The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Coaches open up about pressures they all face
Five of Georgia’s top high school football coaches share how they handle challenges of the job.
Each week, five high school coaches will discuss one issue that affects Georgia high school sports. At issue this week: High school football coaches face undeniable pressures to win, to be couriers for success and stability within a program and to become the face that fan bases love or hate. In addition, they have to manage the general day-to-day operations of a football program, no easy task. In today’s day and age — where a Hudl highlight reel clip can generate college scholarships and football film is being reviewed before teams hit the showers on Friday nights — the pressures on coaches come from all angles. So what are the biggest pressures coaches face at the high school level?
Blessed Trinity football coach Tim McFarlin
The skinny: Blessed Trinity will enter Class AAAAA in 2020 after winning the last three state championships in Class AAAA, and the pressure could be immense. From the coronavirus pandemic to the loss of spring practice, high school football programs around the state are struggling. But McFarlin said his program has a contrasting view.
Entering a new class in a new season with the loss of spring practice would be a tall task for most programs, but since McFarlin’s arrival at Blessed Trinity in 2006, he has not fielded a spring practice team because he wants his players to compete in other sports.
“You’re already missing your baseball players,” he said. “You’re missing your track guys, and lacrosse has such connection to football. For us, it was a good move. It may not fit for everybody, but we certainly haven’t missed it. My perspective on this is probably going to be a little different than other people who still do spring ball.”
Blessed Trinity clearly hasn’t missed spring practice. It won the 2017 state championship with a 16-7 victory over Marist after losing their regular-season matchup 25-24. In 2018, it defended by beating Cartersville 23-9. Last season, however, was the sweetest.
“The last two, in 2017 and 2018, were sort of expected,” McFarlin said. “This year — beating Oconee County 17-14 — wasn’t.”
McFarlin, who coached at Roswell from 1998-2007 and led the Hornets to a co-state championship in 2006, retired in 2007 and took the Blessed Trinity job in 2011. He has a unique perspective of the various pressures faced by coaches who lead powerhouse programs.
McFarlin: “Well, it’s a broad spectrum. And here’s the reason why every good head coach has this internal drive to be really good. So much of the pressure that head coaches have is self-imposed. And it should be if you’re in that position. It’s your job to elevate the program and take it as far as you possibly can. I think the problem now for head coaches is when you look around the state and you see guys who are winning and still losing their jobs. All over won-loss records. If you look at the scenario with coach (Alan) Rodemaker at Valdosta. If you just look around the state and you see where guys have done a good job and are let go. I mean they’re winning region championships. Like coach Jacob Nichols did at Alpharetta, and they’re still getting replaced, and usually that comes because of the expectations of either board members or sometimes administration. Sometimes — most of the time — it comes from the community. And so it makes it really hard for these coaches to deal with that pressure, because that pressure comes from so many different places. To me, it’s sad when a program makes a change based on that . ...
“Here’s the reason why it’s a double-edged sword for a coach to be effective. He’s got to have the full confidence of those people he reports to. And a coach needs to feel like he can drop his roots deep and really saturate in the community. But we’ve all seen the quick fix in programs where you hire the latest, greatest or kids are recruited to come in from this place or that place . ... But at the end of the day, if you want a program that’s going to sustain a culture of winning at whatever level that is, that coach needs to be able to really go deep with his roots and invest in the community and the players and get to know them. And we know that, as coaches. But then on the other hand you look around and you see just how fragile the job can be. It causes coaches to have to keep an eye open for the next job. I’ve never blamed coaches who go for two or three, four or five years in one place, and then they look to move because in a lot of ways they are probably avoiding headaches.
“That’s part of the college influence, too, and it’s now filtering down to the high schools. I worry about it, because at the end of the day high school football is about the community. And there’s nothing better than when you get a coaching staff that feels that they’re secure in their jobs and they can be part of the community ... that the head coach and his assistant coaches can be a part of the community and their kids can go to school there and there’s the confidence that they’re going to have their jobs and that the administrators will support them and have their backs.
“And I think the challenge now is for administrators to be able to resist those voices from the community that constantly want change. Because those voices come from a lot of different places, and a lot of times it has to do with how they think things should be shaping up for their kids. What coaches really need in today’s environment is the trust and the support of the administration. On the flip side of that, the administration needs to know that they’ve got a man in place or staff in place that they can trust, that those guys are going to be good teachers in the classroom and that they’re going to be conducting themselves in a way that’s going to be beneficial for the kids in the program.”
Former Brookwood football coach Dave Hunter
The skinny: Hunter spent his career molding high school athletes for more than 50 years. He coached at East Cobb Junior High and Ridgeview High School in the late 1960s and early ’70s before coaching at Chamblee and Peachtree. When Hunter took the head coaching job at Brookwood in 1987, he began the longest tenure of his career. In 1996, Hunter led a team that won Gwinnett County’s first state football championship, when Brookwood beat Valdosta in the title game.
