your own — you have to be the one to motivate yourself. That was a unique thing to learn.

The other half of it is the physical side — how you really have to invest in your body. I think the young receivers in the NFL now understand that better than we did. My tenure wasn’t long. Physically, I didn’t hold up as long as I thought I would. But you learn from it, and now I try to teach younger guys what it really takes to stay in the league longer.

The everyday part of it is: are you living your dream? I think that’s something you don’t take in in the moment, because there are so many distractions going on. You don’t realize you just became someone’s hero, and everyone looking at you now expects you to be that person — someone inspiring. I think that’s all I ever wanted to be, was a hero. I saw one in my uncle, and I wanted to make sure I could live up to that. I think I’ve done a decent job in that window, and transitioning out of playing and into coaching has given me the balance to speak across all these levels and give kids real insight into what it takes to be successful in this sport — and to keep being someone’s hero.

Did you always know you wanted to coach once you were done playing?

You know, I think that’s the hardest part about the transition — you don’t know what you want to do. I got into coaching because of my nephew. He’s 22 now, but he was eight when he started playing football, and I was taking him to practice. I’d sit in my vehicle and watch, and I noticed the coaches there weren’t teaching fundamentals. So I told them: since you all signed up and want to do this, next year I’ll get a team. My nephew is the reason I got into coaching, because I wanted to make sure kids were taught the fundamentals of the sport, but also what comes with being a student-athlete.

That team ended up producing one of the most notable players I’ve coached — Luther Burden. I had my hands on him from age nine until he went into high school, and I still mentor him from afar to this day, following his journey and his walk in life.

You then went back to Missouri and joined the staff there. What was that experience like, coming back as a member of the staff instead of a player?

I think that was the real transition — you’re not one of the players anymore, you’re an adult. You see the side of the program you don’t see as a player: the long hours, the consistent commitment to whatever the head coach’s mission is, from academics to the social side to recruiting to developing the current players. I was there almost four and a half years before I started feeling like, okay, I’ve got this, and I want to go get my own opportunity.

That experience taught me the administrative side of things — I used to sit with Coach Odom and talk, and we had a guy named Michael McHugh who was over the Director of Operations, and I really learned the behind-the-scenes work. One of the coaches there who’s since gotten into the Hall of Fame, Coach Andy Hill, who I played for, was the one I told I was interested in coaching. He said, well, you’re doing so well teaching these young men how to start thinking about life through sports. So for those four years I kept working on getting guys to understand they had to think of themselves as more than just athletes — especially coming out of college, where that number of guys who go on to play professionally gets slim. You shouldn’t walk out of college feeling like you didn’t get anything else out of it. If you can think of yourself as more than an athlete, you walk out with a wonderful experience.

As I got better at that, I pushed myself to learn coaching itself. I went to the defensive side — I felt like I already knew enough offensively — and I used to sit in the room with Brick Haley and the defensive linemen to learn defense, then moved to sitting in defensive coordinator Ryan Walters’ office learning how to actually put a defense together. From there, I felt ready to come back and coach on my own, and I got my first head coaching job at Vashon. That’s when my coaching journey really started.

What made you want to jump into high school and come back to your alma mater, instead of staying in college and working your way up a staff?

Once I got into the mindset of coaching, I always wanted to be a head coach at my alma mater. We never really had a true football program there, and I wanted to show that you could build one at a school that’s predominantly known for basketball — that you could do just as well in football as in basketball. I also wanted to step out on my own and build something. When I first took the job, I had nine kids. I worked my tail off, and by that first season I was up to around 28 or 29. After that I averaged 45 to 50 kids, and we went from a 1-9 season to finishing around 34-12 over my time there, with a couple of conference titles. I had a pretty good stretch before I took a hiatus and stepped away from coaching for almost two years.

Walking into a program with nine kids — that’s about as low as I’ve heard. What was that like, especially having played there yourself, then been at a big-time college program, then the NFL, and now coming back with almost no resources and no kids in the program?

It really made me question myself — do you really want to do this? I could have stayed in college and kept working my way through those doors. But it made me want to get closer with God and stay focused on my own journey. I bet on myself — I gambled on myself and how I envisioned things — and I just went to work. I beat the hallways down. Everybody in that building, I was talking to.

I kept working to get the kids who were already in the building to believe we could build something at the school, because a lot of athletes walked those halls but only ever saw basketball — that’s what had won multiple state championships there. Of course kids want to be part of a winning atmosphere, so I had to create one for football, to give kids a reason to come out and stay committed. Once that started happening, you’d look up and see talent like Dierre Hill walk through the door — a freshman who’s now heading into his sophomore year at Oregon. That commitment to myself and to God, staying with it, is what got the program to where I wanted it. We ranked in the top ten in the state a couple of those years, which was a huge accomplishment given the athletes we had and how competitive the football was.

Going from nine kids to a successful run, ranked in the top ten in the state, winning district titles — what do you attribute that success to, beyond getting kids to buy in?

The whole Vashon community. I was also an assistant with the basketball program, so I had support across all the sports, from the administrators and the community. Once they started seeing things head in the right direction, they encouraged the kids to buy in and go out and be their best. The communication and support from behind the student-athletes and their sports was real. Once they saw the commitment from the coaching side, the alumni and everyone who wanted to see the program do well showed up and gave the kids the love and support they needed to understand their value — just like any other sport.

How did the opportunity to coach at University City come up?

Through a mutual friend. I was actually working at William Jewell College as the receivers coach — I’d just taken that job in February of that year and had just completed my first road recruiting trip when I got the call about the U. City job. My first words were, man, you see there’s a gold mine there. And the person on the call said, I think so too. U. City has always been a community — decent, but never over the top — but the community and alumni have always loved that place. You see these families who are diehards about their town. For me, I thought: if you can keep the kids from going to the private schools, I’m pretty sure you can win. I was optimistic, given the right support, I could turn the place into a destination — and that’s what we’re trying to do now.

They were 3-8 when you inherited the program — another rebuild from the ground up. How has this rebuild been different from, or similar to, the one at Vashon?

It’s a lot different, mainly in the true support from the community versus a district. A district has multiple high schools in it. A community like University City has one high school, so everyone from the superintendent down to the smallest elementary school is supportive of that one high school, because these are the same students who came up through your elementary and middle schools. But kids would go from elementary to middle school and then never come to the high school — you’d look up and see your Jayson Tatums, your Larry Hugheses, players like that, who went through University City elementary and middle school but never played at the high school.

So when I took the job, the first goal was to try to stop those future players from leaving the city — our own little town — for other schools. With what I’d learned at Vashon, I understood you have to have patience with the transition, because you’re trying to get a community to believe in itself the same way I got Vashon to believe in itself — that you can be a good program if you actually commit to it. We inherited a 3-8 program, went 5-6 my first year after an 0-5 start, which is tough, but everything worth building takes time. It took about five weeks to get our first win, and after that we went on a winning streak into districts before losing in the second round.

This past year was our first full off-season after that 5-6 season — we were in the weight room two weeks after our last game, doing off-season workouts for the first time in program history, and had a spring where we started really teaching. We also grew the roster: 35 kids in year one, 62 in year two — the first time the school had a JV team in probably ten years — plus we started a middle school program with 40 kids. Now going into year three we’re at 86 kids, with 42 incoming freshmen and 45 of our 62 returning. It’s a great turnaround compared to my third year at Vashon, when I still hadn’t hit the 45-50 mark needed to field varsity, which meant freshmen didn’t really get the chance to develop. What’s happening now shows the community believing in high school football, and that middle school pipeline should let us keep building the program the way we want to.

Looking back from your first year at Vashon to now, heading into your sixth or seventh year as a head coach, what are some of the biggest things you’ve learned?

Patience with yourself — and as you keep growing, patience with staff. As you go out and build a staff and keep bringing in players, you have to have patience for everyone’s growth to understand your vision for what you’re trying to accomplish. I think I’ve done a good job at both Vashon and U. City of going out and getting good people, and I believe good people, good men, matter more than finding great coaches. We’re in a window where young men need to be developing all around, not just in sports, and it takes good people with patience to help with that. That’s helped grow the program — I went from five or six coaches to sixteen this year, and from 32-33 kids to 86. That also reflects what’s come out of my two graduating classes here. Those kids and their families speak well of what we’re doing, and it’s gotten a strong response from alumni and families still in the district, because this community basically recycles — great-grandparents went to the school all the way down to the youngest grandchild. My first graduating class here, we sent two kids on to college; this past year we sent nine; and this year I have seventeen seniors, and I’m looking to get all seventeen of them on to the next level too.

Having played high school football in the area some years ago and now coaching in it — what do you think is better about high school football today, whether nationally or specific to St. Louis, and what’s worse?

I think it’s better, honestly, across the board. You have more coaches now who’ve actually played at a high level. When I was growing up, you had more good men who worked good jobs, probably played in high school, but didn’t go further — and once they got back into the community, I think they did an amazing job grooming us to become the coaches we are today, because they gave us the chance to get the college experience they couldn’t get themselves. It’s almost like a father complex — a son wanting his own son to do better and go further than he did. I think coaching is at such a high level right now because of the men who came before us and helped us get NFL and college-level experience. I still call my high school coach, because it’s something I’m still learning and trying to get better at.

From an IQ standpoint, it’s better, and it’s well balanced — a kid can go to almost any high school in the state of Missouri, especially right here in the St. Louis metro area, and get close to a high level, get held accountable at a high level, and perform to his greatest ability.

What’s worse is social media. I don’t think young coaches in our generation — and I call myself a young coach — fully understand the importance of being a role model to the young men who follow them on social media. I think we sometimes lack the awareness that your players are watching, and coaches get into heated exchanges online and forget there’s a young adult looking at them as a father figure, as “coach,” expecting them to keep doing the right thing so he can model himself after you. Social media is really putting a bug into that right now. It’s a universal issue coaches bring up — trying to get kids to not get too immersed in it, too caught up in who has what offers and what attention they’re getting. It’s a different beast today than even when I was playing in high school.

In terms of football specific to St. Louis or Missouri as a whole, what’s unique or underrated about it for people who haven’t spent time there?

The level of competition around here right now is high. I think this window of football has been building since around 2015 — I say that because I was recruiting this area for Missouri back then, and the talent level has been on a tremendously high level since. You go back to guys like Ezekiel Elliott coming out in 2015, and it goes from there — all these guys coming out of this area into the NFL and nationally ranked programs.

It comes back to the coaches who went from being college or NFL players, or arena league players, back into becoming high school head coaches, starting at the youth level, like I did. My own group alone — guys I actually had my hands on who are now in the NFL — includes players now with the Miami Dolphins, the Buffalo Bills, and Luther Burden, who’s with the Chicago Bears. When you have coaches like myself, Jeremy Maclin, Kirby Davis, Coach Sunkin over at East St. Louis, Tony Woodfold, and the list goes on and on, coaching this generation of kids, they’re learning and playing high-level football against high-level competition. We were once a quiet little nest, but I think everyone’s starting to take heed of how much talent keeps getting drafted out of St. Louis — guys like Jeremiah Love, who came up in the same organizations we did and went to a local St. Louis high school. I recently had Miles McVeigh, who played at East St. Louis — I offered him his first scholarship offer to Missouri when he was in eighth grade — working out at my facility before he headed out to continue his career.

Last question, coach. When you think about your players ten, twenty, thirty years removed from playing for you, what do you hope they say about what it was like playing in your program?

I hope they say Coach Will held us to a high standard of integrity, and that we’re married to winning life.

Take me back to where you grew up — how did you get introduced to football, and what did it mean to you as a kid?

I grew up in a small town in south-central North Dakota, on a farm. Getting introduced to sports in a small town is different than it is in a big town — it usually happens later. I wasn’t allowed to play football until seventh grade. I’d played some basketball and that was my first love. I convinced my parents to let me keep playing football, and for me sports was always the most fun thing — it wasn’t like work, and having grown up on a farm, we were working all the time, manual labor. Sports were my outlet, something I really enjoyed, and I had some natural ability. I was fortunate enough to have a pretty good high school career that led to a college football scholarship at the University of Jamestown in North Dakota.

My first coaching experience was actually while I was student teaching — I coached seventh-grade girls basketball, which was an interesting experience after being a college football player, but a fun one. I coached my first football my second year of teaching, junior high stuff, did that for a couple years, then coached freshman football, then JV and varsity. I took a break from football at one point to coach high school girls basketball and track. I got my master’s, and in 2015 we moved out to Reno, Nevada — Sparks, technically. I was at North Valleys High School for one year but didn’t coach football, just track. In 2016, I got hired at Spanish Springs as a P.E. and weights teacher, and was asked to be the wide receivers, DBs, and special teams coordinator under Coach Borja. When Coach Borja resigned, I got the head job in May of 2019, and I’ve been the head coach ever since. I was also the head track coach at Spanish Springs from 2016 through about 2023, before stepping away from that to focus more on football and give more time to my family.

Where does that passion for working with kids come from?

I was from a family of four, so growing up with siblings probably had something to do with it. I had some close friends in high school, and some relatives of mine were educators. Being in education wasn’t really my initial plan — I wanted to be a sports broadcaster, be on ESPN, do all that. I ended up pivoting in my second year of college and decided to focus on education because I really have a passion for working with people and communicating. Sports shaped who I am as a father and husband, and as a man in general — going through adversity, understanding the importance of hard work, understanding the importance of working together, being unselfish. Those are core values that transcend into real life easily. I think athletics in general, extracurricular activities, and even some of the subjects I teach, like weight training, have a lot of tangible benefits that carry over to everything else a person does. A lot of former students and athletes have been appreciative of what I’ve helped them accomplish, and that’s been special for me.

What is it about football specifically that makes it a vehicle for developing character?

Football teaches ultimate responsibility. We preach that all the time. As a grown man, a member of a community, a potential father or husband, you’re going to be looked up to, and you’re going to be counted on and relied upon to do a lot of things — a lot of times you won’t want to do them, but they’re going to have to get done, and people are counting on you to do it. There are a lot of instances in football where that’s the case. You’re going to have to work through a lot of discomfort, some pain, some really tough things, and you’re going to be humbled from time to time. Things aren’t going to go your way. That adversity piece is critical, because life is full of it. In football — in one game, one practice, one week, one season — there’s no telling what kind of adversity could come up. We talk about the injury piece, and how hard it is to work through that. We talk about working together — in football, you’ve got eleven guys on the field at once, and everybody has to do their job and do it to the best of their ability. That comes from preparing the right way. We try to create parallels between what we do in training and how it leads to performance, and how that translates to being successful in life. You can say you want to be a dad, but if you don’t have the value system in place or the work ethic, there are a lot of things that have to be developed to do that at a high level. It’s the same with the sport of football.

What was football like growing up in a small town in North Dakota?

Football’s a big deal in small towns, I think probably across the country, but definitely in North Dakota. I’m really grateful for that experience. That’s kind of how I got intrigued with football — watching older kids play, playing around on the playground with classmates before schools had a lot of rules about what you could do at recess. We were playing tackle football at recess. Then you’d watch high school games and want to experience it yourself. We were fortunate — as a group, we were part of the only state championship in school history at Strasburg High School. We helped build the program up to that point, and it was great for our community. It’s a cool atmosphere — a high school football field that didn’t have many bleachers, but people stood all the way around it watching. We got to do that quite often in our high school career, and it was special. I think in North Dakota, people really rallied behind the small towns — same thing for basketball, where the lowest division has the best turnout at the state tournament, a packed house. The whole town would shut down if we were on the road, just like you’d see in the movies. It gave the community something to get behind and be proud of, and we took that seriously. There are a lot of great memories from that. I tell the kids all the time how fortunate it is to experience atmospheres like that, where there’s pressure and expectations. We’ve been in some of those situations over the years, and last year especially, they got to do some things no kid at Spanish Springs had ever done. That stuff is going to stick with them for a long time.

What brought you and your wife out to Nevada?

We were both born and raised in North Dakota, high school sweethearts, and lived there for 32 years. We got to a point where we were looking for a change — we both had good jobs, but the tough weather year to year got to us, and we wanted a more moderate climate. We started looking at a few different parts of the country. We almost moved to Arizona, where a college teammate wanted me to coach with him, but I couldn’t get behind 5 or 6 a.m. practices in the fall when it’s 105 or 110 degrees out and Friday night kickoffs at 9 p.m. and it’s still 95. My wife’s father lived in Colfax, California, so there was some proximity there, and we looked into the Reno-Sparks area. We flew out in February of 2015, around Valentine’s Day — it was 65 degrees and sunny. We looked around at some nice communities, and the fact that our kids were active in sports and the whole conference was within an hour’s drive was appealing. Then we flew back to Minneapolis and it was 5 below. We looked at each other and asked how much longer we wanted to do that. I’d been watching job boards, and a job opened up late — I threw a line in the water, got an interview, and it went well. They waited about a month to offer it to me — by the time they called it was the middle of July, and they needed me there by August 2nd. My wife came home from work, and I asked if she was sure she wanted to do this. We were both pretty emotional, but we shook our heads yes, and within two weeks we packed everything up and moved to Nevada. It was quite the adventure, but we like the area — we enjoy the Spanish Springs community. It was challenging early on, but we’re definitely acclimated now and enjoy it.

What was that first experience coaching seventh-grade girls basketball like?

Every experience was a little different. I knew what I was getting into to some extent, having been a basketball player myself, but I had to scale a lot back — I obviously wasn’t going to have the same demeanor with seventh-grade girls that I would with my high school varsity football team. It was fun. There were a couple of instances you don’t plan for — we called a timeout once, and a player spilled water, so we moved the huddle, and when I turned around looking for one of my players, she was on the floor wiping up the water with her jersey because she felt bad. Just quirky stuff like that that makes you laugh and realize you’re working with young kids who are just trying to have fun. I learned quickly that most kids are there for a lot of different reasons — it’s rare to find kids with the same passion you have as a coach. Some are there to have fun, some because their friends are involved, some because their parents wanted them there. But if you can get them to understand there’s a lot to be learned from what they’re doing, they can get more out of it than they bargained for, if they treat it with some importance and purpose.

What was the program you inherited like when you took over as head coach, and what were the biggest adjustments going from assistant to head coach?

There were quite a few things. One of the big ones — coming from North Dakota to a school of about 2,300 students with a nice stadium, I thought games here would just be packed. I was underwhelmed as an assistant, observing that. At the time we were about a .500 team — not bad, just right in the middle. I kept thinking, a school with this many kids, this stadium should be packed. I’d ask people, and everyone had their own reasoning, but I thought, what if we created an experience people wanted to be part of, whether as a fan or a player, so that Friday nights in the fall, that’s where people are. It’s gotten a lot better — we have a real good student section now, and this past season we had packed stadiums, which was an awesome experience for the kids, playing in front of the community with the band out there and the whole atmosphere. That was something I wanted to improve, and I think we’ve accomplished that.

The other part was that our school district is very underfunded when it comes to athletics, and football is expensive to run and compete at a high level — quality equipment, an adequately sized coaching staff. There’s a huge undertaking in fundraising, and I’m really grateful for the community, businesses, and families who’ve stepped up to help us function at the level we’re at.

Coach Borja had started some things we’ve continued, like going to team camp every year — that’s been huge for team bonding and unity, and it’s also a big evaluation piece for us, jump-starting our summer and helping us see our strengths and weaknesses. We haven’t missed a team camp yet, and we bring our JV too — we might be one of the only teams in our area that does that.

We’ve also leaned heavily into the youth program. My own kids came through it, and other coaches’ kids too — you’re only as good as what’s coming through the pipeline, and we want kids in our community to want to play for Spanish Springs and stay in our community. We host a youth camp every year that our varsity kids run, and in the fall our varsity kids rotate through youth games and practices to help out — good for those younger kids, and good for our players too. Combined with things like youth night and armed services night, it’s about creating a fan experience, not just asking people to show up and support. Even talking to big-time college coaches, the culture has shifted — entertainment matters now. If you create a fan experience where people are entertained in addition to supporting the team, you’re probably going to get more people there. That’s part of why major college programs blend tradition with new things like light shows, music, and fan contests. I’m just grateful for the community, my family’s support, my coaching staff, and our admin at the school — the people who help make all of this go.

Looking back from year one to now, what are the biggest ways you’ve changed or evolved, schematically or culturally?

There’s a lot to that. We believe in developing young men first and foremost. If you do a lot of things right from a character standpoint and a preparation standpoint, the football usually takes care of itself. You have to have talent, obviously, but if you don’t have work ethic, discipline, unselfish players, people bought into what you’re doing — you just have talent, and talent gets beat more often than not by teams that have those other things too. We’ve always put a lot of emphasis in the weight room — you’ve got to be strong, flexible, fast. That applies to most sports, but especially this one.

One of the things that really improved was our retention from year to year — it wasn’t great, especially my first couple years. So we did things to make the program more affordable for families, worked to entice more kids to come out, and improved relationships with other sport coaches, since our school is a big proponent of kids playing multiple sports. That got our numbers up to the point where we’ve had to make cuts at the varsity and freshman level almost every season for the last three years. That’s allowed us to specialize kids by position — we went from a school where a lot of guys played both ways to now being one of the few schools in the area where very few guys play both sides of the ball. That depth is critical over a season, and it lets you get more complex schematically when a guy has a defined role and can really get good at that one job. It’s also created a lot of high-level competition in practice — you can put your top offensive players against your top defensive players, or your number twos against your ones, and still get quality work in.

We’ve adjusted practice structure as we’ve moved toward more position-specific players — we watch a lot of film, and in our preparation we have days dedicated to offense and days dedicated to defense, but during individual work time, even a player who only plays one way is still getting individual reps at his position on the other unit’s day. To get to that point, we had to raise more money to expand our staff so we could have coaches specializing in certain positions and scout team coaches.

Last year was a unique year — we got to the point we knew we were capable of reaching, it just took time. It takes time to build a program to that level, and now the challenge is sustaining it. Getting kids to want to lead has actually gotten more and more challenging every year — getting them to be the right kind of example for what success and high-level execution and preparation look like, and what they don’t look like. Accountability is something culturally that a lot of people struggle with, and the first person you have to hold accountable is yourself. From a leadership standpoint, that takes courage and thick skin. We do individual exit meetings every year — I meet with every kid on varsity to talk about the season, strengths, weaknesses, and what I can do better for them as a coach, and I do the same with my staff at every level, to figure out what we need to keep evolving. We’re not perfect by any stretch. I think you have to be willing to evolve as a coach — if you get too stuck in one way of doing things, you might have success for a while, but that doesn’t mean it’s sustainable.

A long time ago, when I took over, we evaluated the roster and decided our philosophy had to be built around what our players could do, not around a scheme I wanted to run regardless of personnel. I’m not allowed to recruit anybody, so if I like a certain scheme but don’t have the players to run it, we can’t run it. We’ve adopted schemes that are position-flexible and athlete-flexible based on what we have, and that’s been good for us. You can get caught up in wins and losses, let your ego get involved — but are you creating an experience that’s memorable for the kid? If you show them you care, that what they’re doing matters to you regardless of where they are on the depth chart, you’re going to have more buy-in long term.

You’re coming off winning the school’s first state title, and you were named the Raiders’ Tom Flores Coach of the Year. How do you look back on last season?

I could best describe it as a good golf shot — for people that can relate to that. I’ve told other coaches this and I mean it: I think coaching is one of the most important jobs there is. I know that’s going to sound biased coming from a coach, but you can impact people in a lot of different ways, and a lot of coaches don’t get opportunities for high levels of success, and go under-appreciated. This past year there’s just so much to be grateful for. I was so happy for those kids, for what they accomplished by working together, believing, buying in, putting in the effort. As coaches we talk about how doing all those things gives you a chance at success, but there are no guarantees it all works out that way. I think every once in a while you need some things to fall into place to help establish that belief and light a fire under yourself, and I hope every coach gets a season like that at some point — where you see a team come together and play at a high level, see a community rally behind you, see young kids excited, see kids having genuine fun, wanting to be at practice, wanting to watch film, not wanting the season to end.

There have only been two times in my life where a season ended the way you dream about — in high school, when we won a state championship my senior year, and this past year, when we won a state championship here in 5A Nevada. It’s rare, and I didn’t take it for granted. Getting to do it with my youngest son as a senior was special too, along with his friends — families we’ve known for a long time. Then some of the other things that happened, like the Coach of the Year recognition from the Raiders, was a complete shock — I was just grateful. I’ve gotten to work with that organization a few different times, and they surprised me with Super Bowl tickets on top of it, which is something I never would have been able to afford on my own. My wife and I got to go experience that and make connections with what they’re doing for communities in Vegas, and now Reno too.

It’s hard to sit and process it all, honestly. You have friends and relatives telling you it was a magical, once-in-a-lifetime kind of season, and when you’re so busy and involved in it, you don’t always take the time to reflect the way you probably should. There were a few moments during the season where I exhaled and just took it in, ear to ear grin, overjoyed for those kids and what we accomplished as a staff, for the community — it was a generational season. I don’t know that the expectations could be any higher this year based on what we did last year. A team that went 13-0, scored almost 45 points a game, never trailed in 13 games, had an average margin of victory over 30 points — and did it with a team of local kids who took their lumps, some playing varsity as sophomores, most as juniors, overcoming a lot along the way. It was just special, and I’m beyond grateful for the experience.

How would you describe high school football in Nevada, and what do you think people outside the state under-appreciate about it?

That’s a loaded question, but a great one. Coming from the Midwest, there are a lot of outlets for kids to go play college football. Here in Nevada, there are only two in-state programs, and they’re both FBS Division I. That was glaring to me right away. I think the level of football in both northern and southern Nevada is pretty high, especially at the top of each division, but I think there are a lot of players in this region who are heavily under-recruited — guys who might not be Division I but are definitely college football players who could play D2 or NAIA. There just aren’t schools around, so if a kid doesn’t get a D1 offer, a lot of times they don’t go on to play. I’ve got ties in the Midwest and I’ve told them all — you’ve got to recruit this region, there are good players here.

