Good Morning -

I grew up loving the Big Three sports - football, basketball, and baseball. And out of those three, the one I loved the most was basketball. When my family moved to Woodbury, Minnesota from a small town in Ohio, one of the best parts of the move was that my new house had a basketball hoop on the roof of the garage. I was in love with the sport from first grade on.

I started playing football as soon as I could, which for us was in third grade. We played flag football in third and fourth grade, followed by our first years of tackle football in fifth grade. Football was a lot of fun to play, and all of my friends were doing it as well. However, when we hit the tackle league, I weighed 108 pounds, and the "skill position" weight limit was 105 pounds. Thus, I became a tight end. Now, sitting here as a 30-year old coach, I love the play of the offensive line and the tight end, but when I was 12 years old, I missed being able to be the quarterback that I was in the flag football leagues. Therefore, I decided not to play as a seventh grader - figuring that I would concentrate on basketball and try to improve my future draft stock from the mid-first round to an NBA lottery pick (you've gotta love the dreams and misconceptions that children have!).

During that 7th grade year, my Physical Education teacher was a man by the name of Gary Halvorson, who was also the varsity football coach at Woodbury High School. He is a great man of character, and one day towards the end of seventh grade, he asked me if I was going to play football the next fall. Not wanting to let him down, I told him I would, but later told my parents that I had no intention of playing, and that I had only told Coach Halvorson what he wanted to hear. Later that week, he met me in the hallway and picked me up by my shirt, and firmly (yet caringly) asked me again if I was going to play football the next fall. I told him that I was, he responded by saying, "Good, because the only thing I can't stand more than a quitter is a liar." So, almost out of a heavy conscience, I played football in 8th grade. However, this time it was different - there was not a weight limit, so I could play quarterback; and, the coach was not another player's father.

I would continue to play football throughout high school, and learned a lot about both football and life under Coach Halvorson. God blessed me with two wonderful parents, but if I had not been so fortunate, "Coach Hal" was that second father for me. In my junior and senior seasons, he was a great teacher of leadership skills. The more I wanted to learn, the more he helped point me in the direction of opportunities to be a leader.

After graduating from Woodbury High School, I went to the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. I had always thought that I would go to a big school - like the University of Michigan where my father went, or Michigan State like my mother - but when my dream school, the University of North Carolina, sent me my rejection letter early in my senior year, I changed my focus. I wanted to do something that could help people, so for a number of years I wanted to be a lawyer. However, when UNC and law school was not an option, I looked at how many lives Coach Hal had affected, and immediately thought about teaching and coaching. The University of St. Thomas was the premier school for educators within the Twin Cities, and I was being recruited as a football player as well.

My high school was only 30 minutes away from UST, so in the off-season and summer I served as a volunteer coach to continue working with the football players from my high school. At that time, there was no contact allowed (aside from weight lifting) for coaches during the summer. However, since I was not on staff in the fall, nor a paid employee by the school district, I could conduct football workouts and coach the 7-on-7 team each summer. If nothing else, I knew the work was helping me become a better football coach.

After two years of playing at UST... well, not really playing, but rather serving as a back-up quarterback, I was offered the coaching position of varsity quarterbacks coach back at Woodbury High School. The position would also include the responsibility of calling the offensive plays for all of the JV games. While I was never really looking to go back to the high school that I came from, I did not want to pass up the chance to work for and learn from Gary Halvorson. He had adopted the Coaching to Change Lives curriculum after my senior season (in which we had 3 Division I-A scholarship players, and 22 of 26 seniors went on to play college football somewhere, yet we finished 2-7) and had really shifted his focus as a head coach, and the focus of the program. I spent the fall of 1998 totally invested in everything Coach Hal was doing with the program, and I plugged myself into doing anything and everything related to the program (orders, inventory, putting together playbooks, setting locker combinations, etc). I loved it. Even with the frustrations of being the new, 20-year old coach on the staff who thinks he's smarter than he is (which I did), followed by being put in my place by more senior assistant coaches, and it would be a season that I will never forget. On a team with only one Division I athlete, and only one defensive starter over 200 pounds, we won the Minnesota AAAAA (big school) State Championship 28-7. The championship and the winning was secondary to how I witnessed the lives of the boys on the team be transformed into young men of integrity and confidence. This was how I wanted to coach, and this was the impact I wanted to have on kids.

