From Gold to Friday Night Lights to a New Path

This week has been hard for me - lots going on during my work hours - and didn't make it to practice on time once . For me, this is crazy. We had a terrible practice as receivers on Monday during offensive individual time - I made them run around 140 yards and then they had about eight wind sprints as a team. They were not happy. I was disappointed. The difficult thing is trying to coach up and keep a group of seven kids interested and motivated to work hard, when they are all at such a wide level. One in particular gets under my skin because he is constantly begging to play. In my experience, I get it but as a coach, if you want to play, you work HARDER, not ask more. I have one player who absolutely never complains but he also does not understand all of what we are doing. If we get to be in a smaller group, he's the one who'll often ask very small detail questions - for example, at the midpoint of the season: "Why does the receiver point to the ref when he's on t...

I found this photo and I love it because it reminds me of the fight we had on our hands three weeks ago on Varsity. An hour or so to the Northeast was the opponent we were expected to beat. But, as things go in football especially, things are not usually as they appear. It was a dogfight - after our varsity guys went up three touchdowns, we allowed them back in the game to tie at 21s for halftime. A shutout in the fourth quarter left us to play for overtime - always a little risky in high school and college. It was a tough loss all around - the 12 th straight for our program since last season - and one that hit everyone especially hard. I guess being in all types of games myself as a player and now going through the gamut as a coach, the feelings are pretty much the same. As a coach, you have no choice but to see a little more objectively the events that transpire, or the missed opportunities both as a result of what you could have done, and what your players could have done. It'...