Here in the north, I think you’ve got a lot of football coaches who care, who put in a lot of time and effort to build good programs and create a good experience for their athletes. There are a lot of competitive, fun-to-watch games, and that’s true not just at 5A but at 4A, 3A, 2A too. There’s good community support, though I think most people would say they wish more people came to games — it’s not quite what you’d see in small towns in other parts of the country in terms of consistent fan turnout.

The state’s in a bit of flux right now — there are about 30 schools down in Vegas that aren’t part of our athletics association for the next two years because of some things that have gone on, and there’s some legislation that a lot of public schools aren’t in favor of, along with some competitive balance issues. I don’t think Nevada’s unique in dealing with that — most states deal with some version of it. Geographically, we’re a little different — about 90 percent of schools are in two regions, which makes things challenging too. The funding for athletics, especially football, isn’t adequate — I can’t say that any more plainly. It puts a lot of pressure on individual programs to fundraise to make things adequate, and that’s something I think needs to be addressed.

Competitively, at the state level, Bishop Gorman is in a class by themselves in terms of resources and the athletes they bring in — anybody who says otherwise isn’t being truthful. But below that tier, there are a handful of teams in the south and north every year playing really competitive games, and I’d say the same is true at every classification down through 3A, 2A, 1A, which tend to be more of that small-town atmosphere I’m used to from the Midwest — it becomes more of an event on Friday nights because there’s not as much else going on.

Here’s a fun fact — the fall weather in northern Nevada might be some of the best in the country for football. Early in the season you might get some heat, but nothing too crazy, and with the Sierra Nevada and Lake Tahoe nearby, it cools down even on hot days, the wind typically dies down, and you get almost perfect game temperatures. I played in a lot of games in high school and college in rough conditions, and fans still showed up — here, the conditions are almost always nice, so people don’t really have an excuse not to come out on Friday nights. I remind people of that all the time. We don’t get much snow, and when we do it usually doesn’t last long, and by the time it comes the season’s usually wrapping up. Once in a while you’ll get some wind, a little rain, maybe a game in the rain — the only real nemesis is wildfire smoke drifting in from California, but weather-wise, it’s nearly perfect.

When kids are ten, twenty, thirty years removed from playing for you, what do you hope they take away from it?

I truly believe wins and losses, and success, are a byproduct of doing all the other things at a high level that make you a successful human being — whatever you end up doing in life. I hope they see those lessons come to fruition, that it benefits their life, and that they have experiences to draw from, whether they’re having success or dealing with adversity, pain, grief, or suffering, and know they’ve been through hard things and have people they can lean on. I hope they want to give back — to the people who helped them along the way, to the sport, to the youth — because I think that’s important for the game to keep being what it is.

A lot of times kids won’t remember scores or stats, but they’ll remember that you cared about them. They’ll remember you being there when something bad happened, holding them accountable for something they didn’t agree with in the moment but that helped them later in life, and being appreciative of that. Everybody’s experience is a little different, but by and large I hope the majority of people involved enjoyed their time in the program and have good things to say about it. I think that’s the case — you’d have to ask my current and former players, but we’ve got about six former players who are coaching with us right now. So I guess I didn’t scare them too far down the road.

How did you first get introduced to football in New Jersey?

We didn’t have a lot of organized tackle football in youth programs when I was younger, so high school was the first real opportunity to play. I started at Bergen Catholic, which is a big Catholic school program up here, and had a great experience there — great players, great coaches. But after two years I transferred to Northern Valley/Demarest, the public school. Part of it was my brother was there and I wanted to be back with him and some of my buddies. And honestly, the commute was a pain. The school was six miles away, practice would end, and you had to find a ride home or hitchhike because my parents were working. But probably the biggest thing was that at a school like Bergen, it was hard to play multiple sports. I love baseball, I love basketball, and coming back to the public school I could play all three. That was probably the real reason.

Did you always know you wanted to coach?

No. I started college as a political science major — my dad was a lawyer and I figured that was a reasonable path. But after my high school experience, I kept thinking about the coaches who had made a difference in my life. They were guys who genuinely loved what they did. So after my sophomore year I switched into education, became a history major, got my teaching degree, and went right into teaching and coaching after I graduated.

In college I played at Providence, but the program got cut after my sophomore year. The NCAA had a rule that Division I basketball schools couldn’t keep Division III football programs, so they ended up dropping a few men’s sports. I finished out at Providence and transitioned to rugby, which I ended up playing well into my late twenties. So it all worked out.

Walk me through the early part of your coaching career. You’ve been at Old Tappan for a long time, but it wasn’t a straight line there.

My first year coaching, I was a freshman football coach at Old Tappan, and the head coach at the time was a guy named Gerry Yonchiuk, who went on to have a tremendous career coaching in Pennsylvania. I happened to catch on with him for one year, and it was a fantastic experience. He gave me a lot of freedom to coach — real freedom, freshman football — but also a tremendous amount of guidance about what to do and how to do it. He set me on the right path.

After that year I got a teaching job at Pascack Hills, the neighboring school, coached there for two years with some great guys, and then a full-time teaching position opened up back at Old Tappan. I’ve been there the last 31 years.

You took over as head coach in 2000. What was that like?

I was 30 years old, one baby at home and another on the way, and you think you have everything figured out. You don’t. I had been a varsity assistant and defensive coordinator for five years, working under guys who had been around a long time, and when they transitioned out and the head job opened up, it felt like a natural step. But you learn quickly that you don’t know as much as you think you do.

Looking back at your 30-year-old self, what were the biggest misconceptions you had about leading a program?

Two things stand out. The first is identity. When you’re new, you feel like you have to establish yourself as something different, something uniquely yours. You feel this pressure to set yourself apart. But the most important thing — and it took me years — is just to be yourself. At 30 you’re still figuring that out.

The second thing is that early on, I thought X’s and O’s were the most important part of coaching. I spent enormous mental energy on schemes and game-planning. Over time I realized the biggest part of the job is communication, leadership, and building relationships. The X’s and O’s matter, but they’re not what wins programs.

What are the biggest changes you’ve made over the course of your career?

For the first four or five years, I ran practices the way the coaches I had played for ran them. Everything had to be hard. Every day had to feel like you were overcoming some great obstacle. The game is naturally demanding, so I figured you had to make every moment a grind. Around 2007 or 2008, I started to realize something: you have to make this a place kids actually want to be. You have to work hard at making it something they enjoy, not just something they endure. The grind is built into the game. You don’t need to manufacture it. What you do need to manufacture is an environment that kids look forward to being part of. That was probably the biggest shift in how I coach.

What have the biggest challenges of your tenure been?

At this point in my career, the challenges are probably what everybody faces — keeping kids healthy, keeping them motivated. In this part of North Jersey, we have four elite private schools nearby that try to pull your kids. Keeping that community feel to your program, keeping kids where they belong, that’s always been something we’ve had to work at. In the last twelve or thirteen years, as we’ve been more successful, it hasn’t been as much of an issue — kids want to be part of what we’ve built.

The other challenge is personal. I also coach girls basketball, so managing the time commitment of two programs and still being present for your family — that’s a real thing. I live a mile from the school. My kids grew up going to school there. It’s been a big part of our family life for a long time, which helps, but you still have to manage it.

How do you manage coaching two sports at a high level simultaneously?

Great assistant coaches. That’s the honest answer. In football, we’ve had largely the same staff for the last fifteen years, almost no turnover. In basketball, same thing. Without people like that, it’s impossible.

The other thing is that basketball is just a simpler operation. You’ve got three assistants, fifteen or twenty kids, a couple of balls, and a court. Football has equipment, logistics, game planning, a full staff — it’s a completely different machine to run. Basketball in season is a lot more manageable than people might think.

I had become the girls basketball coach before I ever became the head football coach. I had a good group of kids and I wasn’t going to walk away from them. Then one year turned into the next, my daughter played, and it never felt like the right time to step away. It’s become just as much a part of who I am as football.

You’ve had the same core staff for fifteen years. What does it take to keep a group together that long?

Camaraderie. People have to genuinely enjoy being around each other. That’s non-negotiable — if they don’t, they won’t stay. We also have to trust each other. I’m not going to micromanage guys who know what they’re doing. Everybody has to feel like they can say what’s on their mind, that no one’s ego is bigger than the program. We’ve cut our meeting time way down because after this many years together, we’re all kind of on the same page. We know what needs to get done, we communicate when something’s off, and we fix it fast. Nobody here is trying to protect turf. Everyone’s just trying to win and help the kids.

What turned the program around? You’ve mentioned that success really came around 2010.

I always tell younger coaches: you’re never as far away as you think you are. During my first five years, we struggled. Parents were grumbling, administrators were restless, and I was going through all the stuff that coaches go through when it’s not going well. But fortunately, I had people who believed in me and backed me up.

And during all those losing years, we kept thinking we were miles away from competing with the top programs. We’d have a good year, get to the playoffs, and get beaten badly by the teams that were always ahead of us. Every year felt like we were so far from where they were. Then around 2009, the talent improved, we got over the hump in a couple of big games, and I realized — we weren’t that far off. It was details. Preparation. Knowing what it takes to win a game like that. Once you learn that, it carries over. You’re never as far away as you think.

Twenty-six years into the head job — what keeps you motivated?

Building a new team every year. That never gets old. Every year is its own puzzle. You’ve got new kids, new personalities, new challenges. Someone gets hurt, and instead of feeling sorry about it, you treat it like an opportunity — now you have to coach, now you have to figure something out. I genuinely enjoy that.

And my staff is like a family. I’ve been coaching with my brother for twenty years. Being around those guys every day is a big part of why I’m still here. But most importantly, it’s the kids. The game planning and scheming is a grind, but I enjoy that too. There’s something about putting a game plan together, about trying to solve a problem nobody else can see yet, that I’ve never gotten tired of.

You said something I want to dig into — that public school football is the last place in America where you can truly build your own team. I’m curious to hear more about that.

It’s the only sport left, at any level, where a coach is responsible for developing players from the ground up. In basketball, the good kids are in the off-season playing AAU ball all over the country, developing skills with different coaches. In football, at the public school level, you’re it. From sixth grade through twelfth grade, these kids are in your system. You’re building the weight room habits, the skill development, the academic accountability, the leadership — all of it.

That means the accountability is real in a way it just isn’t elsewhere. Your kids know each other. They’ve been playing together for years. They feel accountable to their teammates in a way that’s hard to manufacture in any other setting. That accountability is what’s driven our success more than anything else. And it’s also why football is the last place where pushing kids hard is genuinely accepted — by the players, by the parents. They know their kids need it. They want it. The kids who stick around are the ones who want the grind. Those are the kids who make you proud.

What’s unique about New Jersey football that someone from the outside might not appreciate?

New Jersey just expanded its playoffs in 2022 to include a true state championship game, so now you see North Jersey and South Jersey programs play each other in a way they never did before. What you notice is how good the coaching is across the board. In public schools here, nobody is hired just to coach football. Every coach is a teacher. They’re in their community all day long — teaching, building relationships, then going to practice. These are guys whose whole lives are woven into the school they coach at. That commitment shows. And then when you get to the top level, there’s a physical toughness that runs through New Jersey football, top to bottom. It’s just baked in.

Talk me through the youth feeder program. What was the original thinking, and what has it meant for Old Tappan football?

We’ve got four or five small towns that feed into the school, and for many years they ran two separate youth programs that competed against each other. The kids would play against each other until ninth grade and then merge on our freshman team. The challenge was always trying to stay connected to those programs without being overbearing. I never believed those guys had to run my schemes or use my terminology. They’re coaches too — dads who want to do things their own way, and they should. My job was to be a resource, a sounding board, and help them with the basics: stance, blocking, tackling. Kids can learn the rest pretty quickly.

Two years ago the two programs merged, which was an adjustment. Part of the value of having two separate programs was the built-in competition — two quarterbacks instead of one, two running backs, more depth. Now we’re figuring out what that means. The harder part is that over twenty-five or thirty years, the leadership of those youth programs has turned over many times. I’ve been the constant. You meet a lot of great dads and youth coaches along the way, and each one has to figure out their own relationship with the high school program. Keeping that communication open and easy has been one of the most important things I’ve done.

Last question. When kids who played for you back in the early 2000s come back — what do you hope they take away from having played in your program?

The most meaningful thing that’s happened to me in the last three or four years is that I’ve started coaching the sons of guys I coached twenty years ago. And when those former players come to me and say, you’ve got to stick around until my kid comes through, you’ve got to be there for him — that means everything to me. I don’t think I’ve told many people that, but that’s been the most flattering thing of my career. It tells me I had some kind of impact. Not just on the field, but on who those guys became.

A lot of them have come back over the years to help coach, to contribute however they can. And what I’ve learned is that the things they remember aren’t always the things I remember. They come back and quote me on something I said twenty years ago, and I say, did I really say that? And they say, yeah, you said it. You don’t realize which moments are going to stick. That’s why you have to be on your game every single day — not perfectly, but consistently. The things you say to these kids will matter, and you won’t always know which ones. So you just have to make sure they’re the right things.

How did you originally get into football?

Football has been my number one thing since I was a little kid. My dad really liked sports, so it was always on TV, and I kind of fell in love with it through that. I played in high school, played in college, and honestly, all I ever wanted to do was be a football coach. That’s been true since I can remember. It’s never been anything else — and that’s been good for me.

You grew up in Moorhead. What was the high school football scene like there?

It was great. We played against some of the Fargo teams, and our conference was huge — it stretched all the way across to Duluth and through northern Minnesota. Some of our road trips were over five hours. Lots of traveling, but a lot of fun and really good competition.

And then four years playing at MSUM. What was that experience like?

It was awesome. That conference — I’d say right now it’s one of the best in Division II, if not the best. It was a great experience. I got to play quarterback, receiver, and safety over those four years, so I saw a lot of different spots on the field.

You always knew you wanted to coach. You started at the college level — what made you decide to move to high school instead of trying to climb the college ranks?

For me, it was my family. We already had our daughter when I was still coaching college, and the recruiting and the offseason grind can be a lot. I just felt like high school would give me more time with my wife and kids. That was the right call for us.

Most coaches I talk to stay close to where they grew up or played. You ended up in New Mexico. How did that happen?

I was close on a couple of high school teaching jobs and didn’t get them. Got a little frustrated, so we just put out some nationwide feelers — and New Mexico hooked up. We went down there thinking it’d be one year, just to get something going, and ended up staying for ten. Almost didn’t come back.

What was coaching football in New Mexico like?

I thought it was fantastic. New Mexico is right next to Texas, and they hold football in really high regard down there — athletics in general. I loved being in a place where football was up on a pedestal. As for the game itself, the speed was a little faster than what I’d seen, but the size wasn’t quite what you get up here. It’s high school football either way, but there were differences.

Your first head coaching job was at Los Lunas. What did you learn about being a head coach that you couldn’t have learned as an assistant?

There’s a ton more to it. Dealing with parents, setting up all your offseason stuff, all the administrative things that don’t directly involve coaching. I like going in and calling plays — I don’t care if it’s offense or defense, I just like being involved in the game plan. As a head coach, you wear a lot more hats. It’s challenging, but it’s fun too.

After ten years in New Mexico, what brought you back north?

My wife and I had kind of settled in — we’d both moved up the ranks and landed good jobs down there. We were content. Then this job opened up at Sheyenne, which was a brand-new school in West Fargo, and I had a lot of ties to the area. People were reaching out saying I should apply. The job was for both volleyball and football. And then I found out that the first principal at Sheyenne was my high school math teacher. I felt like I had a pretty good in with him. It just kind of worked out.

What are the biggest differences between high school football in New Mexico and North Dakota?

Speed, probably. The game down there is a little faster. But there’s more size up here — kind of like NDSU versus a lot of FCS programs. That said, North Dakota football has evolved a lot in the last ten or twelve years. The game is much faster than it used to be, and there are a lot more Division I athletes coming out of this state than there were before. It’s grown a lot.

Did you have to adjust your approach when you got here?

Not dramatically. We’ve evolved schematically — we run more spread and spread-option now than the under-center option we used to run. But kids are kids. If it’s relatable, it’s relatable. The fundamentals of how you work with people, how you build relationships — that all translates.

What do you credit Sheyenne’s success to?

We’ve had really good kids. That’s the number one thing. It’s hard to build a winning program without good kids, and we’ve been fortunate. We’ve also had really good coaches — the same staff, essentially, for over ten years. And in North Dakota, there aren’t a ton of teams in our class, but the teams that exist are very good. It’s extremely competitive, and I think that keeps everyone sharp.

You’ve had the same staff for over a decade. What do you look for when you’re building a coaching staff?

Obviously they need to know football. But I need guys who are loyal and not afraid to work. During the season, we work seven days a week. I’ve had the same staff for ten-plus years and I’ve never heard anyone complain about it. That’s not easy to find. It’s a big time commitment for guys who aren’t getting paid much, and I’m grateful for them.

You teach PE at Sheyenne. How does being in the building every day affect your relationship with the kids?

It helps a great deal. You’re there. You’re in the hallways. You can help kids behave, help them get to class. Honestly, some kids only go to school because they have a sport to play — right or wrong, that’s just true. If being visible helps one of those tweener kids stay on track, I love that role. Football can be a reason for a kid to show up, and showing up is the first step toward something better after high school.

What’s the makeup of the Sheyenne community and the kids in your program?

It’s a good mix. We’ve got some affluent families, nice houses — and then a whole lot of apartment buildings too. All kinds of kids from all kinds of backgrounds. The beautiful thing is that they can all come together on the football field and be a family. That’s one of the things I love most about the game.

What’s something about North Dakota football that outsiders would underappreciate?

The ability to run power. Even teams that spread it out have some power in them up here, and I think that’s unique to this state compared to New Mexico. The size of kids up here allows you to push a pile in a way that’s harder to find elsewhere. There are some farm-fed kids in this state, and I love that mix.

What frustrates you most about coaching high school football today?

Single-sport specialization. I want kids playing all sports, and I think some coaches do a real disservice by hogging kids and keeping them in one sport year-round. These are high school kids. They should be playing as many sports as they can. The odds they’re going to the pros are very slim, and the kids who only played one sport their whole career often look back and wish they’d done more. That frustrates me — and it’s everywhere, not just here.

What keeps football interesting to you after all these years?

It’s a chess match. There are a lot of moving parts, and you can expose a team one way and win — and then they adjust, and you have to adjust back. Up here especially, we know each other. We know the same coaches year after year. So every season, the question is: what are we going to do differently? How are we going to tweak this to beat these guys this year? That back-and-forth is what I love. It never gets old.

How do you make sure you and your staff are still growing and not getting stagnant?

We try to get over to a college practice or two in the offseason, just to see what they’re doing — maybe revamp something, or just give the kids some excitement about what’s possible. Evolving your practice plans helps too. After enough years, things can get monotonous if you’re not careful. You have to keep pushing yourself.

Last one: when your players are twenty or thirty years removed from playing for you, what do you hope they take away?

We just want good young men. Responsible, loyal people who can have families, build lives — and carry something from their experience on this football team into who they become as adults. I hope we have a positive effect on kids in that respect. That’s really all any of us coaches are after.

What was football like for you growing up in Winters?

Honestly, for me it wasn’t necessarily just football. I was raised by a single mom, so sports in general became a way of life. It was more than just playing on a team — those teams were kind of families. The coaches were father figures and role models. It didn’t matter what sport it was. I loved football, I loved baseball, I loved basketball. I also played golf, tennis, bowling — pretty much anything I could. Sports were just how I lived.

The football brotherhood was more of a high school thing. The love of coaching, though, that didn’t come until much later.

You actually played college baseball. So how did you end up coaching football?

I was a baseball guy through and through. My dream was to be a high school baseball coach. When I got hired to teach here in Winters, they appointed me as the JV head coach because I was on campus. I was like — whoa, what? I played quarterback in high school and loved the game, but I really didn’t have much concept of other positions, play calling, any of that.

I remember the very first game — a long road trip — and one of my assistant coaches said, “Hey Coach, you got your play sheet ready?” I had no idea what he was talking about. So I borrowed a piece of paper from a cheerleader and wrote down every play I could think of. And as soon as that game started, I was in love with it. There’s nothing like it.

I coached JV baseball for almost ten years alongside it, but it’s just different when you’re a competitive person. Football — the play calling, the preparation, the chess match of it — there was nothing like it. I got that feeling around age 24 and it’s been addicting ever since.

Growing up, you played for legendary Winters coach Jack Delbar. What did that experience mean to you?

I got the later years of Coach Delbar. He was already this huge figure — the winningest coach in the Northern Section at the time, section championships, all of it. But you don’t realize the life lessons he was teaching until after you’re done with the program. You don’t walk around every day thinking about how lucky you are — you just go through it.

It wasn’t until after the fact that I realized how much I learned from him about structure, about how to carry yourself. He was old school as old school gets. If he were coaching today, he probably wouldn’t survive some of what he put us through. But what people on the outside saw were wins, losses, and records. What they didn’t see was how much he truly cared about the players. That was the biggest thing — he would take the shirt off his back for those kids.

You became JV head coach with almost no experience. How did you eventually get the varsity job and how were those early years?

After three years on the JV, I applied for the varsity job at 27. I was passionate, I was single, I had nothing but time — and I was good at relationships. But the X’s and O’s? That definitely trailed.

The first couple years were a struggle. I always felt like I had a good plan, but I didn’t have the adjustments when we saw something different. I look back at some of those early kids who are still around town and I think, man, I failed those guys — I wasn’t good enough at my job yet. But you learn from your mistakes, and I had administrators who believed in me and let me work through it.

What helped was the two coaches who came with me that first year as JV head coach are still with me today. That continuity means everything.

What did you do to build up your football IQ over time?

Before X’s and O’s, the first thing has to be relationships. I still use the same quote at every preseason coaches meeting: they don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. I think younger coaches get so caught up in scheme and strategy that they don’t worry enough about team building and creating a family atmosphere. That has to come first.

As for the football side — it just takes time. When I first took over, we ran a pro formation, 21 personnel, power offense. We could beat teams we were better than, but we weren’t big enough up front to beat the bigger schools. So around 2008, we switched to a spread — back when almost nobody was doing it. We went up to Oregon and spent time with Chip Kelly’s staff just trying to learn the system.

The biggest thing I struggled with was adjusting on the fly in games. That took years. But we haven’t changed our offensive scheme in 15 or 16 years now, and I think that continuity is a huge reason we’ve had success. Our junior levels run the same things we run at varsity, so by the time kids get to high school, they already know the system. You spend a lot less time teaching and more time refining.

How do you adapt year to year when your roster changes but your scheme doesn’t?

A lot of it hinges on the quarterback. Last year we had the best player on the field in Lane Brown — he rushed for 2,000 yards and passed for 2,000, only the fourth time it’s ever happened in California history. Kids like that are once in a generation.

But we’ve had quarterbacks who couldn’t run at all, and that forced us to get really good at the short passing game — screens, middle screens, anything in that vein. This year we have a QB who’s a better runner than thrower, and our JV sophomore is one of the best passers we’ve ever had but isn’t as mobile. So this year we’ll be very run-heavy, and next year it’ll morph again.

That’s the fun part of high school football. You’re not out there recruiting Lamar Jacksons. You work with what you have. The scheme stays constant; what changes is how you use it.

Winters is 450 kids. What does football mean to a town like this?

I’m the Athletic Director, so I’m not going to sit here and say football is king — our soccer teams are amazing, baseball is amazing. But this whole community takes a huge sense of pride in athletics. The way people from San Francisco look at the Giants? That’s how people in Winters look at their high school sports programs.

And it’s still one of those old high school football towns where Friday nights basically shut the place down. We’ve got a brewery — Hooby’s — that puts the game up on the NFHS network and people gather to watch. Our school has 450 kids, and on a Friday night we’ll have close to 80 playing football, 40 cheerleaders, another 40 in the band. Half the school is out there.

What are the dynamics of kids and families in your program?

Our roster is 67% Hispanic. We’re a hard-working, gritty community, and that’s what our football players look like. Last year we didn’t have a single kid on our roster above 220 pounds. We play small and physical, and we play with a chip on our shoulder every single Friday night.

The biggest compliment I heard from coaches this past offseason was: I’ve never seen kids play so hard. It means more to your kids than anyone else. That’s what this program is built on. Our motto last year was “empty the tank” — every practice, every game, leave nothing out there.

What was it like to win the state championship in December?

The state championship in California is still relatively new. In 2013 and 2014 we won our section championships but didn’t get to go. The model changed in 2015. Then in 2024, we probably had the best team we ever had — went 12-0 and lost in the NorCals to Arcata, who ended up winning the state title. The year before that, we lost our section championship to a team that went on to win state. So we had been that close.

All of that became a rallying cry for this year. Winning state went from a pipe dream to an actual goal.

The week before the state game we played Minarets — a small school in Central California — and we also had our big tractor parade that same night, which is probably the biggest event of the year in Winters. Half the town skipped the parade and drove down to watch the game. It was a foggy night where you couldn’t even see the other sideline. When we won, the community came out on the field, and it was surreal. One of the coolest experiences of my life.

Then the send-off the following week. The whole campus turned out with the drum line and the band. Before we got out of town, we drove by every school in the Winters Joint Unified district — and every kid was out on the streets with signs, cheering us on. I saw my own kids out there with all their buddies. Even the girls showed up to send off the boys. Every kid in town wanted to be on that bus.

That’s what I told the team before the game: you guys are living the dream. Everyone in this town wants to be you right now.

After the game itself — we played the best football we’d played in years, won 28-7 — it was actually a little strange. CIF runs a tight operation. We took a couple quick photos and then it was okay, get off the field. I did some interviews, the kids got on the bus, and I never even got a chance to really talk with them. They went home; I stayed because I’d promised my wife and kids a Disneyland trip, win or lose.

The full-circle moment came later when the community organized a parade back in Winters. We came down Main Street in the rain and the streets were packed. We finally got to thank everyone and celebrate with them the right way. That’s when it really sank in.

Now that you’ve won it, does it change the culture of the program?

Taking the lid off matters. Once you’ve done it, you realize it’s not a pipe dream — it’s possible. Going forward, a state championship is the goal, not just a league title.

