I've paid my dues. Starting back in
1970, I coached and ran the minor league
(semi-pro) Hagerstown Bears for three
years. Many of my players were pretty good - they'd been cut by the (Baltimore) Colts, Eagles,
Steelers or Redskins, and when the World Football League started up in 1974, I
parlayed my knowledge of where to find players into a job with the new league. I spent two years in the WFL, first in 1974 as Player
Personnel Director of the Philadelphia Bell, then in 1975,
after a move to the West Coast, as Assistant GM/PR
Director of the Portland Thunder. I did gain a measure of fame as the person who signed Vince Papale, the inspiration for the movie "Invincible," to his first pro contract.
When the WFL went out of business in mid-season 1975, I
returned to college to pick up education credits, and
started teaching and coaching in 1976 at Gaston, Oregon
High, a rural school with fewer than 200 kids in four grades. (Just in case you're wondering if it's too
late for you to get into teaching and coaching, I
was 38 years old at the time.)
Since then, I've been a head coach at seven different
high schools, both large and
small, rural, inner city and suburban. I've been an assistant at five different schools.
In areas other than coaching, I spent the summer of 1986 as an intern in the athletic
department at LSU under AD Bob Brodhead, my former boss with
the Portland Thunder.
For three years, I did color analysis on Portland
State's telecasts.
I've coached overseas, in Denmark and Finland; the
highlights of my seven years in FINNISH FOOTBALL from 1987-1993 were
(1) Winning the Maple Bowl, the National Championship of the
top division, in 1989, and (2) building a
new team totally from scratch and in our second year winning the 1992 Division II National Championship and the Division II Coach of the
Year award. It was while in Finland that I first saw Coach
Don Markham's Double-Wing in action, and it was while I was there that I
introduced his toss play into the Delaware Wing-T I had
been running and the numbering system I had developed, and
began running my version of the Double-Wing.
In 1996 I was named head coach at LaCenter,
Washington, High, a school of about 600 students (9-12)
some 20 miles north of Portland, Oregon. At the
time I was hired, the Portland Oregonian called
La Center "perhaps the most forlorn program in the state of
Washington." (During the 1980's, La Center had once lost 39
games in a row.) By my third year, 1998, we made it to
5-4, not a spectacular mark by most standards, but at La
Center, the first winning record in the school's history as an
11-man program!
In 1997, I introduced a direct-snap version of my Double-Wing offense which we called the Wildcat - because that was La Center's nickname. (Not very original.) We ran it in our last two games, and won them both, one in a runaway victory over a school two classes larger! (After the 1998 season, I wrote an article about it - "Wildcatting With the Double Wing") for Coach and Athletic Director magazine.) I found it amusing, to say the least, when in the 2008 NFL season the Miami Dolphins began running a direct-snap series which they called, "The Wildcat." (Even less original.)
(I take great pride in the fact that my successor at La
Center, John Lambert, a former student, player and assistant
of mine, has taken the program to great
heights, including the 2003 state Class 2A Semifinals, and established LaCenter as a state power.)
In 1999, I accepted the head coaching job at Washougal, Washington,
the town adjacent to Camas, where I live. Washougal had
won just two games in the previous two seasons, but when I
arrived I found good kids who told me they were willing to
work hard, and sure enough, they were. Although they had
been a passing team, they took a quick liking to the
Double-Wing, and after losing our first two games to strong
opponents, we got it together and ran off seven straight,
finishing the regular season at 7-2, the unbeaten Southwest
Washington AA league champs. I was deeply honored to be
voted Coach of the Year by my fellow coaches. In April of
2000, with some regrets, I chose to resign my
position.
In 2003-2004 I was privileged to work as
an assistant to head coach Tracy Jackson at Madison High
School in Portland, coordinating the offense. (Guess what we
ran?). In 2004, after winning only four games total in the
previous four years, Madison finished the regular season
7-2, its best record in years.
In July of 2005, when Tracy left to take another job, I elected to stay behind and replace him at Madison. It was not an artistic success. We were very young and inexperienced, and we lost every game. We moved the ball okay - we just couldn't stop anybody. The kids worked hard and I love them dearly but they were simply outmanned.
In 2008, I was attracted to a job at North Beach High School, in the quaint resort community of Ocean Shores, Washington. My wife and I rented a neat ocean front condo for the season, and I was able to convince some other coaches to join me, including recently-retired Jack Tourtillotte, veteran Double-Winger from Boothbay, Maine. The upshot of it was that we were able to take a good group of kids who had been 1-9 in 2007 to a 7-3 finish in 2008. Our three losses were by a total margin of 11 points.
We rushed for 3670 yards - an average of 367 yards a game - and outscored opponents 353-172. We ranked fifth in the state in our class in scoring. In a tribute to our players and coaching staff, I was named Pacific League Coach of the Year, and I was the subject of a very nice feature in the Aberdeen (Wash.) Daily World.
taking my lumps
If it's true that you learn more from losing than you do from winning, then I've learned a lot. In my first job, in Hagerstown, Maryland, we lost our first seven games in a row, before we finally won. But then, fortunately, we won our last seven games, and finished 7-7.
In 2005, my team at Madison High in Portland went 0-9. You're not a coach until you've survived a season like that. I offer no excuses. I knew things were going to be tough and I didn't have to take the job. But I did have a chance to work with some really good kids who gave me everything they had and never quit, and I'll never say anything that would reflect badly on them.
I also know what it's like to be out of work. On two occasions - in 1974 and 1975, the World Football League went out of business, leaving me jobless. In 1975, it stranded me in Portland, Oregon, 3,000 miles from my home in Maryland, but it turned out to be one of the best things that's ever happened to me. I found a high school coaching (and teaching) job and my wife and I were able to raise our four kids in the beautiful Pacific Northwest. Unfortunately, they all went away to college and now they're scattered all over the map. If only they'd all move back...