To this day, if somebody sees me on a cell phone after a big win, or even after a devastating loss, I'm probably talking to Coach Hal. He had a major impact on who I am as a coach and the career path I chose. Because he lives in Minnesota with a cabin somewhere in Canada, and he's now an assistant coach at a high school (after traveling the country as a speaker for Character Education from 2001-2005), he won't be able to catch a game unless I'm in the State Championship, so whenever that day comes, having him there will be an added bonus.

August 9, 2008

You mentioned that your high school coach used the "Coaching to Change Lives" curriculum. Can you talk a little bit about that? What is it? What does it entail? Is it something that you have incorporated into your coaching philosophy?

With practice starting for your team on Monday, August 4th, what is it that you look for during that first week? What are two or three things that your players HAVE to understand by the end of week one?

Coaching to Change Lives

The Coaching to Change Lives curriculum was developed by two assistant coaches - D.W. Rutledge and Dennis Parker - at a high school in Texas during the mid-1980's, and it focuses directly on the specific training and development of character development. Both Coach Rutledge and Coach Parker would go on to become head coaches and build reputations for not only producing great football programs, but also for producing quality young men.

The program works to incorporate a specific game plan for the development of character. As coaches, we devise a game plan for offensive, defensive, and special teams schemes, and we prepare to teach technique down to a matter of inches. However, at the end of a season (or game for that matter) many of the "areas of improvement" that we reflect upon are not rooted in technique or scheme, but rather in the character of our team. For example, I don't ever think that I've thought "Well, if we changed our first 6-inch step on our Stretch play, we would have one four more games." But I believe that I'm not alone when a reflection produces either "we won a lot of games because our guys believed in each other and were going to fight until the final whistle," or "we weren't as successful this year because we lacked discipline." Thus, if every year our success and failure depends more upon the character of our players, as opposed to the wisdom of our schemes, this is something that needs to be both a focal point for our program and something that we teach and reinforce daily.

The curriculum divides character development up into six different categories - Goals, Attitude, Responsibility, Character, Leadership, and Self-Image - and has 81 lessons overall. The curriculum is flexible enough that you can follow it straight through, or you can jump around and implement the lessons as you see fit (which is what we do). The "lesson" is usually a story, quote, example, or possibly a poem, that easy something easy for players and coaches to grasp, and it often has a key word or phrase that we can reinforce throughout the week or season. For example, one of our stories about persistence involves a bulldog, so later at practice you'll here our coaches implore our kids to "be the bulldog." Even though some of the stories I include can be cheesy, the kids really do look forward to hearing them, and the enthusiasm for what we do helps make the program a success.

At Park View, our "Patriot Pride" philosophy is the Coaching to Change Lives curriculum put into practice. We will have coaches add other stories or teach some of the lessons, and we are constantly moving and changing our approach to the curriculum. I recently read "The Winners Manual" by Jim Tressel, and he does something very similar with his teams at Youngstown State and Ohio State, and I like how he has his material organized. So for the fall of 2008, I am reorganizing how we present the material to the kids. Practically speaking, the first section of their playbook will be their Patriot Pride Winners Manual, and it will contain our lessons. Once school starts, it will also contain weekly academic planner pages that players must complete and have checked off by a coach in order to play in the game on Friday night.

Our first week of practice:

In my four off-seasons of work at Park View High School, this has been the best one so far. We weren't slightly more committed than previous years, we were significantly better. We went from having a committed group of kids working out for last year's team at around 22-24 players, to this year we had a consistent average of 53 players. Therefore, the big thing that we need to instill this first week is a commitment to the collective identity of our program. We have too many people that have worked too hard for any single individuals to come into the program and have an attitude of entitlement. So, the main thing we will have accomplished by the end of the week is getting everybody on-board.

At Park View, football is a no-cut sport. So, not including the 55 anticipated 9th graders who will start on the 11th, we are currently running practices with 92 players at the varsity and junior varsity level. In his book "Good to Great" about businesses that have maintained consistently high levels of success, Jim Collins talks about the importance of (a) getting the right people "on the bus" followed by (b) getting them in the right seats, in order to move in the direction of success. As I mentioned before, we are working on getting the right people "on the bus". As far as getting them in the right seats, we work to do that as best we can, but there are two times in which that entire picture can change (1) our first day of contact on Saturday, and (2) our first scrimmage at Turner Ashby High School on August 15.

By the end of week one, we need our kids to understand and commit to our basic philosophies on offense and defense, and commit to taking the little things from practice and continuing them on their own at home to continually get better. We will have a large part of our offensive and defensive packages installed, as they are not very complicated, so this will give us a chance to evaluate and refine our team in week 2 as we prepare for that first scrimmage.

August 27, 2008