And the ripple effect surprised me. I talked to our youth program recently and their numbers are at an all-time high. I asked why. They said: because you guys just won a state championship. Everyone wants to be part of that. Kids who are eight and nine years old are dreaming about playing for Winters now. That’s something.

Last question: when your players are 20 or 30 years removed from your program, what do you hope they take with them?

When I first started coaching, I read Season of Life. There’s a moment in that book where a coach is asked how the year went, and he says come talk to me in ten or fifteen years. He means it: if you’re judging by wins and losses, you’re looking at the wrong thing. He’s more concerned with what kind of fathers and husbands and community members his players become.

That’s the approach. Football comes and goes. Even looking back at my own playing career — I don’t remember the touchdowns. I remember the relationships, the bonds, the memories.

Our program motto is H.A.R.D. — hardworking, accountable, respectful, dependable. Those aren’t football values, they’re life values.

And there’s something about the word coach that’s just powerful. Walking around town and having someone who’s 30 years old with a ten-year-old kid say “Hey, Coach Ward” — introduce you to their family — that’s about as good as it gets. The only label better is dad. But coach is second, and it’s pretty special.

A lot of kids leave Winters for college and come back. They get married, have families, settle here. That’s the full circle. I hope they leave the program a little better — not just as football players, but as people.

Take me back to the beginning — growing up in Wahoo, your dad’s football background, how you first got into the game.

So I grew up born and raised in Wahoo, Nebraska, which is about 30 miles just north of Waverly. You know, grew up small town, play every sport — all those things. Football in Wahoo is a big deal now, but when I was growing up there, it was very much a basketball town. If you do much research on Wahoo, Nebraska, you’ll find they’ve got one of the longest winning streaks in the nation — the third longest, something like 118 wins. So growing up as a kid, we were always playing basketball.

But my dad had played football in college and was fortunate enough to play in the NFL for a little bit, so football was always something really important in our household. I fell in love with it early. I was the student manager for the football team starting in about fifth grade, did that through middle school, and then when I was old enough to join the team myself, I started in on that.

I was fortunate to play for a gentleman by the name of Chad Fox. He’s still the current head football coach at Wahoo — they’re coming off back-to-back state championships. I got to learn from Coach Fox as a player, and he’s been a great mentor for me in the beginning stages of my career as well. I played linebacker and running back for him, and then upon graduation went to Midland University in Fremont, Nebraska, and played linebacker for four years there. Loved my time there, wouldn’t have changed it for anything. Made great friends, got to play right away, which is a big deal.

At Midland, we ran a 3-4 defense, and that’s what I still run today. A lot of what we ran in college is what we still run at Waverly. We’ve morphed a little bit, but that was the beginning of me developing my own personal identity as a coach — figuring out what I wanted to do when I finally got the opportunity.

And after Midland?

Upon graduation, I had a couple of short stints as an assistant before I got my first teaching position in Crete, Nebraska. There I was fortunate to work under a gentleman named Chuck McGinnis, who is one of the winningest coaches in Nebraska history during his time. He was head coach at Crete for 14 years, and I think they were in the state finals seven of those 14 years. A lot of what we run today philosophically — offensively and defensively — came from my time there.

Then I got the job of taking over for Coach McGinnis when he retired. I was probably too young to be a head coach — I was 25 at the time. But it was too good of an opportunity to pass up, whether I was ready or not. I certainly wouldn’t change it. I had such great kids play for me there.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have any winning seasons. I think the best we did was 3-6. But those 3-6 seasons — you learn a lot about yourself. You learn a lot about your philosophy. I always tell people: if I had gone 10-2 my first year as a head coach, I wouldn’t be near as good a coach as I am now. A lot of what we run here at Waverly was adapted from those years at Crete. And we had great kids that I coached at Crete.

Even though we weren’t successful, those were probably my biggest growth years as a coach. And when my opportunity came at Waverly, I think those trials and tribulations were a big reason we were set up for success.

Did you always know you wanted to coach?

I did. When I was in middle school, I knew my ceiling as a football player was fairly low. I wasn’t going to be able to play at the highest level, so I remember thinking, I’d love to coach at a really high level. Growing up, I always thought I wanted to be a college coach — coach Division I football, see where that took me.

But funny how life happens. You start seeing all the moving that comes with that, the constant job searching, uprooting your family. My senior year at Midland, they started a graduate assistant program and asked me to be part of it. That was a fork in the road — get into college coaching right then, or go into high school. I remember being a little burnt out and wanting to get back to where I fell in love with the game, which was growing up. So I made the decision to go the high school route.

I’ve always known I wanted to coach. What level changed as I got older and figured out what mattered to me.

Walk me through what those early years at Crete actually felt like — taking over your first program, the losing seasons, what you were learning in real time.

More than anything, those kids at Crete were so tough. It’s a very blue collar community. And I found out that toughness is one of the most important things you can have, because we were playing teams — the Gretnas, the Elkhorns — bigger schools that weren’t facing the same issues we were. We’d field a team of 50 kids and they’d have 100 on their sideline.

Getting kids to play hard for you and believe in what you’re trying to accomplish — that’s such an important thing. We found ourselves in games we maybe shouldn’t have been in, and that was a tribute to those kids’ blue collar mentality. That’s where you start developing your philosophy as a coach. What’s important to you? What kind of identity do you want to have?

We weren’t very successful running the ball — we were undersized up front. We had to rely on creativity, had to rely on throwing it. And you find out real quick that can only get you so far. That helped develop my mindset around how important it is to run the ball successfully and control the clock.

In my time at Crete, those kids gave me everything they had. I never once looked back at the end of a season and thought we vastly underachieved. Even in the 1-8 season, I think we lost four games by a combined 12 points. Never once did those kids give up or stop competing. And here we are, over ten years later, and I still remember that about them. I remember how hard they practiced. Those things shape you, mold your philosophy, and give you perspective and appreciation.

There’s something to be said for learning the run game through necessity — Matt Rhule talked about discovering how the wind changed a lot of how he coaches games when he got to Nebraska.

Exactly. You might get a windy night or a rainy day, and if you can’t control the clock and move the chains the conventional way, it’ll come back to get you. It puts a lot more strain on your defense too. More bad things can happen when the ball’s in the air than when it’s on the ground. That’s just a fact.

How did the Waverly job come onto your radar?

Ironically, when I first got out of college I had a couple of short stints finishing up some classes, and one of them was at Waverly. I was actually an assistant coach here in 2012 — got to know the community, the school, and most importantly, some of the people who are still on staff today.

When I saw the job come open, I wasn’t actively looking. During my four years as head coach at Crete, I never applied anywhere, never interviewed anywhere. I was committed to making that the best I could. But one of the assistants I’d coached with here at Waverly called me when the job opened and said, hey, you’ve really got to apply for this.

Our athletic director at Waverly was also a Crete graduate. He didn’t play under me — he’s older than I am — but he knew people in Crete. We had actually played Waverly when I was at Crete; we were in the same classification. My teams had always competed well in those games, and I think that helped. Between having been at Waverly as an assistant, the connections I’d made, and the AD being able to make some calls on my behalf — it all kind of came together.

And honestly, the family piece mattered too. My wife and I are both from Wahoo. Crete was about an hour from home, and Waverly would get us about 30 minutes closer. As we were starting our family, being closer to grandparents — that was important. It just was the right move for us at the time. And thankful it was, because it’s been one heck of a ride.

Five state semifinals in eight years, three in the last four — was there a pattern to what kept you coming up short, or was it more just a play here, a play there?

There are a lot of factors. The margin for error in semifinal games is so, so small. Oftentimes it’s the team that gets something good to happen first — that’s what I’ve found really matters.

Semifinals are harder to coach in than the finals themselves, in some ways, because you’re so close to achieving that goal. You can put more pressure on yourselves in those games than in the championship game itself. I’ve talked to so many coaches about this.

The big factors in getting through? Number one, staying healthy. Having depth so that if someone goes down, you can slide somebody in. Getting that late in the season with the team you started with still intact — that’s huge. We had a team here in Nebraska a couple years back lose their Division I quarterback to a torn ACL in the summer. That changed the whole trajectory of their season. You see that happen.

Number two is playing good football at the right time. Peaking in November. We’ve always tried to do that. There were years we felt like we were playing our best football going into a semifinal — and then something bad would happen early, and you’d feel that doubt start to creep in.

This past year was our first time getting over that hump. We had kids who’d been in a semifinal before, so we had experience. We were healthy. And we had good things happen for us right away — we got a roughing the passer call that led to our first score, got a three-and-out, went right down the field, and before you knew it we were up 14-nothing. Having been on the other end of that, I know how easy it is to let doubt start creeping in. We’ve been there.

You went through four or five one-score wins during that championship run. There’s an argument that teams with a lot of close wins one year are actually more likely to regress the next — the margins were thin, maybe you got fortunate. But there’s another argument that winning those games builds something in your program. Did you see that play out?

I’ve been on both sides of it. At Crete that 1-8 year, we’d get into close games and find ways to lose. You’re kind of waiting for something bad to happen. And I think it’s exactly the opposite when you flip it. The more you play in close games and come out on the right side, the more confidence you build — okay, don’t panic, we’re fine, trust it.

Teams that haven’t been in a lot of close games can press when they find themselves in one. Coaches can press too — start calling things you wouldn’t normally call. Kids start to doubt.

Last year we opened the season against Bennington and won 21-19. That set the tone. I don’t think it was a coincidence that we kept finding ways to win tight games after that. Our kids got to where if something bad happened, they’d go: we’re fine, just trust it. And they did. That was kind of where we lived last year.

The championship — first one since 1980. What did that mean to the school, the community, the town?

It was huge. To this day, when I go to the grocery store, somebody new will stop me — somebody who played here in some year — and tell me what it meant to them. It was so much bigger than just this team.

In the eight years I’ve been here, I’ve had so many groups get so close. This was a celebration of all their hard work too. Someone once told me: if you knock on the door enough, sooner or later they’re going to let you in. The groups before this one set the standard — what practice looks like, how we do things here. Those same attributes trickled down from group to group, year after year, and I think that was a huge factor.

Our community took such pride in it. We’re a football community — has been since I was here in 2012. And in our state championship game at Memorial Stadium, our whole section was full. The entire community, players from years past. So many people came out. That shows you how big of a deal it was.

For people who aren’t from Nebraska, what would you want them to know about what high school football means in this state?

It all goes back to why I wanted to get into high school coaching. There’s something so special about playing for your community, with the kids you grew up with. In Nebraska, that matters to people in a way that’s hard to explain. Small town Nebraska shows out for their schools. Big town Nebraska — Omaha, Lincoln — shows out for theirs too. It’s very important to people here.

When you’re driving through town and you see signs in the windows — “Go Vikings, good luck Friday” — that’s what makes high school football special. Nebraska embodies that so well, from the six-man schools all the way up to programs like Millard South that are ranked in the top 25 nationally. Everybody supports their school. It’s a big deal here.

What’s the profile of the Waverly community and the families in your program?

Much different from Crete. Waverly is a very blue collar community with less diversity. We’re a suburb of Lincoln — we don’t even have many stores here because people just drive into Lincoln. But the way I’d describe it is: it’s a white collar community with a blue collar work ethic. It’s not a poverty-driven town, but people here work hard. That’s the fabric of this place.

Your dad played for Nebraska under Tom Osborne. Does the shadow of Husker football shape what high school football looks like in Nebraska?

Yeah. Obviously I can’t speak to what it was like in the 90s because I was so young, but I think it’s a trickle effect. Everybody goes to Husker games on Saturdays — that’s the biggest thing in the state in the fall. And that same passion trickles down to their own communities. Even in the years Nebraska has struggled, that hasn’t wavered. The passion from the fan base toward football in this state hasn’t wavered.

The nice thing is we don’t play on Saturdays, so we don’t have to compete with it. And if anything, I think it’s only gotten stronger as time’s gone on. Football in general just seems as strong as it’s ever been.

You won the state title. How do you manage the shift from chasing a title to defending it?

It’s been really good, actually. Really encouraging. When we first got with our seniors in the spring, the very first thing we talked about was going from the hunters to the hunted — and how our mindset and how we train has to reflect that.

We’re not going to train any differently than we have in the past. But our kids have to understand: a year ago in summer workouts, we were talking about how we weren’t going to lose to certain teams again. Now, every one of the other 20-some teams in our classification is sitting in a room right now talking about how they’re going to beat us. We have a bull’s eye on our back.

I think our kids have responded to that really well. The rally cry has been that we have to train at a very high, elite level right now, because we’re not sneaking up on anybody. Every opponent will know you’re the returning state champions. We have to play at a certain level or we’ll find ourselves in situations we don’t want to be in.

We literally just had a football-only lift last Friday where I spent five minutes talking about exactly that — about how everybody’s gunning for us right now, and we have to keep getting better every single day.

Has your approach to motivating the group changed at all?

You know, it’s all the same — just a little different in how you present it to the kids. Before, it was getting somewhere we hadn’t been in 40 years. Now it’s maintaining the standard. That’s why we coach — you’ve got to find ways to motivate kids. And this is a different challenge, but an exciting one.

You’ve seen the game from a lot of angles over the years. Where do you think high school football has gotten better, and where has it gotten worse?

More than anything, I think the game is safer than it’s ever been. We went through that concussion reckoning in the mid-2000s, and there was a moment where you wondered — where is this going? Is football going to survive this? But what it forced was a real reevaluation of how we teach tackling, how we coach the game. And equipment today is so much better — the helmets, the helmet guards, everything. The game has genuinely improved in that regard.

We’re going to have somewhere between 115 and 120 kids out for football this year, which is right in the range of where we’ve been. There was a period where we didn’t know if those numbers were coming back nationally. So that’s been really encouraging.

The other big change I’ve seen is just how much happens outside of the season now. In the 70s and 80s, football was football season. You rolled out the balls in August and put the pads away in November. Now you’ve got training facilities available year-round, more 7-on-7, more team camps in the summer. Here in Nebraska, they’ve even lifted some of the limitations on what you can do with kids in the offseason. Football is becoming something you can do almost year-round, which wasn’t always the case.

We always want our kids to be multi-sport athletes — we’re not big enough to have kids specialize. We need kids wrestling, playing basketball, running track. But across the country, you’ve really seen the 7-on-7 culture and the training facility culture take off, and that’s something I’ve watched change in my time in the game.

What’s your take on offseason 7-on-7 specifically?

Right, wrong, or indifferent — it’s part of the game now. And I do think there are real benefits, especially for skill development. Quarterbacks and receivers are probably better in a lot of places than they used to be because of the extra reps in the offseason. But it’s not real football, either. No pass rush, no contact — there are limits to what it translates to. So I understand the mixed feelings. It’s a growing piece of the game and I don’t think it’s going away.

Last question. When guys are 10, 20, 30 years removed from playing for you at Waverly, what do you hope they say?

More than anything, I hope they walk away having had a good experience. That’s not always possible — some years it’s easier than others. Obviously after a state championship year, those kids are going to carry that with them for the rest of their lives. Other years, we came up short. But more than anything, I hope we taught them values.

Football is the ultimate team sport and, in my opinion, the ultimate life sport. It teaches you things that go far beyond the field — how to overcome adversity, how to put the team above yourself, what it means to be committed to something bigger than you are. Those are the lessons I hope our players walk away with, whatever their role was.

I hope they developed a work ethic under us that helps them be successful in life. I hope they learned what it means to be committed to something bigger than themselves. And I hope when they look back, whatever their experience was — whether they were on the field all the time or not — they reflect on those life lessons and say: I’m thankful I got to be a part of that.

Growing up in Michigan, how did football become a big part of your life?

I always loved sports for as long as I can remember. I played hockey first, and then as soon as I was able to get into football, I got into football. My brother was actually one of my youth coaches — he’s twelve years older — so he was one of the ones who really helped me get started. And then, crazy as it sounds, the NCAA football video game was something me and him had always bonded over. He always said, you know, you’re really good at just calm play-calling, setting things up, understanding all the parts of everything. That always kind of stuck with me.

I was probably more of a coach than I was a player. I’d say I was a hard-working, average football player. I wanted to play college ball to learn more about the game and get experience so I could be a good coach. That’s what led me out to Iowa. I felt a really good connection with the coaches, and as a lineman, it was a lot of fun to play triple option football. It was a lot more fun to be aggressive than to just pass protect and do all those things.

And then after playing, you went straight into coaching?

After I finished playing, I wanted to get into college coaching. I got a GA job at Dakota State up in Madison, South Dakota — an NAIA school — and spent a year as a GA, then as an O-line coach, then offensive coordinator for two years. And then I wanted to see if I could be a head coach. I think there’s a lot of people who can be great coordinators but maybe not great head coaches, or vice versa. I just kind of wanted to know, as young as I could, if that was something I was built for. If not, I could figure out what I was built for and find my niche.

What were the conversations like when the Riggs job opened up?

I’d probably had ten or twelve silver and bronze medals — getting interviews, getting to the end, but not getting the job. This was the first one that actually offered me the position. We actually didn’t have any particular connection to Pierre. This was one I pursued because I wanted to be a head coach, not necessarily because we wanted to move there. But we just found out that we loved it here.

They were a school that was good but not great before — not sustained over a long period of time. One of those where when they had really good athletes, they were good, and when they didn’t, they were average. That became the fun part: how do we translate this so that it doesn’t matter what we have? We’re going to be good. That was the premise of what we needed to get done.

You were selected for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers Coaching Academy. What was that experience like?

That would have been 2024, so it wasn’t early — it was just the last couple years. It was incredible. From that end, it was similar to why I wanted to be a head coach: I want to see what football’s like at this level. Is it so far above me? What could I do? I learned a lot. It’s an incredible organization to go work with and see how it all comes together.

At the end of the day, you also get a view into what coaching life looks like at that level — how much they have to move, how much is all on the table. I left feeling like I could probably handle it at that level. I just don’t know that my family could. And that’s more important.

Seven consecutive state titles from 2017 to 2023. What do you attribute that run to?

The most important part — and this is going to sound weird — is recruiting. Not recruiting from different schools, but the big discussion we had when we moved here was: who are the ten best athletes in our school, and are they playing football? The general consensus was we had about half of those guys out for football. You can be good with that, but you know, if you get the ten best boys out of eight hundred fifty students, you’re going to be good. Very rarely are your ten best just bad. So the real focal point right away was: how do we increase that number?

The process we came up with was — what kind of experiences and moments can we help create for these guys that aren’t a state title? Because ultimately, that’s what you want to build toward. But if you only measure yourself by that, there’s a lot of times you go home disappointed at the end of the year. If that’s all the kids are working for and getting out of it, you’re going to have a lot of issues.

The coolest part looking back on it: every senior night, when seniors share what they’re most proud of or remember most — despite most of them having won multiple titles — that’s rarely the thing they bring up. And that just shows that the moments and experiences we were able to build for the kids did their job. It kept them out. It kept them engaged. It brought them together.

What are some of those experiences?

The first one: we take our whole team camping for the first three days of practice. Traditionally that’s your acclimation period where you’re not wearing pads anyway — most teams do install and conditioning. We take our team over to a state park and go camping for those three days. We make it horrible and we make it fun. We have a unique challenge every year that our coaches come up with, specific to that group. The kids can see the intentionality in it — we’re designing something specifically for them, how we see them.

Most of the kids will remember their challenge from “Downstream,” which is what the park is known as. We unplug. The kids don’t have their phones, they don’t have their car keys. The National Guard comes out and hammers the guys a little bit. The moms come out and cook one night, the dads cook the other night. There’s an element of closure for the parents too — they get to go enjoy their son’s last first day of football.

During COVID, the only question all our kids had leading up to that season was: are we going to be able to go to Downstream? That’s how you know it’s really hitting what you wanted to hit.

Can you give an example of one of those challenges?

One of them, we bought a kiddie pool from Menards and drilled a couple hundred holes in the bottom of it. We gave the kids a couple straight PVC pipes — no caps. The camp is right on the river. We said: you guys have to overflow this kiddie pool. Here’s your tools. You have twelve hours. Good luck.

They all had to work together and figure out how to get those PVC pipes to hold water long enough to dump it into this pool with two hundred holes in the bottom. We learn a ton as a coaching staff — who our leaders are, how they lead, the kids who work hard, the kids who think they’re a little too cool for these types of activities. It lets us know who we can push and how hard.

At the end of that one, there was a little sophomore who, when they overflowed the kiddie pool, crawled out from underneath it. He’d been under there for almost seven hours. He never left. You could see everybody’s face kind of realizing at the same time: oh my gosh, he was under there the whole time. The kid didn’t care. He was just glad he did his part and plugged all those holes so they could accomplish the mission. You learn so many cool things, and every challenge has somebody like that who steps up and earns a lot of capital with the rest of their team.

How do you guard against complacency when every kid coming into the program has only ever known state championships?

I think complacency sets in when you treat everybody the same forever. If you say these are our standards, these are our rules — it works, but at some point you’re going to get a group that just doesn’t respond to that.

The beauty of our season theme, our challenges — all of those things are specifically curated to that group of kids. There are years where we’ve had to do nothing other than get out of the way, because they were completely motivated themselves. All we had to do was continue to steer the ship. There are years where we’ve had to put out a mirror and say, you guys want it? Well, this is what you’ve shown us.

As a coaching staff, you have to be able to adjust to the kids you have, not to the kids you necessarily want. As humans, we’re all wired to lead the way we want to be led, coach the way we want to be coached. It’s more important that you’re giving the kids what they need, not what you want them to need. That only happens if you know your kids well enough to know what they need.

We also do a senior meeting — just coaches and seniors — where we give a very blunt, honest opinion of what we see from them, what we see in the room, what we see with that team. And they get to throw it right back if they want to defend or challenge or call us out. There’ve been years where it’s gotten decently contentious. But at the end of it, everyone walks away heard, and everyone walks away understanding what both sides see and what both sides know we need to do.

In 2024, after seven straight titles, the streak ended on a missed two-point conversion with under a minute left. What was that like?

The kids were definitely more motivated after that. That was the thing that stings — no one wanted to be the group that ended the streak. But the realization had to come that odds are, we’re not going to win forever. There’s a healthy level of acceptance they had to find. It was over, and it just needed to be restarted.

A lot of our discussions over that offseason were: stop sulking and go do it again. You take your day. That weekend was tough — everybody licked their wounds, wished this or wished that, and then you move on. We’ve tried to treat wins the same way. When you win it, enjoy it that weekend, make it memorable, and then get back after the next one.

And honestly — how many people wish they ended their career in the state title game? It doesn’t mean you win it, but there are a lot of people who wish they could have been playing that game. There are silver linings to everything.

Last summer, you lost one of your players, Aiden Van Balen, suddenly. What was that like for you and for the team?

That was about as hard a thing as anyone could have to go through. You obviously hope no one ever has to go through that. There’s no playbook for it. You can prepare as a coach for about every situation you can possibly prepare for, but there’s nothing that can prepare you for that news.

I was sitting at my desk working, and I got the call that morning. We had a staff member who was a player and really good friends with Aiden. Having to tell a kid that one of his best friends just passed away is a conversation I wouldn’t wish on anyone and hope I never have to do again.

Your thoughts immediately go to how you can help the team and how you can help the family. We opened up our locker room and kept it open for over a week — guys, if you need a place to go, this is a safe place. They made a little memorial at his locker. It was hard just because we’d had football, lifting and 7-on-7 at eight that morning. He left, went to eat at Burger King, went to work, and never came back. It was a shocking thing as a human too. You’d just seen him. Not two hours ago.

It took a few of us coaches getting together to realize that you’ve got to make sure you’re okay too. Because you’re not going to be able to effectively help the kids if you’re not.

There’s no way to sugarcoat or downplay it. I feel good about the decisions we made. There were concerns about leaving the locker room open — what if there’s vandalism and so forth — and I thought: we can buy a new TV, but we can’t buy a new kid.

How did the team navigate going back to practice?

It happened June 4th. The rest of that summer was really hard. The biggest challenge we tried to help the kids through was understanding that everyone’s going to process this differently. There’s no right way. On a day that you’re perfectly fine, your teammate might be really hurting, and vice versa.

It was challenging when we got back into it, because he was a starter. No one wanted to take that position. And you’re not dishonoring him — guys, we can’t play with ten. You’re not doing anything wrong. But ultimately, what our defensive staff decided to do was rename that position for him. That way he could still play it, in a sense.

Once we got to the season, I think it was tremendously motivating because the team wanted that for him, for his family, for his brother. The kids wanted Jakob to be the one who went and got the trophy. And they did it. He was the one able to go accept it for the team. I know that meant more to the team than winning it — the fact that he was there to be able to do that.

You’re no longer in the building day-to-day as a teacher. You’re running the Boys and Girls Club. How has that changed your rhythm with the kids?

It’s definitely harder. I think I’m fortunate that I was here for eight years first, so I still knew all the kids. The hardest part is when the younger kids come up — if you get to a point that you don’t know them, that becomes very challenging. You’re not in the building with them every day.

I wouldn’t have been able to do it without the coaching staff we had. They were able to pick up the areas I couldn’t cover as easily not being there. But it’d be very hard to do if you were new to a place.

As for why I made the change — there’s not a ton of upward potential in teaching, and this is not a state where you get paid just to coach football. Most districts here have a policy where you can’t be an administrator and also be a coach.

It was a way to advance professionally and challenge myself. There’s a point where something becomes easy. And is it still fulfilling? I think that’s where it kind of got lost on me. There were a lot of people who asked why I’d ever leave. And I missed the difference I was making, but not necessarily the work I was doing to make it. Running the club was a different way to still make a big difference and get that personal fulfillment that you’re doing meaningful work — while also having upward potential.

How do you build a coaching staff?

The biggest things we focus on are personality fit and work ethic. If you love the game and you have a personality that gels with the staff and is what we need, you’ll learn. I was an offensive lineman — I’ve coached quarterbacks for ten years. Our quarterbacks turn out okay even though they have a guy who never played it coaching them.

Every kid on the team needs someone to go to. If all you have is a staff of yellers, the kids who need an arm around them aren’t going to find someone to talk to and you’re going to lose them. If you don’t have any yellers, the kids who need that aren’t going to find it either. Finding that blend of personalities is the most important thing.

