Just Another Day at the Office

I last coached a football game at Oakcrest High School, a school where I taught for 26 years, in the early 1990s. We were serious underdogs and surprisingly upset our sister school Absegami on a stormy, windy Thanksgiving morning.

I retired from teaching in 2005, and since then I have received many compliments from former players about how their lives were affected or shaped by our football approach during my 38 years of teaching and coaching!

When I heard these compliments, I was sort of stunned by the remarks, because our focus on the football field was to win! Win as often as we could! At the schools where I coached, the desire to win was also the prime concern of the administration and most certainly the school board! I never heard anything but win from the parents either. If we did not win, most likely we would be fired from coaching. So winning was uppermost in our approach to the game! The school would not rehire us because we built character. The administration wanted a winning program, or out the door you went in a hurry! With a family of four children, being fired was not an option.

Recently I began to think about what in our approach was so instrumental in having such a long-lasting effect on our players. The first one that came to my mind was the use of a song lyric that was very popular back in the late 1960s. We referred to this music and lyric quite often during my first years as a head football coach!

The senior group from that first team went on to be undefeated and ranked number 1 in the area. Certainly, this achievement was not possible without the outstanding young men on the team, and by the way, they would have won big with or without the Impossible Dream.

Moving on, in the late 1960s and early 1970s I heard a 78 rpm recording by an old coach from the U of Illinois, Ray Eliot. It was simply titled The Proper State of Mind. Well, we also played this recording quite often for our teams back in the day! In a nutshell, the recording defined the Proper State of Mind “as that dynamic something that jumps into your heart and soul and tells you you have what it takes to get the job done regardless of the odds.” We played this recording for years. Some players can, to this day, quote from the recording word for word!

Moving to the mid-70s, I was an assistant coach at my old high school in Philadelphia. It was halftime in this particular game. We were losing, and I thought we should be winning based on the talent we had on the team!

I asked the head coach if I could say something to the team before taking the field for the second half! He said yes, and I started by asking the team if they knew where they were at this moment and where their poor effort was keeping them. Of course, no answer!

So with a loud, emotional voice I told them they were lower than whale’s dung. I asked them if they knew what and where whale’s dung was located! Again, no answer! I explained that whale’s dung is the waste that comes out of the whale’s tail and sinks to the bottom of the ocean, and at this moment we were lower than whale’s dung by the way we were playing.

“Now let’s get together and show each other we are better than we were in the first half. And when we set foot on the football field, the other team better be ready to do battle!”

They ran out of the locker room and played well to come back and beat the other team! The following year they had one of their best seasons in recent years, due to some great athletes who stepped up to compete in every game.

Next, we were undefeated, losing by a safety, 2-0, and playing very poorly! We had coughed up and lost three fumbles after long drives in the first half. At halftime in the locker room there was nothing but silence. Heads were down. Not a sound was made except for the coaches making adjustments and the trainers looking into some bumps and bruises!

Over the season I had kept all of their very flattering newspaper clippings in my sweatshirt pocket for an occasion like this! Just before it was time to retake the field for the second half, I pulled the clippings out of my sweatshirt and began reading the headlines to the team. After reading a few, I began to tear them up one by one, saying, “This is what we can do with these clippings if the score remains the same at the end of the game! If you play like you are capable of playing, this will not happen!”

They nearly broke down the door trying to get back onto the field. They put together four field-length drives, scoring at the end of each one while shutting out the other team, and won the game 24-2.

Once again, good athletes responding to a wake-up call and some needed adjustments allowed us to remain undefeated!

“You don’t want to win!” This is a remark I would make to any team member who made trouble on the team, trouble in school, trouble in class, failed a subject or missed class or school! We explained to the players that when they made a bad decision in school or out of school, they should remember that they carried 40 other guys with them, especially if they were a big part of the team. And regardless of what they thought about a decision, they had no right to carry the team with them! They may not have been aware that the bad decisions they made in and out of school affected the entire team, but they did!

So whenever there was a problem with grades or discipline, in and out of school, on and off the field, I simply told them, after a correction was made, that they did not want to win! Well, to a man, those teams in the 1980s all hated to hear “you don’t want to win,” and they all remember it today. Hopefully it reminded the players to be conscious of the decisions they were making both on and off the field!

Another theme we used prior to the season was that we had to approach practice and each game with an extremely businesslike attitude! I told them to picture themselves as a refrigerator salesman who was given a very large sales territory in Alaska. In fact, you had to sell refrigerators to people living in igloos. Can you imagine the sales approach you would have to develop in order to be a successful salesperson? Your family was depending on you being successful!

Well, that’s the businesslike attitude we needed to develop for our practice sessions and our games! We talked about this attitude often with the team, and we became very serious-minded when it came to football.

One particular game, we were winning by a big score at halftime, so one-sided that I did not say anything to the team before retaking the field for the second half! As we walked to the field from the locker room, just before we broke into a jog to the bench, Louie Parks, an offensive guard, raised his fist and yelled loud and clear, “Just another day at the office!” At that we all yelled and laughed at the same time as we jogged to our sideline! The businesslike approach certainly made an impression on Louie Parks!

So the question remains: how is it that the former players remember so many moments of their high school playing days? Well, according to Anthony Robbins, a well-known motivational speaker, the recalling of all of these memories by the former players is directly related to the emotional situations the players were experiencing during their playing days!

According to the experts, when the brain experiences emotion, there’s a part of the brain that recognizes the emotion and delivers a shot of dopamine to the area, and the players’ reaction is an all-out effort to achieve success in that and all highly emotional situations! This, in a nutshell, is how all achievement, for good or bad, is accomplished in our lives. This high-powered achievement mechanism enables strong emotional situations experienced in our lives to be committed to memory for life!

You could be at your wake in a coffin, and if someone asked you a question about your playing days in high school, you would sit up and answer the question very accurately! Go Emotion!