The other piece is succession planning. We’re on our third defensive coordinator in ten years. We always knew who the next guy would be if someone left, and we used the spot that opened to go hire that person’s replacement. That’s what’s allowed us to remain consistent.

Describe Pierre for someone who’s never been there.

It’s a beautiful place right on the Missouri River, hills on both sides. It’s the state capital — the only one not on an interstate — and it has a true small-town feeling. We don’t have to lock our house. My car’s unlocked with my wallet in it right now.

When we play games four hours away, the entire community gets there. Every state title we’ve been in, we’ve traveled farther than our opponent, and we’ve never had noticeably fewer fans — despite traveling twice as far, sometimes three times as far. There was a year we played a team in their hometown and we still had way more fans than they did. To see people support these kids at that level just makes you want to be there. You want your kids to have that.

What does football mean to Pierre specifically?

Ten years ago it might have been a little different. Baseball had historically been a big deal here — Legion Ball, a phenomenal field, everyone loves it. When I got here, there was excitement around baseball and basketball, and football was kind of there.

But football is different because it starts the school year. If the football team goes out and has a great season, you get three great months of school spirit and community support that carries through the rest of the year. The Principal put it to me early on: if you come out and lay a dud, you’re chasing it the rest of the year. And I could see that. That’s part of why the homecoming game always matters — there’s so much energy surrounding it that it can be a force multiplier if you do what you need to do.

I think you could say we’re a football town at this point. There are no pro teams in the state, no top-level college team. South Dakota State is really good and there are a lot of Jacks fans, but for your closest major program you’d have to look at Nebraska or Minnesota depending on where you are. A lot of people care about high school sports here because it is their hometown. That was always a unique thing when I moved here.

When guys are twenty or thirty years removed from playing for you, what do you hope they say?

I hope they take away that we were always family-oriented, family-first people. That the young coaches on our staff showed them the importance of being husbands and fathers, and that that created something more within the football program.

And I hope they would say that our focus was always on the right things. We’ve talked a lot more about being there for each other — especially this last season, but all the other seasons too — about filling each other’s buckets and being the best person you can be for your teammates. I hope they still have those senior night memories thirty years down the road, because that was truly our initial intention: to give every guy something they can take away that’s not a title. Something special they’ll remember forever. And then hopefully they picked up the lessons along the way.

Steve Steele wrote more on the T.F. Riggs dynasty in his “Building the Empire” book set to release this summer. You can pre-order his book here.

Take me through your early years growing up and playing football in Oklahoma — what the game meant to you, what it was like playing for a really successful high school program.

I started playing in 6th grade. I had played baseball up until that point, and then a lot of my friends were doing football — practicing in the yard, all that. The Salvation Army in Sand Springs had a league, probably eight teams in each grade, around the West Tulsa area. I was fortunate enough to play for some really good coaches. None of them had kids on the team, so they were just volunteers. They made it fun, and I fell in love with the sport.

I played through high school as an offensive and defensive lineman. Played for a Hall of Fame coach in Sand Springs — he’s passed away now, but he was an excellent teacher, excellent coach, great human being. Then I got a scholarship to Northeastern State in Tahlequah. Same kind of deal — really good coach. I thought I was going to redshirt, but ended up starting halfway through my freshman year. Played for a Hall of Fame coach there who had won a national championship in NAIA. We were moving from NAIA to D2, and our senior year we snuck into the playoffs and made a run all the way to the semifinals. When you’re a D2 guy and four people are sharing a hotel room, and then you get to the NCAA playoffs and they fly you in two to a room and give you a meal allowance — that was pretty cool.

After that, I knew I wasn’t quite ready to hang it up. My roommate’s dad was a coach in the Oklahoma City area, and I was visiting with him. My scholarship was done and I knew I was going to be living at home in the Tulsa area, so I reached out to Allan Trimble — longtime head coach at Jenks, all everything. He’s since passed away from ALS, but I worked for him for ten years. He gave me as much work as I wanted. The more you were willing to bite off, the more he’d give you. He taught me what a successful program in the Tulsa area should look like — year-round training, organized practices, all of it. He was one of the pioneers of getting year-round football going.

I interned the first year, then got hired as the O-line coach. After four or five years, I was offensive coordinator and running the strength program. I had the perfect job. I was never going to leave.

Then in 2009, I was interim head coach for a few games. And I’d always run my mouth about this little 5A school in a small, growing suburban area outside Tulsa — Bixby. We played them when I was at Jenks, and I said, man, that community has all the makings of a really good football program.

Sure enough, right after that season, the Bixby job came open. I’d never applied for a job before. Decided to throw my name in the hat and was fortunate enough to get it.

Did you always know you wanted to coach, or was it something that crept up on you near the end of your playing career?

No. I had no idea, really. I went to college and once I got the basics out of the way, I entertained the thought of maybe doing a business degree or going into education. As I got closer, I decided to major in special ed — I knew I’d be able to get a job easily. And then after that, I decided, you know what, I’m going to give coaching a try too. So no, I didn’t always know I was going to be a coach.

You were inducted into the Hall of Fame at Northeastern State. What did that mean to you?

It was cool. They probably didn’t watch a ton of my game film, because I was really, really average — or below average. I was just good enough. But NSU holds a special place in my heart. A lot of my really good friends to this day, we still get together — next week on the Fourth of July, 55 of us and our families get together at the lake. I got to play for great people, the town is unique, you kind of have to be going there to even know where Tahlequah is. It just meant a lot.

When you were at Jenks, you looked at Bixby and felt like it had all the makings of a really good program. What were some of the things you saw in that community?

They were always pretty good at football. It’s an upper-middle-class community, so I knew we’d be able to raise money and have the resources we needed. And there are a lot of tall people. I know that sounds crazy, but a lot of tall people. I think success and height might go hand in hand sometimes.

Coach McGrew, the head coach before me, was awesome to me when I got there. He told me, all the things you have to do to be successful in 6A — a larger staff, year-round programming — he’d decided he didn’t want to do that anymore. But he believed I could take the program to the next level. They’d played for some state championships but never won one. I thought, you know, if you brought in an excellent strength and conditioning program and a rigorous summer program, you could maybe take the thing somewhere.

You played for L.D. Bains, then coached under Allan Trimble — two Hall of Fame coaches. How did those experiences shape the way you built things at Bixby?

Anytime you’re going through a journey as a player and a coach, you’re always looking at things and thinking, man, this is really good, or, I wish we did this, or, if I were ever a coach I might do it this way. I had really good examples in Coach Bains, in Coach Eckert at Northeastern State, and then getting to see it all put together in Coach Trimble’s program at Jenks.

I also heard Rick Jones — a really good high school coach who was at Greenwood for years — speak one time. He said what’s successful at one place might not be successful at another. I think there’s a lot of truth in that. When you look at our program, you’ll see foundational things from all the places I’ve been, and then some things that are quite a bit different — our staff’s own twist.

What are some examples of things Bixby does that you’d consider unique?

Club 225 is one. Any time a kid does a full clean with 225 pounds for the first time, we celebrate it — t-shirt, sticker for their car, the whole thing. We call it Club 225. Our first year here, eight kids were in it. Last year we had somewhere in the nineties.

We also try to incentivize consistency. The kids with 100% summer attendance, no questions asked, I cook them a ribeye. We call them Steak Eaters. I used to do it at my house, but now we have so many it doesn’t fit anymore.

We run two JV games a week instead of one. On Monday nights, we split up and play two different games. We run three eighth grade schedules, three ninth grade schedules. We try to host everything — team camps, seven-on-sevens, all of it. Part of that is selfish — we want people to see our facilities and feel comfortable in them. But we also want to make sure our kids are getting reps.

The other thing we’ve really dialed in over the last few years is that we’re always competing. No matter what time of year it is, whether it’s the weight room or the field, we’re recording, measuring, ranking the kids, and posting the results. What gets measured changes intent.

This summer we do something called the Rack. The top six guys in our daily field measurements get to use the two racks in the middle with gold barbells. Each day we’ll measure two things out on the field — today it was a fly 10 and a double broad jump. At the end of the week, those top guys also go through a leadership vote from our leadership council and coaches. So it’s a combination of your output on the field and your core values. You can win everything out on the field, but if you don’t get any leadership votes, you’re not going to win the Rack. When kids can compete every single day and see the results, it drives intent just a little bit more.

What do you attribute the run at Bixby to? What are the real reasons you’ve been able to sustain this for over a decade?

Number one, we’ve been lucky and caught some breaks at the right time — like the 6A split. Before the split, a school like Broken Arrow had 6,000 kids and we had 1,200. When they created 6A-II right as we had some really good players coming through, that mattered.

We’ve also been able to retain the core of our coaches for a long time. Tyler Snyder, our offensive coordinator, will be going on his 16th year here. Rodney Flowers, our defensive coordinator, going on his 15th. Our head eighth and ninth grade coaches were here before I was. I’ve got a linebackers coach who was here a year before me that I actually played with in college. That continuity is huge.

The community is growing and athletics matter here. On Friday nights, the entire town of Bixby is at the football game. With so many large districts split up across multiple schools, you don’t always get that one-horse-town atmosphere. We have it.

And then there are just good football players here. There were good players here before I got here, and there are good players here now. Some of our former players have kids coming up through the system.

How do you combat entitlement or complacency when winning a state title is basically the expectation every year?

Honestly, it’s one of the things we’re dealing with right now. We graduated a really good group last year. A lot of these guys haven’t played much, and now it’s their turn. We’ve seen in team camp that some of them aren’t quite as competitive as they need to be. I wish I knew the magic formula, but I don’t.

What I keep coming back to is that healthy anxiety is a real thing. We hear anxiety talked about as something negative, but anxiety that causes you to focus, to have drive, to stay competitive — that’s a good thing. When your best players are your best leaders, then you’ve got something. But I don’t always know what resonates.

You’ve talked about process over outcome. How do you actually instill that — keeping guys locked in on a Monday in June instead of just waiting for Friday nights in the fall?

We’re always competing. That’s the biggest thing. No matter what time of year it is, we’re measuring, we’re ranking, we’re posting it. What gets measured changes intent.

Like I mentioned with the Rack — it’s June 22nd and our guys are competing today in a fly 10 and a double broad jump. The results go up. The leadership votes happen. There’s something on the line every single day, not just in October.

Your O-line background is pretty deep — played it, coached it, coordinated around it. How much does that shape how you run things now as a head coach?

Probably more than I realize — your own perception of yourself is always a little off. During practice I’m not calling plays, so I’m over with the offensive line assisting our O-line coach. I think Tyler Snyder knows way more football than I do at this point. But over the years I’ve been able to be a resource for him on blocking schemes and what I think we can get done.

And then there’s just the mentality of an offensive lineman. The emphasis we put on strength and conditioning — I never cancel those sessions. We lift five days a week during the season. That probably traces directly back to what allowed me to get on the field in the first place. That was my edge.

What do you look for when you’re hiring assistant coaches?

Guys that love football and work hard. If I need them up here seven days a week or call a Sunday meeting — which I try not to do, I try to protect their time in the offseason — I want guys that want to be here anyway. Work ethic is huge.

I look for guys who haven’t bounced around a lot. Job hoppers who are always chasing the next thing — that’s not what I want. I want coaches who want to develop, and if we can promote from within, we’re going to do that. We’ve had a pretty good track record of elevating middle school coaches to high school positions.

And you can’t have a staff of all the same guys. Each position group is different, and so is the coach it needs.

Your name has come up in conversations about college jobs. Have you ever seriously considered that path?

Yeah, and honestly, those guys are all miserable. I mean that. The timing was never right with my kids, I didn’t want to move all over the country — but beyond that, the way the game is right now at the college level, I’m not sure it would be a lot of fun for me. They’re just chasing players, living on pins and needles, making sure somebody doesn’t leave every week.

And I’ll be honest — there’s a little bit of that creeping into high school football now too. Not to the same degree, but it’s there.

What does football mean to a town like Bixby on a Friday night?

It’s big. We do Hi-Five Friday before every home game — our players stand at the entrances of the elementary schools and welcome the kids when they come in. Right now we’ve got 450 kids, first through seventh grade, out on the field doing drills. It’s just a big deal.

We’ve played our opening game at H.H. Chapman Stadium at the University of Tulsa — sponsored by QuikTrip — and had 23,000 people in the stands. People here keep up with high school football. When you walk into the grocery store, everyone wants to stop and ask how the team’s going to be.

That’s why we always tell our players — we love it when we’re out and about and we don’t hear something bad. We love hearing that you helped someone carry their groceries to the car. Because the whole town is watching.

What makes high school football in Oklahoma special to someone who’s never seen it?

It’s electric, and at the highest level right now, it’s uber competitive. If we start doing something that works, you can pretty much count on everyone else replicating it. High tide raises all ships. Every program around here is doing really good stuff, and when one of us sees another having success with something, they’re going to pick it up. That competition makes everyone better.

When you think about guys who are ten, twenty, thirty years removed from playing for you — what do you hope they say about their time at Bixby?

We made them better men. We do a spring game every year where we divide the team into four groups and invite 22 alumni to come back — they get a polo and get to be out on the field. We’ve got so many guys who are successful now as adults, as dads, as professionals.

Hopefully we taught them to be consistent. To have discipline. To be guys that their boss, their wife, the people in their life can count on. Guys who are selfless. That’s what I hope they carry. Not the trophies. That they’re better because they were here.

Take me back to the beginning — where did football fit in your life growing up in Artesia?

I grew up here in Artesia, New Mexico, and Artesia is like the Friday Night Lights town you see in Texas and different places. We only have about 10,000 people in our community, around 1,000 kids in school, and we average about 200 kids playing football every year. So you’re talking about 20 percent of the school on the football team.

There’s a rich tradition of winning here. Since 1957 — some of the first years they started recognizing state championships — we’re at 33, which puts us number two or three in the nation over that time span. I had three cousins that played quarterback — ‘96, ‘98, and then my youngest cousin was a junior when I was a senior. All three of them played quarterback, all three won state championships.

Since you’re a little kid, you just dream about playing football here. The whole town shows up. We have a beautiful stadium called Bulldog Bowl that seats about 6,500 and it’s usually full on Friday nights. The whole town shuts down — my dad and grandpa owned businesses here and Friday afternoons they’d be shut down for parades, just to get ready for Friday night lights. When we travel, people travel with us.

We had a legendary coach here for a long time — he still comes around and helps us out, and he was my coach. His name’s Cooper Henderson. His dad coached here back in the ‘60s and won several championships, and then Cooper came back in 1989 and was head coach through 2015. He won 16 or 17 state championships, something like that.

He had a big picture on the wall in his office from some game in the ‘90s, and I’m sitting there in the front row. You could see me on this big blowup. Back in the day when the headsets had cords, you had to run them all the way down from the press box — I worked for Coach Henderson as a little kid, holding the wires. When he ran down the sideline, I gave him slack. When he came back to the 50, I wound them back up. And some people would send Coach Henderson suggestions during the game on a piece of paper, and I had to run them down to him from the stands. That would annoy me so much as a coach now. But yeah, I grew up around Coach Henderson my whole life. He’s my mentor. I coached for him for a few years, and then he actually coached for me my first few years back here in Artesia. Kind of full circle.

We didn’t even play tackle football until 7th grade here. We have about 100 kids in athletics in 7th grade and we just divide them up and play each other. The last game of the year, we bus them up to Bulldog Bowl — it’s their first time on that field playing football. We have a band there, a huge crowd, and it’s just a 7th grade inner-squad scrimmage. But it’s the beginning of the career. Then 8th and 9th grade you play at a different venue, and 10th grade is your first year back at the high school.

We also do this thing — we went viral a few years ago, and people thought we were crazy — we start every game with what we call the dog pile. It goes back to the 1960s. Literally at the beginning of the game, we break out through the paper banner our cheerleaders make and the whole team piles up into a giant pile. You dream about doing the dog pile on a Friday night. There are videos of me as a little kid doing the dog pile in my living room. It’s just been ingrained since you’re a little kid to be a Bulldog.

Did you always know you wanted to get into coaching?

Coach Henderson was a good recruiter. He always talked about it, and he was a huge mentor for me in high school. I went to Eastern New Mexico to try to play some football over there, didn’t end up playing, and kind of journeyed through college — started education, changed my major a few times. But Coach Henderson was always the constant who would still reach out and keep me involved. Even when I was at New Mexico State in Las Cruces, he’d call and say, hey, can you go scout Deming? They’re playing over there against Hatch. He always kept me in it, and it just got me really excited about the opportunity. When I graduated, he offered me a job right away and I’ve never looked back.

What was it like taking over your first program at Los Lunas?

It was great. They were great to me. Great community, great kids — they wanted to be really good at football. We went to back-to-back state championships before COVID hit. We thought we were going to be really good that year. Then in the spring of 2021, we got to play a little bit and went undefeated — only three games, but we didn’t lose. Then the coach here in Artesia resigned, so I took over. The bad thing was my first year, we ended up playing Los Lunas in the state championship and lost to the guys I’d just left.

How did the Artesia job come about?

Rex Henderson called me on the phone. He said, hey man, I’m about to tell the kids I’m resigning, and I think you’re the guy that needs to come back and lead this program. I’d never really thought it would happen that way. But I was honored that he thought of me. Right away I called Cooper Henderson — who was the athletic director at the time — and he said, can you be here this weekend for an interview? I think Rex called me on a Thursday and I was here on Sunday afternoon meeting with Coach Henderson. It was a whirlwind. Crazy fast. But it’s been great.

What do you remember from those first days back?

I came in right around spring break of 2021 and it was so weird to come back to that place as a head coach. A lot of the guys I’d coached alongside were still there. I just jumped in with both feet. I knew I wanted to bring two guys from Los Lunas, and I was trying to fit them into a new staff while also honoring Rex — not stepping on his toes, letting him finish out that spring.

But I do remember telling my wife: the pressure here is different. I’m going to work a lot harder than I did at Los Lunas — and I worked hard at Los Lunas. It’s just so different here. The expectations are high, and there were some things that needed to change. I felt the pressure. I felt like I had to go be like Coach Henderson. And it took me a little while to realize — I don’t have to be like Coach Henderson. I have to be like myself.

A lot of coaches face the challenge of inheriting a dynasty while making the program their own. How did you walk that line between honoring what was already there and putting your own stamp on things?

I remember it was around week two of that first year. I got in front of the team and I just paused and told them — it’s so hard here in Artesia, following successful people, because you start to think you just have to do things the same way. But if you’re not them, you’re just imitating somebody else’s program and it doesn’t go very well.

There were some things that needed to change. We had some guys showing up late that first summer, and our motto that year was “Locked In.” If we started at 7 AM, I had a coach go lock the gate. It showed me two things: there’s the kid who saw the gate locked, got back in his car, and went home — and that told me a lot about that kid. And then there’s the kid who was jumping the gate, refusing to go home. That told me a lot too.

But I also recognized how important the traditions were. So I focused on those first. We did a whole history of the dog pile, a whole history of why we dress the same every Friday night — we don’t allow visors unless every player is wearing one, no single-digit numbers because there are only nine guys looking different than everybody else. Instead of those being little things, we made them the most important things. We brought in past coaches and past players and said, we’re going to build on these traditions, these are what make us special. And then that created the space to say — and we’re going to change how we practice, or we’re going to change this aspect, because it makes us better. The kids bought in right away.

You’ve embraced the pressure to win here. How do you make sure that pressure doesn’t tighten the kids up?

The greatest thing about Artesia is these guys believe they can beat anybody. That’s instilled in them because their grandpa played here, their uncle played here, whoever. At Los Lunas, the hardest thing was getting kids to consistently believe they could beat anybody. Here, that belief is already there.

We play a hard schedule. All three of our non-district games are against 6A teams every year, because we believe — even if we lose — we’re better for playing really good teams than playing gimmies. We hang a banner of the trophy in our locker room. On our press box, we put up a football with the year and the coach’s name every time we win, and we put that up on our practice field. On the way out of practice every day, guys touch it. We believe in this group. We believe we can win.

And when we do lose — like this past year when we lost to Centennial, a 6A team, and people were already saying the quarterback isn’t good enough or the defense can’t tackle — we just focus on what’s happening in that locker room. Nobody can penetrate this room. Nobody can put doubt or fear in here. This is the room where we’re for each other.

We don’t even talk about winning district. We put those trophies in a closet. Our goal is to win state. And we talk a lot about being good men, not just football — about building good people when they leave that building. People think we just talk about winning championships all the time. We fully embrace it, but we actually talk more about non-football stuff in that room. Nobody knows what goes on when that door shuts in the locker room, and that’s what we focus on.

You’ve been to five straight state title games. How do you guard against complacency when kids coming into your program have never known anything different?

It starts with us coaches. We don’t refer to last year’s team. We don’t bring up last year’s championship. I fully believe I have to adjust to the guys I have. In ‘22 and ‘23, I had a quarterback who wasn’t a runner — he was a pocket guy who threw for a ton of yards. In ‘24, our quarterback’s best ability was to run, so we adjusted. Last year, we went back to a pocket passer. These guys look at that and say, they’re going to coach us to our abilities and our strengths.

I talk to my staff a lot: we can’t get complacent because this isn’t last year’s team. We have a new motto every year. We do things a little differently every year. Defensively, one year we based out of one front; the next year we had more D-linemen so we went to an even front. You’ve got to make sure you’re doing everything for this group to find success with this group. The best thing, though, is that these guys want their year up on the press box too. You know you’re going to get the effort. Now it’s just — how do we make sure we’re not just doing the same thing over and over?

What do you look for when you’re building a staff?

Loyalty is the most important thing. We’re going to argue in that office about what we should do. But when we leave that office and go talk to players, whatever we decided is the best thing — we’re all going to teach it like it’s the number one offense or defense in the state. Loyalty is everything.

I also want camaraderie. We’re in that office a ton, and we’ve got to be for each other. We don’t have any players who play both ways, and same with coaches — there’s an offensive staff and a defensive staff, no crossover. That can create tension because it’s offense versus defense in practice all week. So I want to build that competition Monday through Wednesday, but come Thursday and Friday, we’re one unit.

Just like Coach Henderson did for me — I want guys who, if they want to go be a head coach one day, are going to give you their very best because they know you’re going to write them a letter of recommendation. And I try to develop coaches from the ground up. I control 7th grade football all the way through 12th grade, so I get young coaches started at the lower levels and talk to them often: if you want to move up, here are the expectations.

But the biggest thing is — are they a good example for our kids? I like coaches who are married and have kids, because I want our guys to see how we are as dads and husbands. We invite guys to our house for dinner during the year. When they go to a coach’s house, I want them to see a family environment. Football I can teach. It’s more about being a good person, being loyal, and being a hard worker.

What do people outside New Mexico not understand about football there?

Travel is crazy. We have three trips that are over five hours in the regular season, every year. Even our scrimmage — we’re driving 3.5 hours. It’s not huge cities playing guys next to each other.

And I think there’s better football here than people give us credit for. We’re not going to produce a hundred D1 athletes a year, but there’s hidden talent. There are guys playing in the NFL right now — Conor O’Toole, Bryce Cabeldue up front — and some big linemen from Carlsbad and the Albuquerque area who’ve gone on. Cleveland is running a really good program in the metro. Jeff Lynn at Roswell. Great coaches in Las Cruces, great coaches in Deming. Even though we’re promoted more as a basketball state sometimes, football is really, really good here. Some of these programs, I think, could compete well in a lot of places.

How would you describe Artesia to someone who’s never been there?

As soon as you drive in, you just see that people value this place. Our sports facilities are the best in the state — not just football. We’ve got four sky boxes at our football stadium, which is honestly probably better than our two college stadiums in the state. Our basketball venue — we call it the Bulldog Pit — is one of the best high school facilities in New Mexico. Brand new turf at our softball complex, a fully turfed soccer stadium, resurfaced tennis courts.

A lot of that is because of guys like Mack Chase and his son Robert, who love Artesia athletics and have been incredibly generous. The Yates family is another big oil family that does a ton for the community. We have a little league tackle program that starts in 4th grade, a full turf field at the park for kids playing on Saturday mornings. Our community pool is in the shape of a Bulldog head. And they’re finishing up a brand new rec center with multiple basketball courts.

But it’s not just football — if you walk into our FFA room, our choir room, our band room, we want everybody to succeed. About 95 percent of our kids are involved in some kind of extracurricular activity. Last year I think we only had one or two kids not graduate, and they’ll finish this summer. The oil industry gives a ton of scholarships — a lot of our kids are going to college practically paid for. We believe our best students are kids who are involved in something besides school. That’s what you see here.

Last question — when your players are ten, twenty, thirty years removed from playing for you, what do you hope they say?

The coolest compliment I can get right now is that I probably have 10 to 15 guys who played for me in these first five years who are now finishing college and coming back wanting to coach and teach. That’s the impact Coach Henderson made on me. When you have guys coming back wanting to be a part of what you’re doing — we have a solid group of younger coaches at the lower levels who I think will be moving up in the next few years when some older guys retire.

But the biggest thing is, we just want them to come back and tell us about their successes. We want them to invite us to their weddings and the births of their kids. Continue to build that community that lasts a lifetime.

We have a booster club called the Quarterback Club — it’s all men, 95 percent of whom probably played for Artesia. They basically adopt a couple of players each season, take them out to eat once a week, check on their grades. Even guys I coached when I was an assistant here, or guys I played with, or guys I watched growing up — they’re in that room, adopting a kid for the season. It’s this community constantly investing in people.

My message to our guys is: never forget the blessing of this place. And wherever you go — whether it’s Artesia or somewhere else — go be a blessing to that community the same way this community blessed you.

I’d love to start from the beginning of your coaching journey. Did you always know you wanted to be a coach?

Yeah, football for me was family. I grew up in a single-parent house — it was just me and my mom. The first time I ever saw my biological father, I was 34 years old. So that family piece that a lot of people talk about was really big for me. My brothers on the team, the coaches drastically impacted my life, and I saw the impact that they had on me. I saw that there were a bunch of knucklehead kids like me that needed that same type of impact. So I kind of always knew that I wanted to coach.

My uncle is Joe Kines, who coached at about every school in the SEC and coached for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for a while. He was interim head coach at Alabama before Coach Saban. I watched his coaching journey and the impact that he had on a lot of people, and that was really my coaching influence.

Walk me through how you got to Cartersville and what it was like taking over a program and running it for the first time.

I started as a GA at Jacksonville State straight out of college. Then I decided to get into high school ball in Georgia, which is my home state. I had a job at Sonoraville just to get my feet wet in high school coaching, and then I came to Carrollton as an assistant and worked my way up to offensive coordinator. Then I landed the head job at Cartersville.

It’s hard sometimes to get a job. I interviewed for several, and there were several I turned down. A lot of times people say experience is the thing that’s against you. I don’t necessarily agree with that, especially if you’re in a great program. I had always prepared myself like a head coach. I would go every Tuesday in the off-season and say, “Coach, what are you working on this week? Teach me something. Teach me how to be the head coach.” I would evaluate every situation and think about how I would react as a head coach. As a coach you talk about getting mental reps — I was getting those mental reps in the coaching world. Once I got the opportunity to do that at a place I wanted to do it, we were super excited.

What do you attribute the success at Cartersville to?

That’s kind of the perfect storm of everything, to be honest with you. It takes talent to win — good players make good coaches. We had a mixture of kids that were willing to buy into the values of what we wanted to be as a football program. We worked extremely hard and pushed those kids to the limit. And then we had a handful of talented players — Trevor Lawrence will be one, obviously. You get a quarterback, you’ve got a shot, and we had a really good one for the four years that he was there plus one more year that I was at Cartersville. You have to have administrator support, you have to have talent, you have to have good coaching, and then all that stuff has to time up right and fit under your leadership umbrella.

After all that success at Cartersville, you went back into college coaching. Did you always think you wanted to go back, or did the opportunity just present itself?

For me, there’s no hierarchy of level. I never thought college coaches are better than high school coaches and NFL coaches are better than college coaches. We’ve always tried to be open to whatever the Good Lord calls us to do. I wasn’t looking to do it — we were having a really good run at Cartersville. But this opportunity at Coastal Carolina came along. Jamey Chadwell was promoted from OC to head coach and they had one offensive vacancy. He said, “Are you interested in coming to coach college ball?” I talked to my wife about it, we prayed about the opportunity, and felt like we had pushed Cartersville about as far as we could push it at the time. The timing was right to step out on faith and take that college job. I’m glad that I did — I learned a ton through the process. But again, for us, it’s always about being prayerful over your decisions and following what we believe is God’s leadership in our life.

Now that you’ve seen both sides, what did you enjoy about college coaching, and what don’t you miss?

The thing that I really enjoyed and miss the most is just the caliber of athlete across your entire roster. Every person on the roster is a talented player that wants to be there and wants to be coached. In high school, we’ve got 115 on our roster and about 27 to 30 of them can play — the rest are there for the experience, which is great. They get poured into, they get shaped to be young men, and that’s part of what I love about high school.

As for what I don’t miss — I was at a 7-on-7 recently and I was talking to a head coach. The month of June for those guys right now, they’re doing official visits, player OTAs, camps. He put his arm around me and said, “Coach, you ready to come back to college?” He had bags under his eyes. He was exhausted because it’s nonstop. And for me, the time I’m gaining with my family — that was the reason that we decided to leave South Florida and come back to Carrollton.

Talk about how the Carrollton opportunity came up and what went into that decision.

We’d had some staff changes at South Florida and I met with Coach Jeff Scott. He was moving me from tight ends to receivers and going to give me the passing game coordinator title. I was extremely excited about that. And then that evening — after that conversation — Carrollton called and asked if I would be interested in the head job. My initial reaction was no. I just got a promotion, things are going well down here. Then the superintendent, Dr. Albertus, called me and said, “Would you just be willing to listen to us?” So I listened. My wife and I prayed about it. The opportunity to be more of a dad, especially with the direction that we saw college football heading at the time, was a big part of it. But also the opportunity to be back in a community — we went from Myrtle Beach to Tampa, which are both phenomenal places to live, but just the small town USA feel, everything shuts down on a Friday night. And an opportunity to come back to my home state and do this while my kids were in school was ultimately the reason we chose to come back.

You talked about what high school football means to a place like Carrollton. What do you see that’s unique to it?

Football in Carrollton has been important for a long time. When you look at the tradition that exists here — we’re one of the top ten winningest programs in the state of Georgia. They won state championships going back to the 50s, the late 60s, the early 70s with the run that Coach Grisham had here, who the stadium is named after. I get to work in his shadow every day. All those state championships that he won — all those people are still a part of this community, and football has just remained a staple of it. Building young men, the excitement, everybody rallies behind being a Trojan. We’re the only school in our system, and everybody around here believes.

How did you think about taking over a program that’s historically really strong and keeping what’s made it good while putting your own identity into it?

We go into those situations and say, okay, what are the great things that are being done here? We want to keep those and keep them great — uphold the level of success and the standard of excellence that already exists. The second thing is, what are the good things, and how do we take those good things and elevate them to great? And then, what are the things that have always been done that nobody really knows why they’re done? We want to question those, and if they’re not necessary, we want to add some new things.

When you go into a program that already has tradition, there’s going to be community support and administrative support. People always ask me about the pressure of winning at a high level in those situations. Nobody’s going to put more pressure on me than I put on myself. And the expectation isn’t to win a state championship every year — it’s to put the best product on the field, embrace this community, uphold the traditions that have existed, and add your own flair to it. If you do those things, those communities will always respect and appreciate you.

How do you balance the clear goals and expectations of winning without focusing too much on outcomes over process?

If we don’t win, I won’t be the head coach at Carrollton High School — so that’s a big part of it. But if that’s all you’re focusing on, you’re doing these kids a disservice. The things that I believe make the game of football special are the things we hang our hat on — pride, discipline, effort, gratitude, unity, toughness, sacrifice. We pour into all of those intangible things, and I believe the outcome will be there.

We’ve gotten to the state championship three times in my five years here and we’ve lost them. We’ve been a little closer every time. But I tell our guys all the time that who they’re becoming in the process matters more. We’re more process-driven than outcome-driven, because I believe the process will set you up for success. Does it mean you’re always going to win every single game? No. But the majority of the time you probably will if you’re doing things the right way.

You’ve coached Trevor Lawrence and Julian Lewis. How do you think about developing the quarterback position?

I love that position — I played it. The physical piece and the mental piece both have to be in sync. We pour a lot into that position. I’m often harder on the quarterbacks than I am on anybody on the team, because everybody’s looking at that spot. I think it’s honestly the toughest position to play in all of football from everything that goes into it.

Here in Carrollton, we talk about playing intelligent football with freakish effort. There are going to be so many guys that from a physical standpoint are ready to make it to the next level. It’s that mental piece that takes just as much training. We pour just as much into the mental piece of learning the game — being a student of the game — and I can name guys year in and year out that get to the next level and are ready to play as freshmen because of that.

You mentioned emphasizing special teams at an early age. Why is that so important to you?

You can tell how much someone loves football by their attitude and effort when they’re on special teams. We’ve got a guy from Carrollton who’s been playing in the league — he’s with the Eagles now. He’s made it as long as he has because he started as a great special teams player. Now he’s playing nickel, corner, safety — he’s all over the place and made himself more marketable because he’s a pro in everything he does, including his mental approach to the game.

When I was coaching college ball, NFL guys were rolling through, and they didn’t just want to know about the kid at his position. They wanted to know what he does on special teams. If you’re a player and you’re a dude, you’re going to be producing on special teams as well.

For someone who doesn’t know Georgia high school football, how would you describe it and what makes it unique?

We’ve got talented players here. Georgia and Florida — there are talented players everywhere, but I think per capita we’ve got a lot of them. One of the areas that has really grown in this state over the past 10, 15, 20 years is the level of coaching. The commitment from local boards of education and administration — the guys we coach against on Friday nights are great coaches. The facilities, the commitment to facilities, and just supporting our overall athletes — that’s what makes it special.

What’s gotten better about high school football in the time you’ve been coaching, and what’s gotten worse?

From a betterment standpoint — the amount of coaching information and education that exists out there. Social media, podcasts, clinics, online versions of clinics. If you can type, you can find anything you want to learn. The level of coaching has improved. All these kids seeing social media videos of other kids training has encouraged other kids to train, so our guys are bigger, faster, and stronger than they were 10 or 15 years ago. A lot of programs are pouring more into nutrition now too.

As for how it’s worse — the overall integrity of the game, some of the things I loved about it. The media, the flash, the hype, the cameras in their face all the time. You play the game for the love of the game, for the man beside you and the community you’re a part of. That part’s changing. It’s kind of a trickle-down effect from the college level. The more marketable you as an individual can be, a lot of people believe that’s going to lead to success. That’s the part that I don’t really enjoy.

When your players are 10, 20, 30 years removed from your program, what do you hope they remember?

The first thing I hope they take away is that I cared about them and loved them for who they were, not what they could do. We try to treat all our guys the same — first string to fifth string. If they were a part of our program, I hope they enjoyed the experience and know that I cared about them. That I poured into them just as much from a character standpoint as I did from an X’s and O’s standpoint.

I think there’s evidence of that. Father’s Day is coming up, my birthday is coming up, and when those days roll around I get text messages from guys I coached 20 years ago — “Coach, happy Father’s Day, I love you.” I’ve got a guy I coached at Jacksonville State my first year as a GA — his son is now in our program as a seventh grader. That means I’m getting old, but the fact that he trusts me with his son, after I coached him in my very first year of coaching, that means something.

I hope I’m the same person as a head coach that I was as a graduate assistant. That I’ve been consistent in who I am throughout my career, regardless of the success, regardless of anything else. That’s what I hope they say.

I’d love to start by learning about your football journey — growing up in North Dakota, your high school career, and how you got introduced to the game.

So I grew up in Minot, North Dakota. I was a split-back veer quarterback in high school, and that’s kind of where I fell in love with the game. I had some really influential coaches and I went to a small Catholic school — I only graduated with sixty students — but we played both ways. The big reward in high school football in North Dakota is making it to the state finals and playing in the Fargo Dome. I got a chance to play there a couple of times and kind of fell in love with it. That’s where I ended up going to college.

When you’re a kid in Minot, North Dakota and the head coach from the Bison is sitting in your living room — that might as well have been Lou Holtz back in the day. It was pretty cool, and it’s not an opportunity a lot of people get to take advantage of. I went to NDSU as a Division II athlete in the fall of 2000, and the Bison moved up to Division I-AA in 2003. I’d like to say I went there as a Division II athlete, but I left as a Division I athlete. It was kind of fun to be part of that transition, and then once I left, they just took off. Being a Bison alum in the Twin Cities and watching what they’ve built has been a lot of fun.

What was football like growing up in North Dakota?

Long bus trips. There are four levels of football but not a lot of population. We played in the second-highest classification at Minot Ryan, and at that point I think there were only sixteen teams in that classification, so you kind of got to know everybody around the state. There’s no pro sports in North Dakota, so people really rally around small college athletics and high school sports — kind of like Montana. Friday nights were the place to be. We had a small student body, but pretty much every male athlete played football.

I could have told you when I was sixteen years old that I was going to grow up to be a high school teacher and a football coach. That experience I had at a young age was really important for establishing my philosophy and the way that I want to coach. Even the things we do today can go back to my high school and college mentors.

You played for a really successful program at Minot Ryan and then at NDSU. How did being around excellence at both levels shape your approach to building a program?

I’m grateful I got to see it done a lot of different ways. At NDSU, Bob Babich was our head coach and then left to coach in the NFL, and Craig Bohl came in. That transition — as stressful as it was at the time — was really valuable. We had two completely different coaching staffs, and the more experiences you have, the more it shapes your philosophy. I’d say I lean more toward the Coach Bohl philosophy than Coach Babbitt’s, not to take anything away from him — it just matches my personality better.

If you put coaches on a spectrum, on one side you’ve got the fiery motivators, the military drill sergeant types — that was more where Coach Babbitt leaned. On the other side, you’ve got the governor, the senator, the CEO types — the organizers, managers, delegators — and that was Coach Bohl. He had some great assistant coaches. Gus Bradley was on both staffs and later went on to become an NFL head coach. Jimmy Burrow — Joe Burrow’s dad — had a two-year stint in Fargo that overlapped with mine. He was our defensive coordinator and did a phenomenal job. Brent Vigen was on staff with the Bison when I was there too. I still consider him a good friend. There were a lot of really knowledgeable people.

What did it mean to you to be inducted into the NDSU Hall of Fame?

It was awesome. Very humbling. I’m really grateful for the experience — I had the chance to play college football in a great program, and I also ran track at NDSU, so I got to compete at the Drake Relays, the Mt. SAC Relays, some really prestigious events. Then you move on, get married, raise kids, start a career — and it was just really cool to press pause and go back, see some old faces, and celebrate things that happened twenty years ago.

It sounds like you always knew you wanted to coach. Did you ever consider staying in college football?

I was a graduate assistant after my playing days at NDSU, and Coach Bohl told me at the time, “There’s going to be some things you like and some things you don’t.” I kind of squinted at him like, what do you mean? After eighteen months I understood. There are real challenges to family life and work-life balance when you’re fully committed to moving up the ladder in college football — moving every two or three years.

My wife Kinsey was a track athlete at NDSU. We found a home here in the northwest metro of the Twin Cities and a community we really love. We’ve been here seventeen years already. Our kids are in the school district, we’ve got great friends — that kind of consistency just isn’t something you can have coaching college football, especially nowadays.

What were those first couple of jobs like — at Maple Grove and Coon Rapids?

Both are really big 6A metro schools. I was the defensive coordinator at Maple Grove when I was twenty-three years old. I got to see a program run at that level with two hundred high school players — what the offseason looks like, playbook development — and I got to call the defense, which was a great learning experience. Then my teaching position got cut and I landed at Coon Rapids, all during the great recession. I looked at those opportunities as a chance to get experience, knowing I wanted to be a head coach. It wasn’t going to happen at a big school at twenty-four or twenty-five, so I bided my time and ended up as an assistant at three schools — the last one being STMA. When the opportunity came, I felt ready.

What were the biggest things you had to learn once you became a head coach?

Communication with players and parents. I feel like I’m a lot better now at knowing what questions are going to come up, how to get people the answers they want, and how to anticipate problems before they arrive. Those are things that just come with experience.

The other big one is coaching the coaches. That’s where you get the ripple effects throughout the team. In those first couple of years I was maybe too locked into my side of the ball and not fully understanding the importance of developing philosophies within the ninth and tenth grade teams.

How do you build a staff?

I’ve always viewed the head coach’s role as the make-it-right guy. Early in my career I was a defensive coach working with linebackers or DBs. The last ten years I’ve been on the offensive side — I’m actually the offensive coordinator now. That’s just changed over time as I’ve trusted people on the staff who are ready to take on coordinator roles. There may come a time where I swing back to the defensive side if that’s what’s best for the staff.

If you can get people you trust in that coordinator role, that’s critical. After that, probably the next most important thing is the offensive line coach. It’s like coaching the pole vault in track — it’s so technical, so unique, and it’s the part of football that people watching don’t really understand the nuances of. We actually have an alum coaching with us right now. He was on the team when I first got here in 2011 and 2012, went on to play at St. Thomas, and now he’s back living in the community and coaching with us. He’s just awesome.

The strength coach is another big one. We have a partnership with a company called Training House that serves a lot of strength and conditioning needs in the Twin Cities metro. When you get the right people in the right places, you can trust them to do their job — and they get a valuable experience too.

Is it hard to get kids excited about playing offensive line?

That’s the pinch point on every team. When’s the last time you heard a fourth grader watching the Vikings say, “Great play by the left guard”? Their parents don’t talk about it, their friends don’t talk about it, they don’t watch that part of the game. You’ve got to really build those guys up and make sure you honor and recognize them as much as you can, because that’s where you win and lose games — even if that’s not where all the prestige is.

What do you attribute your success at STMA to over the years?

Really good kids. Kids that work hard. In those years where we can stay healthy and have one or two all-metro level players — especially someone who can really run, at running back or receiver, or a special quarterback — those are the hallmarks of our best teams. You keep working at your schemes and your practice organization, and some years you have those high-level kids and some years you don’t. The years you do, you hope to make a run.

What’s the profile of kids and families in your program?

We’re an outer ring suburb, about thirty miles northwest of Minneapolis. Fairly affluent, upper middle class — but we’re a public school, so we get kids from everywhere. People whose families have been in the community for five generations and people who just moved here two years ago. Our school has doubled in size in the last twenty years. When I was hired in 2009 as an assistant, we had 1,300 kids in the building. Now we’ve got 2,400. It’s urban sprawl — we’re right on Interstate 94, so we’re a bedroom community in a lot of ways. But then you also get farm kids who are milking cows alongside third and fourth generation families. It’s a unique dynamic.

How does STMA fit into the football ecosystem in Minnesota?

A couple years ago we moved into the Lake Conference, which is the most prestigious high school conference in the Twin Cities. It includes powerhouse programs like Eden Prairie, Minnetonka, Edina, and Wayzata — all one-high-school districts like us. Our defensive coordinator says at best it’s a 6A schedule, but when we play in the Metro West against Lake Conference teams it’s really Class 7A. Last year, eight teams made the state tournament and six of them were from the Lake Conference. Every week is a gauntlet — but in terms of participation numbers, facilities, and demographics, we fit in with those schools and we can compete.

What’s something about Minnesota high school football that people on the outside would underestimate or might not know?

We don’t have any spring ball practices, so we have a lot of multi-sport athletes. But even without spring ball, there’s seriously talented kids here. Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, the North Dakota schools — they recruit the Twin Cities heavily, and the North Dakota schools are as good as anyone in the FCS. Last year in the Lake Conference, every team had a Division I commit, and a couple had two. It’s fun to compete against those kids and then follow their careers.

The other thing is the run game. If you want to make it to U.S. Bank Stadium for the state championship, you’re going to have to win playoff games in November in Minnesota weather — cold, potentially rainy, potentially snowy, extremely windy. You can wing the ball around in September and early October and have success, but historically the best teams are the ones that can run the ball and stop the run.

You’re in the building every day as a teacher. How does that shape your relationships with players?

I teach U.S. History and Psychology. Most of my history classes are ninth and tenth graders, so I get to know a lot of my players in the classroom before they even get to the varsity level. I also think it sets a good example as a role model. Just as they’re expected to be student athletes, their coach is a teacher-coach. I take pride in my classroom and hold those kids to high standards in there just like I would on the field. That ability for them to see me as a professional in both roles sets the stage for what it means to be a successful student athlete.

How has high school football changed from when you started compared to today?

The spread college offenses have really trickled down to the high school level. Probably ten or fifteen years ago, the offense everyone was running was wing-T — down block, pull, misdirection. Now we’re seeing a lot more shotgun-based offenses, and defenses have adjusted with more odd fronts because you get more flexibility with only three hands in the dirt. What’s happening at the levels above us has filtered down to the schemes we’re seeing from opponents more and more.

The other part is participation. Most Twin Cities metro schools are probably down ten to twenty percent in total players on the roster. You get more specialization now — kids playing year-round baseball, year-round hockey, and lacrosse has really grown in the Midwest. It used to be that you rang the bell and everybody signed up for football. Now you really have to make sure players are having a good experience so you can retain them, because all of a sudden you’ve got a razor-thin team without any depth. Kids have way more options than they did fifteen years ago.

Do you encourage multi-sport athletes?

Our best players historically have been multi-sport athletes. It’s pretty rare for a kid who only plays football three months a year and trains the other nine to really succeed. The more competitive situations kids are in, the better. We really encourage them to play as many sports as they can, and most of our best players do. The big difference I’ve noticed is we have a lot of two-sport athletes now — not nearly the three-sport athletes we’d have had fifteen years ago. As I talk with other coaches in the metro, that’s pretty common.

How do you stay sharp as a coach, and how do you develop your staff?

The best resources for me are other high school coaches and junior college coaches. When you listen to big college coaches talk, they just have so much more time with their players. You have to be stubborn with the size of your menu — the schemes you’re going to put in — and be really intentional about how you scaffold those from one year to the next, starting with your middle school and ninth and tenth grade kids. You want to appear complicated, but the ability to layer your scheme from year to year is what really matters.

Last question: ten, twenty, thirty years from now, when your players are husbands, fathers, people out in the world — what do you hope they take away from playing for you and your program?

I hope they really enjoyed their role on the team. The things they’ll remember are the time they spent with their buddies — the in-between-practice moments, the bus rides. Those are the things I remember and really cherish.

But I also hope they learned some life lessons. Some grit. I feel like that’s a trait we don’t have enough of in society today — the shortening of attention spans, the instant gratification. I hope they come away with the ability to stick to something, to overcome adversity and challenges, and to find a way to fight through it. That would be the goal.

Growing up in Breathitt County, what did football mean to you as a kid, and what did it mean to the community you grew up in?

Football was relatively new in Breathitt County. It started in 1974 — my dad was on the first team there. My mom was a school teacher, my dad was a coal miner. My mom couldn’t get a job in our county, so we drove thirty minutes to a neighboring county for school — and that county didn’t even have football. So I couldn’t play until 5th grade, and when I did, it was 8-man football.

Any kid in Kentucky at that time, your first love is basketball. I played all three — baseball, basketball, football. But we had a Hall of Fame coach in Mike Holcomb, who’s one of my best friends now. Wouldn’t have thought that when I was playing for him, but that’s how the relationship changed over time. He came in and really started throwing the football. Most of Kentucky back then was power-I, wing-T, wishbone — and he came in no-huddle, moving up and down the field, throwing it all over the place. And I was the quarterback, so it was the best thing in the world for me.

Where I grew up was about forty minutes from where Tim Couch grew up. There’s a road called Tim Couch Pass out there. I remember waiting outside a basketball game once — he was a really good basketball player too — just to get him to sign something. Quarterback play, Tim Couch — he was 6’4”, I was 6’. A little different. But watching him, watching Hal Mumme come to Kentucky and throw it everywhere, for a quarterback growing up where I did, there was nothing better.

We went 7-and-5 my junior year. We had a bunch of guys coming back, and my senior year we went 15-and-0. I threw for over 4,000 yards and 58 touchdowns and we won a state championship.

You mentioned Mike Holcomb — you played for him, won a title with him, and then came back and coached under him. What did you take from him?

He’s got a sign in my office right now: When you’re through learning, you’re through. That’s something I’ve always carried from him.

He grew up in a power-I, wishbone world, and then kept evolving. When I came back as an assistant, we were running a lot of what Rich Rodriguez ran at West Virginia — spread concepts, inside zone, outside zone. We had a 3,000-yard rusher out of the spread. So he taught me to adapt to your talent, to keep getting better, and to never stop learning. He was a gap-scheme guy for years, and then he was running zone football. That kind of willingness to change shaped how I think about the game.

I still talk to him two or three times a week. He’s still coaching at Breathitt as an assistant. He’s probably been through everything I’ve ever run into, and I’ve got a sounding board I can call when something comes up. I’m very blessed to still have that.

You won a state championship with him, then went to Western Kentucky, then came back to coach. When did you know coaching was what you wanted to do?

Growing up, my uncle had a buddy who was a civil engineer — made really good money — and I said, that’s what I want to do. Be a civil engineer, make money, and coach football. I got to that first math class in college and said, this ain’t for me.

So I said I want to be a coach. I thought about the GA route, trying to work up that way. But I had a chance to go back home and coach with my younger brother. I started making a little money. It was hard to leave that and go be a GA somewhere, making nothing. It worked out for me.

You took your first head coaching job at Perry County Central at 25 years old. What was that like?

Perry County Central was known for basketball. That’s what you thought of when you heard that school name. We had guys coming in with that background — football had never won a playoff game there.

In my four years, we won two playoff games. I started from rock bottom there — had to build it from the ground up. This is where we’re going, here are the changes we’re making, let’s go. And we had some real success. I think they’ve won one playoff game since. So we did something. But it taught me what it looks like to start from zero.

And then Corbin — which has a good backstory, because you beat Corbin 51-to-nothing for the state championship in 2002.

Right — and twelve years later, I’m the head coach there. That was a cool little story.

Corbin loves football. It really exploded for us there. I think my first year we lost in the regional finals off a crazy play, and then from there we were in the semifinals or the state championship every year after that. Great run. Six years, five district championships, four regional championships. And two state finals — lost both of them.

What I learned there, and what I carried to Boyle County, is that everything matters. In the 2017 championship game, we had some turnovers, some things we let slide. And it comes back and bites you in the end. Every step matters. This foot, that foot. The little things you let go in September become the difference in December. That attention to detail is something I really locked in on when I got here.

In 2020 you took over at Boyle County — following Chuck Smith, who’d won six state championships there, including five in a row. How did you approach taking over something like that?

I’ve never known anybody in any of the jobs I’ve taken. I’ve gotten them all on my own, and I feel good about that — I don’t owe anybody for getting me in.

Coming into Boyle County, I was in a different mindset than when I’d taken the other jobs. At Perry County and Corbin, I had to come in and do a complete reset. Build from the ground up. When I left Corbin, I said: if I’m going to leave, I want to go somewhere that’s already here, and I’m just going to make it better. I don’t want to have to change everything. That was Boyle County.

So I took the job, moved my family — and then COVID happened. I’m thinking, what did I just do? I moved my family here and we don’t even know if we’re going to have a season.

They’d also lost a lot of players. A Notre Dame commit. Reese Smith, who was going to West Virginia, their Mr. Football. So we took over with a lot of uncertainty. But a couple weeks in, I called Coach Smith — and his son Brandon had been my backup quarterback at Western Kentucky, so there were already some ties there. I said, hey, I just want you to know I appreciate the culture you built here, and I’m going to do my best to keep it going and make it better. We’ve had a good relationship ever since.

We kept a lot of what he’d done. There’s a coach here named Jeff Hester who’d been the defensive coordinator for twenty years — he stayed, and I learned a ton from him just watching how he operated, the attention to detail, nothing getting past him. He made me a better coach. I came in calling the offense, added some different uniform looks — we’ve got an all-white and an all-black now, which the kids love. The personality of the program is a little different, just because my personality is different from Coach Smith’s. I’m going to coach you really hard, but I’m going to love you hard too. But the foundation he left was as strong as anything I’d ever seen, and we’ve built on it.

Five state championships in six years. What do you attribute that to?

Staff, first. We’ve got multiple guys in the building, guys who are bought in completely. A lot of them I brought with me, and a couple have been here a while. They understand what this program is.

The other big piece is Rebel Boot Camp. It starts January 4th or 6th, whenever school comes back after the holidays, and it runs every morning from 6:45 to 8:45, five days a week. Speed work, agility, everything in the weight room. And all of our coaches are there — at 6:45, every morning, with the kids. That’s where the relationships get built. That’s where the accountability becomes culture.

Whether you play basketball, run track, play baseball — if you’re going to play football for us, you’re there every morning. And there’s no bus. They’ve got to figure out how to get there, whether that’s a parent, a teammate, whatever. That’s on them.

Our best player a couple years back — Montavin Quisenberry, Mr. Football, plays at Louisville now — came in late one day. Our policy was you have to do 35 up downs if you’re late. He walked in the door and started doing them before I ever said a word. I didn’t have to say anything. He just knew. That’s the culture. Nobody’s above it. When your best player holds himself accountable without being told, you know the thing is real.

How do you keep a team hungry when winning is the expectation? When kids come into your program and all they’ve known is Boyle County as a dynasty?

Every year is completely different. The team that wins it is never the same team that won it before. Different leadership, different personalities, different things they respond to.

I don’t think I’ll ever fully get over 2024 — we lost in the region finals to Covington Catholic. That was a season where we went to Ohio and beat St. Edward, ranked around 12th in the country at the time, and then we didn’t play our best late. We peaked early instead of playing better in the postseason like we had in the years we’d won. So we kept that runner-up trophy. We might have put it in the middle of the gym during winter workouts, just as a reminder. There’s a shorthand in our program now — remember what happened with this group. You can’t always manufacture hunger. But when they actually felt a loss that stings, you can point to it.

And there’s something on the wall in our weight room — Neal Brown donated money and we redid the whole space. One of the quotes we put in there: It’s not the most talented team that wins a championship every year. It’s the team that loves each other and comes together. I believe that wholeheartedly. We’re not the most talented team in Kentucky every year. There are programs with bigger, faster kids than us. But we’re going to play together, we’re going to love each other, and we’re going to compete on every play. If you can do that better than us, we’ll see what happens.

What’s the demographic of kids you’re coaching? Who are the kids that come through Boyle County?

Just a bunch of hard-working kids. There’s a lot of farm area around here. They’re not flashy. Even our best guys. Quisenberry was maybe 5’8”, 165 pounds — but he could run. This past year we had Seneca Driver, who’s 6’7”, 245, and can run like a deer. He’s the number-one tight end in the country. But those elite division-one guys are few and far between for us. Most of our players go play D-II or NAIA. We’ve been lucky with this little run, and when you’ve got those players, you better win with them. That’s been our thing.

What do people outside of Kentucky not understand about high school football in this state?

I think they underestimate the quality. I’m a junkie — I’m constantly watching film, constantly reaching out to coaches from Alabama, from Georgia, trying to understand how they do it differently.

I think Kentucky is behind in some things, just by the rules we’ve set for ourselves. We give up June — there’s a dead period that I think hurts our guys in terms of getting out and being seen. You give that up and you’re putting your players at a disadvantage. So I try to take my guys to as many camps as I can — Penn State, Ohio State, Ole Miss. Not just to get them in front of programs, but to show them there’s something bigger out there.

We’ve also started our own coaching clinic — the Commonwealth Coaches Clinic — and had 350 coaches there last year. That’s our fourth year doing it. We’re bringing in guys from all over, sharing ideas, pushing each other to get better. That kind of rising tide is what elevates the whole state. I think Kentucky football is catching up, and I think we’re going to keep getting better.

In what ways is high school football better than when you were playing and coaching? And in what ways has it gotten worse?

Strength and conditioning has improved the most. I remember when I was playing — we would just bench, squat, clean, a few auxiliaries, and let’s go throw. That was it. Then I go to Western Kentucky, and the first practice I’m doing hurdle work, and if you knock a hurdle over you do ten push-ups. I had about 150 push-ups that first day. I said, I’ve got to get better at this. And I said, when I’m a coach, my guys are going to be prepared.

Player development too. At one point, everyone got into wristbands — and yeah, wristbands are fine, but are you actually teaching them the game? Are they understanding it? We don’t do wristbands. Our best players can play multiple positions because they understand football. Quisenberry was our best slot receiver and our best free safety. Seneca Driver is our number-one tight end and our best outside linebacker. That football IQ — developing the whole player — that keeps getting better across the sport.

What’s gotten harder is everything around the game. The year-round demands are real. It never stops — lifting in the offseason, summer schedule, fall. And you’re doing all of it while trying to develop kids who are dealing with things we never had to deal with. The phone stuff. The social media stuff. Being present, being in the moment — that’s a constant conversation now with this generation. And the mental toughness piece. Getting kids to push further than they think they can go isn’t just physical anymore. It’s a whole other layer of the job.

What are some things that people who aren’t in the coaching world don’t understand about what it actually takes?

You have to go head-first. I don’t stick my toe in the water to see if it’s warm. I jump in head-first — and your family has to do that with you.

My wife and my three kids, they’re all in it. It is football Friday in our house. It is football season, year-round. And one of the things I feel best about here at Boyle is something we call skill meals. The skill position players come to my house, and our offensive line coach has the linemen at his house. They get to see us being dads. They get to see us with our kids, around our families. We feed them, make sure they’re taken care of. The community sponsors a lot of it.

But what it really does is open the room up. We have what we call “why” talks — the coaches share their why, the players share theirs. You’re in the locker room, more relaxed, and people open up in ways they won’t on a football field. We had a young man stand up once and say, who y’all think my mom is, that’s really not my mom. Nobody in the room had any idea. You find out who these kids actually are. What they’re carrying.

I tell our guys — the byproduct is winning. That’s what everyone talks about, that’s the thing that gets in the paper. But the real thing is teaching them to be accountable to each other, to handle things not going their way, to play the next play. If we can do that, the football tends to take care of itself.

Last one. When your players are ten, twenty, thirty years removed from playing for you — what do you hope they take from it?

You hope that when things get hard — and things will get hard, whether it’s a marriage, being a parent, a career — they don’t quit. You hope they learned somewhere in this program that when it gets hard, you lean in. You play the next play.

I’m starting to experience the full circle of it a little now. Guys I coached at Perry County and Corbin are now dads. Now coaches. One of the biggest pains in the ass I had at Perry County — a really, really good player — he’s now a football coach there and a dad. I said, are you acting the same way with your guys that you acted with me? We laughed about it.

But that’s the thing. You want them to be good husbands, good dads, good citizens, people with a job in their community who take care of the people around them. The wins are great — I love winning, there’s nothing better. But if twenty years from now a kid who played for me is a better man because of what he learned here, that’s what I’m after. That’s the win that lasts.

You grew up in a football family — your dad coached at Conway, the gym there is named after him, your brother was a defensive coordinator. Was it ever really a question for you that this is what you were going to do?

It was a foregone conclusion. Having my brother and my dad both involved in it the way they were — I was just going to be a football coach. The only question was how it was going to unfold.

I got a degree in health and PE and wasn’t totally sure what came next. My brother said, just come down here to UAM, GA for a year, work on your master’s, see if you like it. So I did. After a year, the head coach hired me as an assistant. I was single, so I was the dorm guy. You can only imagine how all that goes at a small Division II school out in the country — there wasn’t a lot to do, and the guys in the dorm made up some interesting things to keep themselves busy. It kept me pretty busy to say the least.

Bobby and I both moved to High School Football when the head coach Tommy Barnes retired after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1997. He retired, and at the college level, when that happens, you better find a job. My brother left and took an assistant job at Ashdown. I landed at Greenwood under Ronnie Peacock as the defensive coordinator. We won the state championship there in 2000 — the first one Greenwood ever won. Coach Peacock took the Rogers job and brought me with him. I really learned a lot as an assistant for about nine years under Coach Peacock, and when the right head job came open, my wife and I jumped on the opportunity.

Mayflower was your first head job — a 3A school. What was that experience like?

We loved the town, the school and the administration. The community was a really neat place to live. We lived right by the school, and it was small enough that I had to take care of mowing the fields. My wife would walk around the track with our young kids while I mowed and painted the field. Those were the good old days.

We went 16-7 in two years and made it to the playoffs for the first time in a while. My forte, is building programs — fixing them and moving on to the next one. We really enjoy bringing a program out of a tough spot. But it’s not a fast process, and it gets harder in a microwave society where everybody wants everything right away. When you want to build a program the right way, you have to find an administration that’s going to give you the time to do it. That’s one of my criteria going into any job. If I feel like they’re in a hurry or want a rush job, I’m not the guy.

Talk about your first run at North Little Rock — what were the keys to building that program?

When we came in, some of the staff had applied for the head job themselves. This was only my second head coaching job and I’d been doing it for two years. I hadn’t earned anybody’s respect yet. So all I knew was to go to work, hit the ground running.

Every day when I’m driving into coach, I’m thinking to myself I’m going to out work all my opponents today. There are going to be people who know more about football — some brilliant people out there — but nobody is going to outwork me. That’s always been where I hang my hat. I’m going to do the jobs nobody else wants to do. A lot of head coaches will walk by something and leave it or simply don’t have time to mess with it. I can’t do that. Sometimes I wish that I could but I’ve got too much pride in how I’m doing my job. Whether it’s a player who needs attention, something that needs to be painted, or a bathroom that needs to be cleaned — I’ll do it. I’m not above any of that.

When your coaches and players see that you’re not scared to work, that you’ll roll up your sleeves, they feed off it. You’re the leader, you set the tone. I’m going to set it by outworking everybody, being the first one here and the last one to leave. Does that happen every single time? No, because I’ve got some coaches now who believe the same way I do. So now it turns into a thing where nobody wants to be the first to leave. That’s a good culture to have.

Your departure from North Little Rock your first time around was very public and difficult. Now that you’re back and looking at it in the rearview — how do you process that chapter?

It’s been a whirlwind. My wife and I have just been blown away by everything that’s happened.

One thing we never did after we left was bad-mouth anyone. We just didn’t. My kids stayed in school here. We still lived in North Little Rock. We weren’t going to pull them. So we stayed ingrained in this community even through the eight years we were at Parkview. We still had friends here, we didn’t burn any bridges, and I think that’s part of the reason we were able to come back.

There are a lot of things I could have done differently. And they could have done things differently too. But that’s the way the good Lord wanted it to be, and there were a lot of lessons learned on both sides. They thought well enough of me to bring me back — I’m grateful for that.

What we went through personally during that stretch was really, really hard. Every place we go, we put our heart and soul into it, and we felt like North Little Rock was a place we could be for a long time. So we went above and beyond. Bottom line is a lot of things happened…long story short it eventually cost me my job, my marriage, and put us into bankruptcy. But I was blessed to be able to marry the same woman again and without a doubt, that was the biggest factor to all of our success moving forward.

I think if you handle things the right way, good things can happen. It may not always look like it did for me. But good things are going to come if you try to handle yourself right, if you step back and think before you say things, type things or post things you’ll keep a lot of problems away. A lot of that comes with being older, growing up, and having experience.

We’re so happy to be back, and people are excited for us to be back. We just want to do it where it lasst long after we’re gone.

You got back into coaching at Parkview, and eventually won three state championships there, including a 14-0 season where you snapped Bryant’s 55-game winning streak on their home field. Talk about your time there.

When I took over in 2017, the program hadn’t had a winning season since 2009. Hadn’t won a state title since 1978. There was a big hill to climb.

I was in the roofing business when they called and offered me the job. That was a tough two years. I’ve been in coaching my whole life — that stretch was just an odd time in my life. But once we got going at Parkview, it clicked. We went 33-0 before we got beat. We went 14-0 and beat Bryant over at their place. They had a 55-game winning streak. They’d won five state championships in a row in 7A and we were 5A. To go over there and do that, and then win the state championship, was monumental.

We built it from the ground up. We had great players, coaches and our culture was electric. Players and coaches loved being there. Consistent winning is a byproduct of great culture.

Most coaches wouldn’t consider going back to a place that let them go. How did this opportunity come about, and when did you know it was the right move?

We started talking right after we won our 3rd state championship at Parkview. There were some people from North Little Rock — Johnny Rice and Daryl Fimple, both coaches or previous coaches at NLR. Johnny came by my Parkview office and we had a long conversation about the job, FCA, life. That conversation along with several others in the community got the wheels really rolling. You have to give a lot of credit to our AD Wes Bilon. He really worked hard to make this happen. Our Superintendent Gregory Pilewski and our School Board.

Athletic Director Wes Bilon and his wife came to our house to meet with my wife and I. My wife had some reservations, which — if you think about everything we went through — makes complete sense. Not only was I fired, it was on a livestream until 2:30 in the morning. They had to open up an auditorium at a different school so people could go watch. I say all that to say — my kids were at the age where other kids say things to them. That was a tough hurdle.

But the people calling me back were all new. New board, new administrators. When I got the job, the headline was just: Welcome Home. That meant a lot.

And honestly, the stars lined up. My son was going into ninth grade at North Little Rock. They told me I wouldn’t have to teach. The pay was better. We did our research on the program — We knew what talent was coming up, and they had some real players, national-level guys. The biggest thing was we had unfinished business. Five of the last six years we were here we made the semifinals and lost a close game. We never got to the finals. So the mindset going back in was: We have things we didn’t get to FINISH.

That’s actually our team theme this year. FINISH. Finish your reps, finish your drills, finish ball games. Last year we were in three games we should have won and didn’t — we didn’t know how to finish yet. We didn’t know how to win. We have made huge gains and there are many more to make.

Your brother was part of your staff at Parkview. What did working with him teach you?

My brother’s won several state championships himself. He’s actually the head coach at Parkview now. We’ve always shared information, but working together those three years, I picked up some things I hadn’t had before.

A lot of it was the mental part — how to motivate a kid without tearing him down. He was a mastermind at it, real crafty with it. I picked up on those things.

The other big one was saving the legs. The philosophy is that you want your guys at 110 percent for the whole game, and you manage their load accordingly. We run a lot of the same systems. But those two things — the mental piece and the leg-saving approach — have made me a better coach, and I think they’re going to make this rebuild at North Little Rock smoother than the first time around.

You’re in 7A Central — one of the toughest conferences in the state. How does that shape the way you build and prepare?

In the summer, we go to as many team camps as we’re allowed — seven or eight. And we’re not just taking the varsity. We’ve got a JV unit, a freshman unit, and we’re sending guys all over the place. We had 70 kids at Conway High Team Camp today. Tomorrow it’s ninth graders at another camp. Then back to Conway for a team camp. We try and put our JV team in as many team camp as our varsity. You have to create depth in 7A.

Developing players is really, really important in 7A. You’ve got to have depth. I’m not opposed to playing guys both ways — when we beat Bryant that first game of the year, We had six guys going both ways. They had nobody doing that. It can be done. You just have to be strategic about managing their breaks and their series.

We’re also starting 4th, 5th, and 6th grade football through the school — something we haven’t had before. That’s going to be big for us. And we’re building a $21 million indoor facility, which I think gives us another boost. In central Arkansas, kids will move around on you in a heartbeat. You better have good facilities and you better take care of them. Our kids don’t buy anything — two or three pairs of cleats, two or three sets of gloves, anything you can wear that’s legal in a game we issue it. The only thing we don’t issue is guts. We will also spend up to $15,000 in protein and creatine a year. We also are able to feed our players year round which is big.

We’ve also just started a counseling program that’s closer to what you’d see at the college level. Our counselors meet with each player — on the mental health side, but also to build an individual profile for every kid so my coaches know the best way to teach him. Sometimes it takes a full year to figure out how to coach a kid. If you can cut that out and get right to what motivates him, you’re saving a lot of wasted time. I’m really excited about it. Early results are fascinating.

What do you think people outside Arkansas don’t appreciate about the football there?

We don’t have Allen, Texas. We don’t have those massive programs in massive states. Places like Atlanta. But I’m going to tell you something — we have some of the best football coaches in this country right here in Arkansas. They have to be good, because we don’t have the resources or the population that a lot of these other places have. So our coaches develop players individually in ways that other places don’t have to and they do a phenomenal job.

And think about the roots here. Bear Bryant was raised in Fordyce, Arkansas and the legend Frank Broyles had a great run at Arkansas. It’s a football state. We produce great players and great coaches, and I think the level of competition at the top of our game is as good as it gets anywhere.

When your players are ten, twenty, thirty years removed from playing for you — what do you hope they say?

We’ve actually started hearing that, since coming back. A lot of my old players have come around, and we want them around our current players. They understand how we think, what the expectations and standards are. Some of them, their sons are getting close to playing age — so we might be coming full circle on a few.

What they’ve said to me is: I’m a different person because I was in your program. That’s a bigger compliment than winning a state championship. In five years, most people don’t even know who won 7A. You’d have to look it up.

But the opportunity we have as coaches to change these kids — a lot of times you don’t even know the fruits of your labor. Some of these kids move to California or New York and you never see them again. But then you run into somebody and they start telling stories, and they’re always telling stories. You think it was the smallest thing, but they thought it was a big deal. When they tell you they’re raising their own kids a certain way because of what they learned in your program — that’s what it’s all about. That’s a lasting impact that you have an opportunity to be APART of changing kids and their families for generations. That’s what drives me.

Take me back to the beginning — where you grew up, your family’s connection to football, and how all of that led to you becoming a coach.

I grew up in LeClaire, Iowa. My dad was the head coach at Pleasant Valley High School — he’s in the Iowa High School Hall of Fame and won the only state title in Pleasant Valley history. He was there for 30 years. He played at Mendel Catholic High School and won the 1968 City Championship as a junior in front of 67,000 fans at Soldier Field. He then played at the University of Iowa, was a GA at Syracuse, and then settled here in the Quad Cities after student teaching. He met my Mom and never went back to Chicago.

I played for my dad at Pleasant Valley. Then I went to Upper Iowa University, which is a small Division II school in northeast Iowa. From there I was a GA at St. Cloud State, then a GA at Rockford College. My first job was at Thornwood High School in South Holland, on the south suburbs of Chicago — I was their quarterbacks coach and a PE teacher. The summer after my first year there, I was hired as the head football coach at Thornridge High School, which was in the same district over in Dalton, Illinois.

It was as chaotic a first head coaching job as you could imagine. About halfway through the season, our kids were told the school was going to be shut down and turned into a freshman center. That added this layer of — not pressure, exactly, but this feeling that this was it for Thornridge football. And our guys were great. We made the playoffs. We won a triple-overtime game against Thornton Township in Week 9 just to get in, then lost in the first round. After that, with my wife pregnant with our second kid, we wanted to get closer to family, so we went back to Iowa. I was at Cedar Rapids Prairie for four years. Then, because my wife is from Arizona, we ended up at Desert Mountain High School in North Scottsdale. I was the head coach there. And then the opportunity came to come back here to Moline. Close to family, a great place to raise kids, and I took it.

Did you always know you wanted to coach?

I did. Growing up in our house, football was at the forefront of pretty much everything, year-round. I grew up going to football camps from the time I was little. But the thing that really stuck with me from a young age was the relationships I watched my dad build. Former players would literally come back in the summer and visit our house — just to see him, to share where their lives were going, to talk about their successes since leaving Pleasant Valley. At the time I just thought, this is incredible, these guys I watched on Friday nights are coming back to see my dad. Then as you get older, you realize that’s what building a program the right way looks like. Those players had been challenged mentally and physically. They’d been pushed. But the goal my dad always had was to make the best young men he could. And those relationships outlasted every win. Even now, when I run into his former players, all they want to talk about is him. How’s your dad? How’s your dad? There’s nothing better than that.

When you took the Moline job in 2017, what did you inherit? What did you know needed to change?

Moline has a good tradition — there’s a real history of competing for conference championships. But I had a vision for what I wanted it to be. We had some really good coaches on the staff who bought in right away.

My initial plan was to run the offense we’d run in Arizona, which was pass-heavy. Our offensive coordinator at Desert Mountain was Kurt Warner. So this wasn’t some ordinary passing system — this was a brilliant football mind, someone who sees the game at an exceptional level. We thought, this could still be unique here in the Quad Cities. We go through the summer, we look great in passing leagues, and then we start the season 0-and-2. A lot of dropped passes. Struggles with the fundamentals, blocking and tackling. So we scrapped everything offensively. Stayed shotgun-based but became a power-counter, sweep, ISO team — a lot of unbalanced sets. And we won seven straight. Lost in the first round of the playoffs to Mount Carmel, who came down and got after us. But we’d found something.

After the season I sat back and asked myself: what do we have here year-to-year at Moline that we can actually hang our hat on? And the answer was tough, physical offensive linemen — not always big, but guys who could move. Wing-T guards and tackles. A good stable of running backs. Quarterbacks who were talented but maybe weren’t going to carry a spread system on their backs. So I reached out to Butch Goncharoff, connected through a mutual friend, and that pretty much changed everything about how we do things.

My dad had been a Wing-T coach, so a lot of Butch’s offensive principles were already familiar to me — I was a Wing-T quarterback for my dad growing up. We took a ton of what Butch does philosophically and schematically and tied it into the same terminology my dad used at Pleasant Valley. We spent the summer installing it, and our own defense was dominating us in practice. Our coaches started second-guessing things. Then the first time we ran it against somebody else, it just clicked. Big play after big play. Guys getting off the ball and moving people, building confidence. We went 9-and-2 that year and lost in the second round to Batavia. That was the moment — we’re like, this is it. This gives our kids a chance to compete against suburban schools with different demographics and different resources. And our kids believed in it. That’s always the biggest thing.

What specifically did Butch help shape for you — philosophically, schematically, how you practice?

He said something early on that stuck with me and that I haven’t stopped thinking about since. He said: It’s not what you do. It’s how you do it. Teams from all over the country run the Wing-T. Teams run the spread, the triple option, whatever it may be. But how you do it makes it unique.

When we first sat down and started going through film, his attention to detail was just next level. And I think we bonded over that — I love the details too. There’s a rhyme and reason behind everything. Every footstep has a purpose. So once I decided we were going to be a Wing-T program, the question became: how do we make it the absolute best version it can be? How do we make it look a little different from everyone else?

When I started watching Bellevue film, I noticed right away it didn’t look like other Wing-T teams. There was so much attention to specific footwork, to blocking angles, to the proper technique as an offensive lineman or running back. The backs playing without the ball — the fakes, the way it all fits together. It just looks different. And that’s what we set out to replicate.

The scheme itself has a lot of what my dad did at Pleasant Valley, a lot of what other Wing-T teams run. But it’s how you do it and how you teach it. That’s what separates great from good. And that’s what Butch reinforced for me.

You call the offense yourself and coach a position group. How have you thought about the balance between being in the weeds versus delegating to assistants as a head coach?

The only place I didn’t call our offense was at Desert Mountain in Arizona. When you have a resource and a football mind like Kurt Warner, that’s a no-brainer — you hand it over. But as a head coach everywhere else, I’ve always called our offense and coached a position. I like being tied in. And I like coaching a position because of the relationships it lets you build with your players.

But beyond that — I don’t want people to think I’m too big for any task. There’s nothing too small that I can’t do or don’t want to do. Whether that’s dragging bags out to the practice field or setting up the snap count for our Wing-T Skelly work. That philosophy connects directly to what we’re trying to teach our kids: we’re all accountable to each other. Nobody is bigger than the program. No individual is ever going to be bigger than what Moline football means to this community.

Describe the Quad Cities for people who’ve never been — the community, the demographics, the kinds of kids who come through your program.

On the Illinois side you get a lot more diversity, a lot more socioeconomic range. Moline, Rock Island, United Township — you’re going to get kids from every aspect of life, every background. We have a lot of blue-collar kids. Our kids are tough. They’re not selfish. When you watch our team on a Friday night, you’re going to see a very diverse group that, I’d like to think, understands what it means for kids from different backgrounds to come together toward a common cause.

And you see it at practice — you can’t tell which kid is a sophomore or a junior or a senior because they all mesh. Their buy-in isn’t just to the team. It’s to representing our school, our program, our community the right way. Forty thousand people in Moline, another thirty-five-hundred or so in Coal Valley feeding into our school. And we all wear maroon. There’s no thought of going somewhere else. People still take pride in that.

What does a Friday night feel like in Moline?

Still old-school. Still Friday Night Lights. People go out of their way to be there. That’s true for all sports — walk into Wharton Field House in the winter when basketball is going and the place is packed. It’s special to be a part of, and I’m proud my own kids are going to get to experience it now that they’re coming through high school themselves.

You run to Hy-Vee on a Sunday morning after coaches’ meetings to grab something to grill for the family, and people are stopping you in the aisle. Hey Coach. Congrats. The kids were great on Friday. You can’t put a price tag on being part of a community that supports you and genuinely cares about the young people coming through. That’s something I don’t take for granted.

After 2023, one of the worst seasons you’ve had as a coach, you bounced back and won the conference title in 2024. Did you change anything between those two season?

We lost close games in 2023 — I think three games by one score. We gave some of them away at the end. But there was also, and I’ll knock on wood saying this because it was my one and only time dealing with it at Moline — we had some off-field discipline issues. We had to dismiss some kids going into the Rock Island game. A couple were two-year starters already as juniors. Good football players. And honestly, good kids who made a poor judgment call.

So we didn’t have enough to get over the hump in the close games that season. We had a lot of great football players. We just didn’t have enough. And I still have regrets for those seniors on the 2023 team, because they were great kids, a lot of them went on to play college football, they represented us the right way. We just couldn’t finish.

Once the offseason started in January, the kids who’d been dismissed were given their opportunity to come back. And to their credit, they were really good all the way through that next season. Our coaches did a great job getting guys back on track — back to the fundamentals, back to the accountability piece, back to understanding that nobody’s bigger than this program. That mindset readjustment was huge. That following fall, they were outstanding.

How do you think about building your staff? What do you look for in assistant coaches?

Trust. If you’ve got guys you can trust, guys who are all on the same bus going the same direction, everything gets a whole lot easier.

My dad still coaches our offensive line. He’s been on the staff since I came to Moline. We just got a retirement from one of our other O-line coaches — he’d been here for 30 years, retired as a teacher and a coach. Those two were together from the beginning. The continuity on our offensive line has been something we’ve been able to count on.

Beyond that, we’re very fortunate that we have a huge number of coaches in our district — at the high school, the middle schools, the elementary schools. They’ve known these kids since they were little. That’s unique. You get a kid in camp at nine years old, and nine years later he’s playing for you as a senior. They’ve had him in class. They’ve been around him in all kinds of contexts. The relationships start early, and they compound. Our school district takes a lot of pride in bringing coaches into the district — if you’re a good coach, you’re almost certainly a good teacher, and there’s something behind that.

You’re both a teacher at Moline and the head football coach. What’s it like being able to be with the kids outside of football?

I think it’s a huge advantage. I get to see these kids outside of the fall in a completely different light. You’re not in the middle of a practice or a game — you’re just getting to know them. It builds a layer of relationship that you can’t manufacture on a football field.

And it matters when the hard moments come. When you have to get on somebody, or give them real criticism, they understand it’s not personal. They know you believe in them. That’s why you’re challenging them. Without that relationship in place, that message lands differently.

What are some of the hardest things about being a head coach that people on the outside don’t see?

The time. That’s just part of what you sign up for — football is year-round now. Lifting in the offseason, the summer schedule, the fall. If you’re not learning how to do something better in the offseason and spending time in the weight room with these guys, you’re falling behind. And we take pride in training our kids for every sport, not just football. We want them to thrive on the basketball court, the wrestling mat, the baseball field, the track. We want them to maximize every opportunity they have as athletes.

The burnout is real with a lot of coaches I know. You love it, you love it, you love it — and then it starts to wear on you. We’re very fortunate that we don’t have a lot of parent issues. Our expectations are high, but we have really supportive parents who share our vision for what we’re trying to do. That’s not a given. A lot of coaches deal with a lot of stuff off the field — specialization conflicts, tensions with other sports in the building. We don’t deal with much of that and I’m very thankful for it.

I’ve been around football my whole life. I wouldn’t know what to do without it. But I hear it from friends in the profession all the time — the burnout is real.

What’s gotten better about high school football? What’s gotten worse?

Player development keeps getting better every year. The resources these kids have access to now — information, training science, the ability to watch how a Christian McCaffrey treats his sleep or his nutrition at a click of a button — we didn’t have any of that. And most schools now are training athletes, not doing bodybuilder workouts or powerlifting programs. The emphasis on mobility, plyometrics, speed work — the question isn’t “how much can you squat” anymore. It’s “are you moving the bar fast? Will it translate to the field?” The science keeps getting better.

On the other side, these kids are exposed to variables that weren’t around even 12 or 15 years ago. Social media is the obvious one. I think about kids feeling pressure around posting offers, reading things that people post about them, fearing judgment in real time. The addiction piece of the phones is a real problem. Be in the moment. Be present. That’s a constant conversation now.

And I think it connects to something bigger: kids struggle to be challenged mentally. There’s a mental toughness issue around what they perceive they can actually get through versus what they actually can. A huge part of the job now is pushing them beyond where they think they can go. That’s not just physical — it’s mental. What these kids can absorb and grasp is so much further than what they initially believe. Getting them to believe that is a big part of what we do.

When your players are in their thirties, forties, fifties — what do you hope they say about playing for you and playing for Moline?

That they learned a total-effort philosophy they can apply to everything in their life. Not just football. That having a total-effort mindset applies to everything — and that as long as they give everything they have in everything they do, at the end of the day they can look themselves in the mirror and know they’re a winner.

We don’t talk about winning games on Friday nights like it’s the only thing. We talk about being a total-effort player. Buying into that philosophy.

One of our tight ends just finished playing for us this year. He’s going to Augustana College to play football and baseball. They won a big baseball game — the conference championship — and he was interviewed on TV afterward. He said: It’s a total-effort mentality. I can’t put into words how proud I felt at that moment. Because it clicked with him. And when times get hard — in a marriage, as a parent, in a career — he’ll have that. You keep that total-effort mentality and you’re going to be okay. That’s what I hope our kids take from this program. That they had a great experience and that they’re better young men because of it.

How did you get into coaching? Where did that story start?

I wasn’t a great player, so I started with youth football. I was running my printing company at the time — I knew how to print, but I knew nothing about business or taxes. Through that, I got connected with Herb Mead, and he said, “Hey, I’ve got a great opportunity for you. Why don’t you start coaching youth football around here?” My first thought was, a bunch of Bellevue kids? That really wasn’t what I had in mind. I had this perception of affluent kids and figured it wasn’t for me.

But I went to a practice. The first day was a mess, and the second day, the coach who was supposed to be running things had a bit of a “happy hour problem” — he was passed out under a tree at Surrey Downs. The Boys and Girls Club let him go on the spot, and suddenly I was coaching the team.

That’s where it started. And I really enjoyed it. It became relational for me. I wasn’t some brilliant X’s and O’s guy, but I cared about the kids. Good players came through that group — Brandy West, Owen Biddle, Lane Johnson — but eventually they aged out and moved on to Bellevue High School.

Not long after, Dwaine Hatch offered me a job. I didn’t really want it. I was just doing the youth stuff for fun. But I liked him right away — you could just tell he was a good man — so I said I’d think about it. Then Dwaine resigned, and they hired Bill Heglar. Bill asked me to stay on, and I ended up coaching running backs and evolving into calling plays. I liked Bill. He was a good man.

When Bill eventually left for Seattle Prep, I was going to step away entirely. I was working around the clock — getting to practice, coming back to watch film, up at 4 AM, at work by day, back at practice in the afternoon. Something had to give, and what gave was everything in my personal life. But then Chris Hoffman reached out and offered me the job on an interim basis. “If it doesn’t work,” he said, “we can both walk away.” Parents and players were pretty unanimous in wanting me to have it, so I took it.

The first thing I told them was: I want to build a national program at a Washington public high school. Something that hadn’t been done. I said that with complete confidence and absolutely no idea how I was going to do it.

3-a-day practices at Fort Worden for a week every July became legendary to everyone who went through your program. Where did that idea come from, and what did it do for your teams?

Credit has to go to Pat Jones, Dwaine Hatch, Neil Buckmaster — those guys went up there before I did. What I liked about it was simple: limited cell service, no mall, nowhere to go. It was just football.

From a football standpoint, mornings were special teams and situational work — third and three, eight minutes left, what are we doing? Afternoons were defense. Nights were offense, and offense usually lasted until I decided it was time to go home. The whole idea was repetition. Don’t do it until you get it right — do it until you can’t get it wrong.

But the football was really just the vehicle. The deeper thing was putting these kids in a situation that pushed them to the brink — not just physically, but mentally — and then watching them find out they could go further than they thought. Life is going to be hard. There are going to be days that hit you, days you don’t think you can make it, days you feel like you can’t go on. Fort Worden was where they learned to rely on someone else in those moments. All of that was built around football.

And then there was the barbecue at the end. I’d split the team into two groups, split the coaching staff the same way, and I’d referee — and I’d call the worst calls I could find. I’d put [Coach James] Hasty against [Coach Les] Dicks. I’d put the Coombs brothers (Matt and John) against each other. Make it go to overtime. It sounds crazy, but I was watching — who can handle pressure? Who needs to go up to the booth when things get tough? You can learn a lot about a coach and a player when the game’s on the line and the officiating is terrible.

After the scrimmage, we’d do the letters. Blaine Davidson actually introduced that — he got the idea through church, and we evolved it into something that became really central to what we did. Kids write letters to each other. Not just football stuff — real stuff. Parents write to their sons. And then I’d stand up and talk about my own life, my family situation, the hard parts. Because how are these kids supposed to trust me if they don’t know me? Kids know immediately if you’re real or you’re not.

In Bellevue especially, everything looks polished on the outside. Nice cars, nice houses — it all looks amazing. But when you put the real stuff on paper, when you stand up in front of your teammates and say something true, you find out that Billy might be going through some real life stuff too. And that changes everything.

When I left Bellevue, we had a going-away gathering. For two hours, former players got up and talked. Nobody mentioned Long Beach Poly. Nobody mentioned De La Salle. Nobody mentioned winning state. They all talked about the lifelong friendships they made and the lessons they learned. And Fort Worden came up every single time.

That’s when I knew I’d done what I set out to do.

Your record at Bellevue was I think 193 and 14. Almost incomprehensible. How do you explain that level of sustained success?

Honestly, I have to call Pat Jones to remember the exact record. Games aren’t really what I hold onto.

Every year is different. But the through-line was this: when your players have a voice — when they take ownership — you’ve got a chance at something special. I always wanted them to feel like, hey, what do you want to do? How do you want to handle this? When they become truly invested, it’s more than just football.

Beyond that, I think the game has always been about blocking, tackling, discipline, details, and execution. That hasn’t changed. People talk about concepts and schemes and zone pressures — all of that has its place. But the teams that sustain success are the ones that believe. Not hope — know. Our players knew they were going to win. They had repped it so many times that it wasn’t a question.

We were rarely the most talented team. 2012 was probably the exception. Most years, we weren’t in the top four or five in terms of raw talent. But you had to beat us. You had to line up against us and execute at a high level for 48 straight minutes. That is hard to do, and we made you do it every single time.

The other thing that doesn’t get talked about: for five to seven years, I’d bet we led the state in fewest penalties and fewest turnovers. We just didn’t beat ourselves.

The De La Salle game in 2004 is probably considered the biggest win during your tenure at Bellevue. They hadn’t lost in 12 years until you beat them. Walk me through that — how it came together, what that team was like, and how it changed the program after that.

Herb Mead called me one night. My wife picked up and said, “Herb’s on the phone, he needs to talk to you right now.” I picked up and Herb said, “We’re going to play De La Salle.” I told him to shut up and hung up. He called back — he was serious.

Herb had gotten connected with Ken Hoffman, one of the owners of the A’s, and Ken was obsessed with De La Salle. Herb told him, “I’ve got a guy in Seattle who will take you on.” Washington football wasn’t on the national map. De La Salle was the gold standard of high school football in the country. So when I finally understood it was real, I went to the players and said: I’m not trying to play this game. I’m trying to win it.

From there, I read everything I could find on Bob Ladouceur and De La Salle. Every book, every interview, every article. I got to know those guys inside and out. What became obvious was that they trained like nobody else and came off the ball like nobody else. Average-sized guys, but they came at you from 19 different angles at a speed that was almost impossible to simulate. So we asked ourselves — why can’t we do that? That’s actually where the sled work came from. We took that from them.

At the same time, we knew our execution in the backfield was exceptional. We played without the ball better than anyone in the country — the faking, the misdirection. So we said, mirror these two things and we’ll be okay.

What gets lost in all of it is who that senior class actually was. They had been 2-and-7 as freshmen. Connor Mawhinney, Ryan Roeter — those guys were playing offensive line at 190 pounds. But they bought in completely, and by the time we got to that game, they didn’t think they were going to win. They knew.

The stadium was packed, and the crowd was there to see De La Salle. Nobody gave us a chance. They drove right down and scored on their first possession. And then we ran full-house belly right on the first play of the game. We wanted them in a balanced set, get them into a 4-4 defense. J.R. Hasty hit the alley, didn’t stutter-step, and went 80 yards for a touchdown. Steve Schilling walked over to me and said quietly, “Coach, we’re going to do this all night.” And we never got off script until the third quarter.

Neil Hayes — the guy who wrote When the Game Stands Tall — had come up before the game to watch us practice. He called Ladouceur afterward and told him, “These guys are like you. They do the little things. It’s like looking in a mirror.” I don’t think De La Salle respected us much going in. I can’t blame them for that. But we knew.

After that game, everything changed. When you win on the national stage, people notice. Families started bringing their kids to Bellevue to play football. And I always laughed at the recruiting angle, because really — do you think I’m going to go scout eighth-grade games in Federal Way? When you do it right, people come.

Talk about the Wing-T — why that offense, why it worked so well, and how it evolved over the years.

I didn’t invent any of it. Dwaine Hatch, Pat Jones, Neil Buckmaster — they ran it before I got there, and I learned a lot from them. But when I took over as head coach, I had to think about what kind of system I wanted to build around.

A few things drove it. First, I didn’t want a system that depended on one player. If you’re running spread and your quarterback goes down, you’re done. Second, it’s hard to throw the ball in October and November in Seattle — you need something that travels, that works in any conditions. And third, it matched who I was and how I wanted to play. Physical, disciplined, fast.

What I think we did differently was the faking. We played without the ball at a speed that was almost impossible to simulate on a scout team. When we came at you from under center, we were coming at 19 different angles at rapid-fire speed. Nobody could replicate that on a Wednesday in practice.

The other thing people didn’t fully appreciate was how hard it is to prepare for in the playoffs. You’ve got four days. If you’ve been repping us since spring ball, okay — but most teams hadn’t.

Eventually, it evolved. Teams started repping us from day one of spring, so we had to adapt. We had Mike Fouts on staff — one of the most humble, brilliant people you’ll ever meet, and a heck of a quarterback — and he started seeing what we could do out of the gun. We’d see so much Cover 3 that certain route concepts made a lot of sense. We went down to Oregon a few times, spent time with Steve Greatwood and Chip Kelly — who had actually been a Wing-T coach in New Hampshire before Oregon — and started incorporating tunnel screens, bubble screens, matchup concepts.

So it became a mix. The core of it never changed — QB-simple, protect the offensive line’s identity, run the ball. But we added enough wrinkles that we became a tougher matchup than ever. When you came in trying to defend the pass, we handed it to the fullback. When you loaded the box, we had options outside. That’s how it evolved.

You had opportunities over the years to leave — bigger programs, college jobs. Why did you stay at Bellevue?

The biggest reason was my family.

I grew up without my parents around — my dad had some issues and wasn’t there, and my mom passed away when I was young. I knew from experience what that absence costs. So when I got married, I made a decision: I’m not watching film until after they go to bed. Everything else in my life had been the priority. Once I had a family of mine, that had to change.

We only have one daughter, and the way I coach — the hours, the intensity — it’s hard to be present. So I made a choice. The job would work around the family, not the other way around. During the season, I knew I was going to get four hours of sleep a night. That was just the reality. But I’d still come home and see my family. I had the best of both worlds.

The other thing I didn’t fully understand until I left was how much the high school part of it mattered to me. I had chances to go — Jim Zorn, Mike Riley, great people who I coached with in the XFL, and I learned a lot. But the lessons you teach at the high school level are just as important as the games you play. That’s when kids find out who they are. I found out who I was. I’m a teacher. And I use football to teach the things I was never taught — because I didn’t have parents around. That’s really why I never jumped ship.

Maybe we stayed a little too long in the end. At some point the stories get old. But the foundation we built — the relationships, the Fort Worden experiences, the things those kids carried with them — that never got old.

What was it like for you and your family with how things ended at Bellevue?

It stung. It stung for Jill. We tried to do things right the whole way through, and it turned into this whole thing about recruiting, about money — everything became about that. And all the stories were anonymous. “I heard from a guy who knew a guy.” I just sat there thinking, are you kidding me?

What bothered me the most was this: I had always let any coach from any school come watch our practice. All access. Because if we could do something to help them help their kids, I was going to give them everything. And then a lot of those same people turned on us. Jumped on the bandwagon. When we eventually met with some of them, I sat there listening and finally said: if Bellevue is the reason for everything bad that’s ever happened to you, you should be 10-and-1 every year. And if we’re still your problem after I’m gone — well, I’m long gone now, and those guys are still winning with Mike Kneip. So I’ll let that speak for itself.

It was hard. We became kind of isolated. Our circle got tight. You find out a lot about people in moments like that.

Chris Petersen (Head Coach at the University of Washington at the time) had actually called me before things fully fell apart and said, “Butch, I want you to come hang out at practice.” I wasn’t sure. He said, “This isn’t how it ends up. Usually somebody’s the fall guy, and it’s going to be you.” He was right.

But I’m not bitter. Not even a little bit. I got to do what I loved with people I loved doing it with. And now there’s a whole staff of guys who played for me, grew up in that program, and are still winning and still doing things the right way. That’s a pretty cool thing to be a part of. Sitting around feeling sorry for myself would be a waste of time, and I don’t do that.

After Bellevue, you took the job at Cedar Park Christian — a program at the complete opposite end of the spectrum. What was that experience like?

At Bellevue, I was at the top of the mountain. Cedar Park had the state’s longest losing streak. Never been to the playoffs. My first meeting, there were three kids in the room. We started that first season with about 16 players — eight of whom had never put a helmet on — in a pretty competitive league.

So it was humbling. And it made me grow in two ways.

The first was my faith. They had 7 AM devotions every morning, and I wasn’t that far along in my walk at the time. But I was around really good people who were close to the Lord, and you gravitate toward what you’re around. I grew as a man.

The second was as a coach. When you don’t have the horses, you figure things out. You have to. We gave them a two-year plan, turned the program around, and eventually got them into the playoffs for the first time. I could write a whole book about that place.

You’re just a few weeks into the job at Saguaro. What made you say yes?

I know who I am. I’m a coach. And I’ve got one more run left in me — I’m not a young guy, but I’m not old either. I want to build something again, with really good people, that’s more than football.

This isn’t about rebuilding Saguaro into Bellevue. That’s not the goal. There’s been a great tradition at Saguaro historically. But there were some transitions — thirty-plus kids transferred out before I was hired, and I started spring practice with sixteen guys. We’re up to around twenty now. And we’re playing arguably the hardest 6A schedule in the state of Arizona.

But that’s okay. It’s about the process.

The most arrogant thing I’ll say in this whole interview is this: I’ve won everywhere I’ve been, and I’m going to win here. It’s just a matter of time. Ask me that question again in a year or two, and I’ll tell you how we turned it around. Because that’s what’s going to happen.

Since Rob took over Billings West, they’ve made the AA state quarterfinals every year, won a state championship in 2018, and were runner-ups in 2020, 2021, and 2025. Rob has had his hand in all facets of the football program and developed many players into college stars, including six starters for the 2025-2026 FCS champion Montana State Bobcats.

We discuss Rob’s coaching philosophy, why football is so good for young men’s development, and what it means to small town Montana communities. I loved this interview.

You grew up around football from a young age. What do you remember about when the game really grabbed you?

Growing up in a family of seven kids, you’re always around it. My dad was a high school teacher, a football coach, and a basketball coach. So you’re getting into trouble at practice from a young age. But I distinctly remember watching my oldest brother Jim play at Richey and Baker — that’s when you realize you love the game, love everything about it. You can’t wait for your time. Then I had a phenomenal high school coach at Baker who was really ahead of his time. We didn’t hit in practice the way most programs did back in the ‘80s. We conditioned hard, but you also had breaks from it. That balance stuck with me.

At Dickinson State, Coach Hank Biesiot reinforced the same philosophy — the game is really important, but it also needs to be put on the shelf at times. You have to do other things.

When your playing career ended, was coaching always the next chapter?

When I first got to college, I was a bit of a rebel. My whole family was in education, so I thought, I’ll do something different. But once you’re done playing, you still want to keep competing. That competitive drive doesn’t go away — coaching is a good way to still have it. And I’ll be honest: winning is important to me. I don’t shy away from that. We’re not here just to go through the motions. We’re here to win.

But there’s also something else. Everybody who’s done playing — they miss the locker room, they miss the guys. Coaching lets you still have that.

You’re pretty open about emphasizing winning. A lot of coaches frame it differently — they put character development and life lessons front and center, like that’s mutually exclusive from winning. Where do you land on that?

I think winning and life lessons are hand in hand. If you have high expectations, that’s what promotes a winning culture. Our goal every year is to be one of the top four teams in the state — and when you commit to that standard, you’re going to be successful.

But I’ve also learned my lesson. After a loss, when you’re upset — I’ve been there. You have to sit back and realize: it’s a hard game. It’s hard to win. You didn’t play as well as you wanted to, but the effort was there.

The life lessons come through the hard work and the commitments. Football demands a lot. And those things are going to shape kids whether you’re explicitly talking about character or not. I also think it matters who you hire. If your assistants aren’t hypocrites — if they’re doing what they’re asking kids to do — that’s where character development actually happens. It’s not a speech. It’s daily.

What was your first coaching job?

This is a good one. Out of college, my first year was in Miles City. And I didn’t coach football. I coached junior high girls basketball — a sport I had never played. The second year, I coached wrestling. I’d never wrestled a day in my life. Then boys basketball. Then track. Four sports in one year, two of which I had zero background in. But I wanted a teaching job, and back then, you’d do whatever it took to get one.

After a couple years of junior high football with my brother Dan, I finally transitioned to high school football. And that’s where it clicked.

You’ve coached track for thirty years, you’ve coached basketball and wrestling. What is it about football that’s different from everything else?

Football is played by tough people. There’s a respect that comes from going out and performing when you’re not at 100% that I don’t think you can find in most places. The brotherhood is real — you’re lifting together, you’re going through self-inflicted pain together, and you have to look at the guy next to you and decide if you’re going to quit on a rep or not.

And then there’s the team aspect. On any given play, you’ve got 11 guys. Ten of them are perfect, one guy misses his assignment — and it’s all for nothing. You can’t win in football with just two studs. Football demands more. Getting eleven people to do something hard, all on the same page, all at the same time — that’s really difficult. That’s what makes it special.

You took over at Billings West from Paul Klaboe, who had been there for thirty years. What was that transition like?

It was hard. His advice to me was simple: make it your own. But that’s easier said than done. I still tell our parents at our banquet — this is Paul Klaboe’s program. It always will be. Thirty years. That’s unheard of in today’s world.

The first game I was head coach, we didn’t get a first down until the third quarter. I thought, Oh my God. He’d warned me it wasn’t going to be easy. And then we started that first season 0-and-3. And then I lost my brother Dan.

So there I am, 0-3, and my brother dies. I’m thinking: this is not very fun. But we pushed through. We made the playoffs that year. And there were lessons in all of it.

One of the hardest things was letting some coaches go — guys I’d been around for a long time. That was part of why I was hesitant to even apply for the job. I knew some hard decisions would have to come.

But what I took from Paul more than anything were two things. First: there’s a difference between yelling and being intense. He never screamed. He just talked to you. Who wants to be yelled at? Nobody. Second: hire the best people you can, then let them coach. He said, Why would anyone want to coach for a head coach who micromanages everything you do? That has shaped how I run my staff ever since.

How do you build a staff? What are you actually looking for?

Character first. I want men with high character — guys who aren’t hypocritical, who live what they teach. If you’re a coordinator, you have to know your scheme inside and out and be able to coach your position coaches too. Ideally, they played the game. There’s something about coaching someone who understands it from the inside.

They also have to love it year-round. If someone only wants to coach August through November, this isn’t the job for them. It’s a year-round commitment. I want guys going to clinics, going to visit other programs, constantly learning, because the game is always evolving. We’ve been to Montana State. We’ve been to Texas Tech. Last year I went to Michigan. You have to keep growing. And increasingly, finding people who are teachers in the building is harder than it used to be. Even in Billings.

What’s your own role on the field? How much are you in the weeds versus letting your coordinators run things?

I lean toward the CEO model, I suppose. My defensive coordinator I’ve known for 35 years — since college. He takes the defense, and I trust him completely. We’re aligned on how we think about the game, how we think about playing kids.

My offensive coordinator has 100% total control. He calls the game, and I rarely disagree. Offensive coordinator is the hardest job in coaching, as far as I’m concerned — after every play, you’ve got 35 seconds, and everyone in the stands is convinced it was the wrong call. No matter what. I’m not going to micromanage that.

I coach running backs. That gives me a specific focus while also giving me the freedom to float — check in on the defense, swing down to the freshman team if I need to, step in wherever something comes up. This past year I got back into special teams when we had some personnel changes, which was honestly kind of fun. Getting back to real coaching.

What do you think fans and parents most consistently misunderstand about what coaches actually see during a game?

Parents are focused on their kid. Completely understandable — I’ve been that parent, watching Connor on the field and realizing I wasn’t paying attention to our scheme at all. But what they sometimes forget is that there are 10 other guys we’re also watching. Forty kids on the sideline. 160 in the program.

On the technical side, most people watching football are watching the ball. Coaches are watching the offensive line, the defensive line, the coverage. When a corner gets beat, fans might think, He blew that coverage. But often it was actually a safety who was supposed to be over the top. The corner ran the right technique for what he was asked to do. You don’t see that if you’re watching the ball.

Same thing with the run game. Why isn’t the line blocking? They are — but the defense ran a specific fit that took away the designed gap. That nuance is invisible if you don’t know what to look for. It doesn’t mean fans are wrong for not knowing. It’s a hard game to fully see.

You coached your own son, Connor. What was that like?

The way I handled the first two years — I wouldn’t recommend it. As a freshman, I had almost no contact with him on the field because I was coaching elsewhere. Sophomore year, he was getting special teams reps, and I distinctly remember: we’re playing Bozeman, he flies down on kickoff coverage and makes a hit right in front of me. Instead of giving him a high five, I turned around and walked away.

I did it because I knew what people behind me were thinking — The coach’s kid is out there because he’s the coach’s kid. I didn’t want to confirm that. But it wasn’t fair to Connor. That was my insecurity, not good coaching.

By senior year I said, forget it. He makes a good play, I’m going to hug him. He’s going to be team captain because he earned it. But it took me too long to get there.

Coaches’ kids are in a tough spot. The head coach is either going to be too hard on them or let them get away with everything. I was probably the former. I didn’t yell at him — but if it had been another player, I would have said, Great play. With Connor, I held back. That wasn’t right.

Has your coaching philosophy changed much since you started?

The core is pretty much the same. Kids haven’t changed in thirty years. Expectations have — from coaches, from parents — but the kids are still kids.

What I feel more strongly about now is multi-sport athletes. I don’t believe in one-sport kids. I’d rather have a player running track or wrestling than doing 7-on-7 in the offseason. 7-on-7 is fine, but it’s not real football. And college programs will tell you the same thing — we just had a kid, Matt Ludwig — we call him Moose — who played basketball and wrestled and ran track. He ended up with seven offers from top-ten programs. Notre Dame was in our school. Texas Tech and Michigan had their entire offensive staffs at one of his basketball games just to watch him warm up and dunk.

When I sent Moose’s track numbers to the Michigan tight ends coach — 11.1 seconds in the hundred — the guy texted back: Come on, you’re lying. I showed him the board. The specialization obsession is misguided. The best coaches know it.

Montana is a massive state geographically but not a huge population. What do you think people outside Montana don’t appreciate or understand about the football here?

Our football is really, really good — and I don’t think people realize that. We’re at about 1.1 million people in this state, and we have guys currently in the NFL, guys projected to go to the NFL. Montana State just won the FCS championship, and most of that roster is Montana kids. We had six kids from Billings West on that team — five of them starters.

Per capita, our football competes with anyone. When I tell people we bus eight hours to play in a state championship game, they go, What? For us, that’s just what you do. Four hours? No big deal. And we have everything from six-man football all the way up to eleven-man, all of it competitive. The culture and atmosphere at our FCS games — Montana and Montana State — is genuinely amazing. I think Tony Romo even said something about Washington-Grizzly Stadium. And now with the Bobcats winning, the whole state is dialed in. You can go watch the state high school championship game on a Saturday with 8,000 people and then turn around the next day and watch an FCS title contender. That’s pretty unique.

What do Friday nights mean to communities in Montana? What does football mean to a place like Billings?

In Billings, in Baker where I grew up, in any small town — Friday night is the community. That’s what you dream about playing in as a kid. That’s the social event of the week. People go watch high school football, and there’s something really special about the fact that we still protect that.

I’ll be honest — we’re getting too many Thursday games, and I don’t like it. Last year we had three, and I’m sitting there thinking, What are we doing? There are scheduling reasons, I understand, but we need to get back to Friday nights. That’s our reserved time. College owns Saturday. The NFL owns Sunday. Friday night belongs to high school football, and in the smaller communities especially, that game is everything. The smaller the town, the bigger it is. You’re not going to find a more invested crowd anywhere.

As someone who played the game and has now coached it for over thirty years, what do you think high school football in Montana has gotten better at — and where has it gotten worse?

Better: the level of scheme being displayed, especially at the Class AA level, has gone way up. If you can’t coach on a Friday night, you’re going to get beat. Strength and conditioning programs have improved dramatically too — we have a full-time strength coach whose only job is developing our kids. When the Texas Tech and Michigan staffs came through, they saw what we were doing in the weight room and were genuinely surprised. They said, This is what we do — just smaller guys. The speed of the game has also increased across all sports. And we’re safer than we’ve ever been. We don’t hit much in practice, which is how it should be. That’s not making kids soft. It’s making them available.

What’s gotten worse is that it’s a hard game, and sometimes we let kids bail when it gets hard. That worries me. We have a session in our program we call KYA — Kick Your Own Ass — where we push kids to a place that’s genuinely uncomfortable. And I’ll tell them, Look around at the kids who aren’t in here. They cannot do this. That’s why we do it — because they can’t and they won’t. That edge, that willingness to embrace the hard thing, is something I think we have to keep protecting. The moment we let kids opt out of hard, we’ve lost something essential about this game.

Ten, fifteen, twenty years from now — what do you hope players say about playing for you and playing in your program?

That it was a good experience. Playing time is always going to be a source of friction — you’re never going to make everyone happy — but I hope they look back and feel like we were fair. Strict, but fair. I hope they say that the work ethic they developed here showed up in the rest of their life. That the reason they got a job, or kept a job, or earned someone’s trust — it traces back to something they learned here.

And the relationships. I was invited to one of my former players’ weddings coming up in May — Taco Dowler. That’s the stuff. Those are the moments that remind you why you do this. There are always going to be kids who disagreed with a decision we made, and that’s fine. But I hope they know we worked just as hard as they did, and that they valued the time.

What’s the hardest part of this job — and what still brings you joy?

The hardest part is balance. For a long time, I didn’t have it. When you’re home, you have to be present — and that’s harder than it sounds now. With Hudl, you have film available around the clock. It’s easy to be on your phone or your computer when you should be somewhere else, with someone else. There are a lot of coaches in this profession who’ve paid a real price for that, relationally and with their families. I’ve missed some of my own kids’ games. That’s not something I’m proud of. Now I tell my coaches: if your kid has a game, you go. You leave practice early, you hand off your group. We figure it out. That has to be the culture.

The joy? Being around the staff. These guys are genuinely your best friends after a while — you just spend so much time together. Being around the kids. The competition. And honestly, just the game itself. It gets in your blood. I’ve seen coaches step away, younger guys who needed a break, and I tell them, You’ll be back. Because this is who you are. It’s not just a job you do in the fall. It’s something you carry. When my kids are playing now, I’m right back in it. It never really leaves you.

Matt Miller serves as the Head Coach at Saint Ignatius College Prep in Chicago, IL, a position he’s held since 2017. Matt started as an Offensive Coordinator at Saint Ignatius in 2015, a position he still holds in addition to being the Head Coach. I had the honor of being on Matt’s staff as the Defensive Backs coach in 2024 and 2025.

A Jesuit school with outstanding academics and a largely affluent student body, football success is low among institutional priorities at Saint Ignatius. The football program was nonexistent for decades until reviving in 2003. With no preferential admission for football players, expensive tuition, and a universally rigorous curriculum, Ignatius struggles to attract the same football talent as top Chicago Catholic schools they compete againt. Think Stanford, Northwestern, or pre-NIL Vanderbilt.

Despite these limitations, Matt has stewarded the football program exceptionally well. The football team didn’t have a winning record or playoff win from 2003-2016. Since he took over, they’ve had 5 winning seasons, 7 state playoff appearances, and won the Chicago Catholic League (CCL) Green (2023) and White divisions (2022, 2023). Matt leverages Ignatius’ strengths (smart, disciplined kids) to out-execute more talented opponents and punch above their weight.

Matt and I dive into his philosophy, what outsiders get wrong about coaching high school football, and lessons learned along the way. Hope you enjoy.

How did you first get into coaching, and when did you know it was something you wanted to do?

I didn’t have much of a transition period. I played a fifth year at Ripon due to an injury, came home for the spring semester, and within a couple months, a mutual friend who was already in high school coaching asked if I’d be interested. That following fall, I started coaching at [Saint Patricks] on the sophomore staff. From second grade on, I’ve been part of a football team every season — it was a pretty natural next step.

I did two years at St. Pat’s, then moved to a varsity staff at Lane Tech. Unfortunately, at the end of that season the head coach stepped down and they had a full staff changeover, so I was looking. Someone referred me to Saint Ignatius, I got on as an assistant and became offensive coordinator. After two seasons, the head coach resigned pretty late in the process and they promoted me to interim head coach for the 2017 season. They basically had no choice. We had a good year, and they kept me on. This will be my tenth year as head coach, twelfth overall at the school.

You were an assistant and offensive coordinator before becoming a head coach. What were the biggest changes once you were leading the program?

The administrative side of things hits you right away — scheduling practice times, communicating with school administrators, ordering equipment, managing parents. All the things that just weren’t your problem as a coordinator. When I was the OC, I showed up, had my practice plan ready, worked within the framework I was given. That was really all I had to worry about.

When you become the head coach, you pick up about fifty other responsibilities overnight. You also become the voice of the program — what messaging goes out, what the culture looks and sounds like. Fortunately, we had a good system already in place for the on-field stuff, so I wasn’t drinking from the fire hose on everything at once. But you really do have to take over all the operations the following offseason — where you’re training, who you’re training with, how the schedule works, all of it.

I’ve held onto the play-calling and offensive responsibilities all twelve years. It’s a big part of the game and the outcome of games, and I genuinely enjoy doing it.

How would you describe your coaching philosophy?

Honestly, it’s something I haven’t fully solved. I can’t give you a tight elevator pitch. It’s always evolving.

I’ve never been a big slogan guy. I see coaches who can command a room with a speech, always seem to have the right quote or mantra, and I’ll admit I’ve been a little jealous of that. Every time I’ve tried to set up a theme for the season, it fizzles out. I want to get better at it, and I think it has real value — but I also think people can tell when it’s not authentic. If you don’t genuinely believe it, it won’t land.

What I keep coming back to is: be the same guy every day. Show up, be accountable, put your best forward, treat people right. The rest tends to fall into place. It’s not glamorous, but I think that consistency is more important than having the perfect saying.

In terms of what I’ve been working toward on the field — I’ve gravitated toward two core principles: be the tougher team, and be the more fundamentally sound team. Toughness gets misunderstood a lot. People think it’s just physical — playing through injuries, knocking guys down. But real toughness is showing up every day. We have weight training in the morning, a demanding summer schedule, six days a week in the fall. Consistently showing up and giving your effort — that’s toughness. And honestly, that translates directly to the professional world, too. Half the battle is just being reliable.

Fundamentally sound connects directly to running the triple option. We’re trying to shorten the game, limit turnovers, not give up big plays. We coach ball security constantly. And in a system like ours, every detail matters — where your foot goes, where your hand is — you’re coaching everything precisely. Those two principles feel right to me, even if I’m still working on how to articulate them as clearly as I’d like.

On a broader level, I think this is a really important time in kids’ lives. They’re 14, 15 years old, figuring out who they are. Being part of a team gives them something to work toward, a group to belong to, a reason to get through a hard day. The football skills are secondary to that. The attention to detail, the continuous improvement, the discipline of it — that stuff stays with them.

What does the average fan or parent misunderstand about what coaching high school football actually entails?

The play-calling is the one I hear the most — “you should be throwing the ball more,” “there’s a gap there,” “why aren’t you doing this?” And I get it. But what they don’t see is how much practice goes into every single thing we do. You can’t just show up on Friday and pull something out of a hat. There has to be a system to rep it, practice it against different fronts, build proficiency. You can’t install a play on Monday and hope the other team runs the perfect defense to make it work.

As an option team, we take a little more heat than most. Running the football and protecting the ball has been shown time and again to lead to consistent success, but if you’re watching something work on Sunday in the NFL, it doesn’t mean you can just drop it into your offense on Friday. Every play in our system requires precise execution that takes months of repetition to build.

We’ve had enough success that I’ve built up some trust and gotten some grace in that area — but it still comes up.

Is there something you used to believe about football or coaching that you no longer believe?

Recruiting has been eye-opening. The conventional wisdom is: if you play well, coaches will find you. Work hard, produce on the field, and you’ll get recruited. I believed that.

Then I had the chance to coach one of the top players in the country — top ten nationally by some publications. And what I saw firsthand was that elite programs weren’t really asking many questions about stats, or work ethic, or what kind of kid he was at home. Coaches would call, offer in two minutes, and you’d never hear from them again. They didn’t ask a single thing about him as a person. It was almost entirely about physical traits — size, athleticism.

At the same time, I’ve seen really productive players — guys who rushed for 1,500 yards — get under-recruited or not recruited at all. Great high school football players who just didn’t fit the physical profile that college programs were looking for. That gap between being a great high school player and getting meaningful college opportunities is wider than people realize.

The character stuff, the “we want to talk to the janitor and the teacher first” — some programs mean it. But my experience is that it’s not being asked very much, at least not at the top end.

What’s one of the hardest decisions you’ve had to make as a head coach?

Any time you have to make a decision that’s best for the team but hard on someone else — that’s where it gets difficult.

We had a situation with a quarterback whose father was on our coaching staff. The backup got an opportunity to play mid-season, played really well, and ended up earning the starting spot. The original starter hadn’t done anything wrong — he was a good kid, a hard worker, did everything we asked. We had a real personal relationship with his dad, who was doing a great job coaching his position. Everything about the situation was good, except the backup was clearly playing better.

I had to make the tough call, give the starting job to the other kid, and have that conversation with the family.

What I learned from it — and what I’d do better — is to not let it be a one-and-done conversation. I had the hard talk, but then the season kept moving and I didn’t go back. When you’ve got a big roster and a lot of people to manage, it’s easy for someone to feel cast aside without you even realizing it. I saw a clip of Marcus Freeman during pre-practice stretching just walking around and talking to guys, and it stuck with me. You only get so many interactions. You have to be intentional about keeping relationships with everyone, not just the guys in front of you.

The decision itself — I stand by it. Football is a meritocracy. But being transparent, staying in communication, and not letting anyone feel forgotten after a hard conversation — that’s where I could’ve done better.

What has coaching cost you personally — things people on the outside don’t fully see or appreciate?

Time, without question. When you’re in the middle of it, you don’t even notice. You spend twelve, fifteen hours at the school and it just feels like the day. You look back and you can’t believe how much time went into it.

It’s become a twelve-month job. There’s no offshoring this for six months and picking it back up in the summer. Recruiting is year-round — we’ll have forty college coaches come through in a two-week window. The administrative close-out after the season ends — players, equipment, coaches, meetings — is sometimes even busier than the season itself.

In our league, you’re starting to see schools hire coaches full-time or lighten their other workload to accommodate what football actually demands. High schools are still catching up to the reality of what this takes.

Fortunately, my family has always known this is my life — something I love deeply — and they’ve bent everything to make it work, especially in the fall. I’m guaranteed to be at school from 7:30 AM to 7 PM most days during the season, on top of film and all the other preparation that happens outside those hours. I don’t count the hours much because I enjoy it, but they’re definitely long.

You’ve been in the CCL for ten years as a head coach. Where is high school football better today than when you started, and where is it worse?

I try not to be the old guy who says everything was better back in the day, but I also try to be objective about it.

The talent level in our league right now is unlike anything I’ve seen. I track where our guys go on to play college football — it’s become something of a barometer for me — and the Catholic League is producing Division I recruits at a rate I’ve never seen before. We’re talking about teams that have had 30 or 40 Division I recruits in the last three years. We played a team last year with 14 Power Four kids on the field. I mean, it used to be that a team had two or three guys playing at mid-level D1. Now the top teams have national recruits across the roster.

The league also expanded to a super conference in 2018 — we’re at 24 football teams now — and top to bottom, there really isn’t a bad team in it. I played in this league, I watched my brother play in it going back to 2001. I have not seen the talent like it is right now.

What advice would you give a young coach just starting out — things nobody told you, or things you’ve seen coaches get wrong?

Be the same guy every day. Be consistent. Don’t try to be somebody you’re not.

I’ve been jealous of coaches who can command a room — who always have the right quote, the right speech, who can find the nerve of the team at just the right moment. I’ve tried to manufacture that and it fizzles. I think the reason it doesn’t work is that people can sense when it’s not authentic. If you don’t genuinely believe it, don’t force it.

Don’t let your ego get too wrapped up in how you think a head coach is supposed to act. There’s a trap in feeling like you always have to be the authoritative guy — always enforcing, always disciplining, always projecting strength. Hold your standards, but don’t be so rigid that you get in your own way. More often than not, that posture does more damage than good.

And finally: even when you make a decision that doesn’t pan out, as long as you made it honestly, with the best information you had at the time — there’s nothing else you can do. Put your best foot forward, don’t force things, and be genuine. I think that’s what’s helped me last as long as I have.

What’s a question nobody ever asks you that you wish they would?

Practice planning and organization. How you structure a practice with two-way starters, how you make sure you’re actually installing the skills you want to install, how you manage reps and time. Most people don’t love that stuff — but I do. It’s at the core of what actually makes teams good, and it doesn’t get talked about much.

Despite being the most successful program in Washington state history, Michael took over the program at one of Bellevue’s lowest points. Still reeling from the WIAA forcing out Butch Goncharoff in 2018, Michael stabilized the program and brought it back into contention. He’s since led the Wolverines to state titles in 2021 and 2023, along with deep playoff runs in 2024 and 2025.

We talk about why Michael has the passion he has for coaching, how being a Dad changed his perspective, and what the Wing-T symbolizes about Bellevue football. Enjoy.

You grew up playing Wolverine football from second grade on, and now you’re coaching at the same program. Take me back to the beginning — what did Bellevue football feel like to you as a kid?

Growing up, I wasn’t a strong academic kid. I had some learning disability challenges, and football was my first outlet — it was the one thing I was good at. I was insecure, and so much of my positive self-confidence as a young kid, and then into a young man, came from that program. What I love about football is that on the field, everyone’s equal, regardless of race, where you’re from, how much money you have, your academic status. Everyone’s just a kid. And I remember being a Wolverine — nobody talked about individual stars. It was all about how many state championships the program had won. That team-first vision made it easy for an insecure kid like me to build confidence and understand that there’s so much more than just yourself.

You were a two-time captain, all-state, and had four years playing for Butch. What was that like? What do you remember most about playing for him?

The older I get, the more I appreciate it. At the time, going through the system, he was a god — because of the success he’d had. You go from idolizing someone like a superhero, to actually playing for him, and then really seeing underneath the cover: the work, the discipline, the love he had for his kids, the love he had for the process. He was so good at messaging through his actions, through the way he behaved. He really teaches you about the fundamentals of becoming a champion through the process. When I was there, I was grateful in the moment, but you don’t fully realize how special it was until you’re out of it. I had friends from California — five-star kids — who told me they never did a single off-season weight training session. I’m like, at Bellevue, it was basically mandatory if you wanted to be a leader on the team. Those concepts I took for granted — they’re so unique and special.

You went on to play five years at Washington for Chris Peterson. As a coach now with years of experience, how was he different from Butch? What did you take from him that you carried forward?

I feel like the most blessed player in the world, getting to play for both Coach Pete and Butch — arguably two of the best coaches in what they do. Coach Pete actually recruited me to Boise first. When he ended up at UW, I remember worrying about who the new coach would be, and then out of nowhere I got a text from him: “I’ll talk to you soon.” That was all I needed.

Where the overlap was between the two of them was their obsession with the process — what it truly takes to be a champion, not just on the field. Coach Pete was such an elite model of leadership. He set the standard through the way he behaved: the way he treated the janitors, the way he was accessible to everyone. In college you’re at the facility from 5 AM to 8 PM, and just watching him operate was like taking notes in real time on how a great leader behaves. His “Built for Life” philosophy was huge for me — football is going to end for everyone, and you better have a plan A that isn’t football. He even talked to us about dating: treat every girl you date like you might marry her, because you well could. That kind of thinking shaped the way I approached my whole life. He walked the walk every single day, and his influence went way beyond football.

Did you always know you wanted to get into coaching?

Zero interest. Honestly. Going into my senior year at Washington, a couple of our coaches asked if I’d thought about being a graduate assistant somewhere, and I told them I’d rather just work and separate from the game. I had no intention of coaching — but I’m incredibly grateful that I did.

Walk me through how the opportunity to come back to Bellevue came about — especially after a few tumultuous years for the program.

It was one of those situations that felt like a God opportunity. I was working at Amazon and had my career going. Butch reached out and asked if I’d come coach the line once a week, just volunteer. At that point I had started to miss the game — once you’re done playing, you can’t play anymore, and you’re always looking for a way to stay connected. So I volunteered for a season and really liked it. Then when the head coach opportunity opened up, and the AD texted me: “Would you consider being the head coach?”

I hadn’t thought about it, but I told him to give me a couple days. By that Monday, I’d applied. It felt like a complete calling — the chance to reroute the program, get it back to where it was, and give other kids the same things the program had given me. I saw it as my chapel. A place where I could be, in a sense, a pastor — talking to kids about how great life can be, what’s ahead of them, mentoring a hundred young men every year. That’s why I keep doing it. There is no other platform in my life where I can impact young men the way I can through football.

You’ve made a point of surrounding yourself with Bellevue alumni on your coaching staff. Why has that been important to you?

There’s so much value in coaches who understand the backgrounds and personalities of the kids in this community, who went to school here themselves. But beyond that, the guys I’ve brought back — they’re all elite men. Going back to Coach Pete’s philosophy, these are guys I would trust with my daughters. They model the behavior I want our kids to see. And they totally believe in our program’s core identity: a bunch of overbelievers who overachieve. That’s always been the secret sauce at Bellevue. We’ve never been the most talented team, and we never would be. But when everyone on the staff can look a kid in the eye and say “We were just like you, and we did it” — that message carries real weight. And they care so deeply about the kids, which matters more than anything.

How would you describe your coaching philosophy, and how has it evolved over the eight years since you took over?

Becoming a parent changed everything. When you have a kid, you start to see every player through a parent’s eyes — you see them as perfect, just like you see your own child. That shifted how I communicate. It softened some things in a good way. And then I had a conversation with Coach Pete where I asked him what the culture should be, and he said: “It’s gotta be you. Don’t try to be me, don’t try to be Butch — the more authentically you can build this program around who you are, the more it will connect with kids.” That was a turning point.

My first two years, we got our butts kicked. So I had to change the goal and go bigger. We stopped talking about state championships as the mission and started talking about something much larger: we want every kid who comes through this program to feel empowered to go change the world — to own their 20 square feet. State championships can be a byproduct of what we’re doing. But it’s a lot more about putting the kid first, about the lessons, the culture, the excellence, the relentless attitude, the no-excuses mentality, and how all of that translates to the rest of their lives.

What do parents, fans, and people outside the program most often get wrong about what it takes to coach high school football?

People forget that you have to do what’s best for the team. That’s the hardest balancing act — what’s best for an individual player, the team, and the community all at once. But the thing I’ve become most focused on is making sure the best player on the field and the player who may never see the field feel equally included and equally valued. I spend just as much time talking to both of them. Everyone has a massive role — scout team, holding a bag, executing our spill-out the right way in special teams. It’s all part of making the program work. You can’t just call out Budda Baker every day because everyone knows what he’s doing. You’ve got to call out the third-string running back who quietly held a bag well that day. As a head coach, operationally, the question I keep coming back to is: how do I make player 122 feel as important as the superstar?

You have a demanding corporate career, a marriage, and young kids. What sacrifices have you had to make to invest this much in high school football over the last eight years?

I think it comes back to the kind of father I want to be. This gives me energy — I’m genuinely passionate about it. I never want to come home drained, just going through the motions because the job pays well. The way I frame it for my daughters is that service matters. If you see a problem in the world, you can either complain from the sidelines or be the change. And pursuing something you’re passionate about — I want them to see what that looks like in practice. That energy runs through our whole household.

There are real sacrifices in-season, no question. But what’s beautiful about high school football is it’s a four-month sprint, and then the other eight months you can breathe. It’s manageable. More than anything, I want my girls to see that if you love something and believe in it, you find a way to make it work. You go do it.

Where do you think high school football is better today than when you were playing? Where is it worse?

Worse first: social media and the comparison culture it’s created. Back when I played, you didn’t really know what other people had. You didn’t know who had offers, you didn’t know what other programs looked like. Now kids see it all, every day. Why does Johnny have an offer to UNLV? I think I’m better than him. That kind of noise puts unfair, unrealistic pressure on kids that just didn’t exist before. And with NIL creeping into the high school conversation now, money is starting to influence decisions in ways that don’t belong in this space.

Better: the sport itself is still really pure. High school football at its core is still about community — the band, the cheer, growing up in your neighborhood with big goals, playing alongside people you’ve known your whole life. That part hasn’t changed. The game is still the game.

You deal with adversity every year coaching 14-to-18-year-olds. Is there a moment or a lesson that stands out when you think about how adversity has shaped you as a coach?

It happens every single year — that’s just coaching. Kids are going to make mistakes because they’re kids. The older I’ve gotten, the more grace I give them for that, because I understand that’s part of the deal. You can’t control your roster in high school. You can’t control which volunteer coaches stay or go. There’s always critical adversity that you try to use as a learning moment.

Last year, we had a lot of off-the-field adversity, and we fell short in the semifinal. Honestly, I think it was the biggest blessing we didn’t win. If we had won with the behaviors we had off the field, we would have validated — to the whole community and to those kids — that you can cut corners and still be great. Losing sent the message that those behaviors didn’t deserve a championship. And that mattered to me, because I want to win the right way. Our mission has to be a lot bigger than a state title, and those adversity points are the biggest blessing for getting things right.

Everyone at the high school level is running some version of the spread now, but Bellevue still runs the Wing-T it’s run for a quarter century. Why do you stick with it? What does that say about your program?

I will go to my deathbed running this offense, and the simple math tells you why: 4 times 3 equals 12, and 3 times 4 equals 12. It’s a system built on discipline and repeatability. You don’t need a five-star left tackle or a superstar running back. A kid who might not be crazy athletic can run this offense more effectively than a blue-chip recruit who’s never run it, because it’s so precise and so practiced.

It’s also my identity. Going back to what Coach Pete told me — do what you believe in, build the program around who you are. I believe in this system completely. Last year we lost 22 starters — two linemen went to USC and Oregon — and the offense still operated the same way, maybe even a little better in some areas. That repeatability is the point. There’s a great quote from Tommy Raymond, who basically wrote the book on the Wing-T. He says the identity of the team runs through the offense. If you’re a running team, you’re going to be more physical than a spread team. And at every level of football — the Seahawks, Georgia’s recent success — the toughest team wins. Teams that run the ball are usually the toughest teams. That philosophy matches exactly what we’re trying to build here.

Last question: what do you hope the players you’ve coached remember about you when they look back years from now?

I hope they see me as an amazing husband and father. Outside of my faith, those are the two most important roles in my life. I want them to know that. Because every young man should strive to be an amazing husband — it’s really hard to be a great dad if you’re not. It all starts with being the best version of yourself and being a big-time partner to your wife, and then modeling that behavior for your kids.

What’s been meaningful is that players I coached early on — guys who knew me as a 24-year-old goofy volunteer coach — are cycling back now in their twenties and seeing me as a dad, seeing my girls around the program. They’re starting to get it. That’s what I want them to remember about me. Not the wins. Not the scheme. Those two roles — husband and father — those are what matter most.