Hunter’s knowledge of high school coaching through the decades provides a glimpse of how things were and how they’ve changed.
Hunter: “It has changed. Probably the most pressure I had was put on by me. My expectations were better than most everybody else’s, I think. Once you’ve established a program and have gotten to a certain level, there’s just another expectation level ... like if you are supposed to be the best team in Gwinnett or the best team in Atlanta or the best in the state. You expect to get to that point. When we won the state championship in 1996 and then won 13 straight in 1997, the expectation level was that we were supposed to win it again. We lost in the semifinals.
“The pressure in Gwinnett at the time was we had to raise a bunch of money, not just at Brookwood, but most of the schools that were successful were doing it. So there’s pressure to build up your coffers there, too — to build a successful program, to have the best facilities they can have. We built stadiums and fieldhouses and meeting rooms and all kind of stuff, but we had to have the support of the community. So you, as a coach, have to earn that support as the face of the program.
“Part of my big deal was fundraising and building, not just a football program, but an athletic program. All the while I was trying to help my kids with the recruiting. But nowadays, there’s so much movement from one school to the other. You almost have to keep your players from being recruited — your own players. And then (college) recruiting has gotten worse, not better, for the high school coach. It’s just so time-demanding now. Everyone has their own Hudl and Twitter and all that. I don’t know what I would’ve done then. I would have been crazy.
“People in each location, each school, they’re only focused on being a state champion. I’m not saying that’s the only thing going on, but nowadays I think there’s probably a little shorter fuse, for lack of a better word, for the coach to be successful. Back in the day, you might have four or five years. But now, it seems maybe two or three years. One of society’s problems is that everyone wants a champion. They don’t want a winner; they want a champion. Some people have the best interest of the program at heart, and some people had the best interests of their kids at heart. Not that the ones who had the best interest of the kids at heart didn’t have an interest in the program, but the program has to come first.”
Buford football coach Bryant Appling
The skinny: Appling spent the past 15 seasons on the staff at Buford before taking over as head coach early in 2019. During his time as an assistant, the Wolves won seven state championships with five runner-up finishes in state championship games. The program won state titles in 1978, 2001-03, 2007-10 and 2012-14. Appling coached the Wolves to a 17-14 state championship victory against Warner Robins in his first season, and that’s a good start at Buford. Entering the 2020 season, the Wolves will reclassify to Class AAAAAA and face new challenges as defending champions that moved up in class.
“I guess my perspective is a little different coming to a high-level program like Buford,” Appling said. “I’ve been here for 15 years, 16 years. I’ve seen things from a bunch of different angles.”
While Buford’s state championship victory was a fitting farewell to Class AAAAA, the Wolves will face new pressures, obstacles and tasks next season. Appling expects nothing less.
Appling: “When we won in my first year, it kind of helped the pressure thing a bit. I still feel the pressure, but it was nice now entering my second season with, ‘Let’s make sure we keep this going.’ But I want this to be clear: It’s never been about state championships at Buford High School. It’s more about making sure that the program and the school is represented in the right way — make sure the kids’ grades are up, make sure the kids aren’t misbehaving in the classroom, make sure that they are being leaders in the school building. I think that if I can keep that going, like I have in my first full year at the helm, they’ll be fine. Obviously, no one wants to go 2-8 or 0-10, that’d be a different story. If I can keep the ball rolling in the right direction on the field and keep my players acting right, that’s the most important thing. If things start changing drastically on the field and if things start changing drastically in the hallways, that’d be a different story. From the outside looking in, some just see the wins and the losses. But what goes on behind the office doors and behind the walls of the school is the most important thing to me. And from my boss, coach (Dexter) Wood, all the way up to the city board, those are the important things to the people around Buford.
“You just have more pressure, probably, that you put on yourself. But I try to put more on myself just to make sure I represent the community and school and everything that means. That means to do football in the right way. And being the face of the program — when I’m being interviewed, if I’m on TV, if I’m at our golf tournament or things like that — the pressure, it’s put on by myself to make sure I do things exactly right. As we’ve grown as Buford football, and as we’ve grown in high school football in Georgia, new things come up each and every year. Recruitment is a hot deal right now. Everyone wants to get their kid to (college), and we try as hard as we possibly can to get each kid in school who has the grades and can represent us well.
“There is a lot of pressure brought on you by outside sources. Everyone is trying to have their own recruiting service to help kids out. Some parents want to go that route, and they will ask about that route. And obviously there’s pressure to win. Being the fact that we’ve done it in the past, a bunch of people think that, ‘Well, you’ve won one or two or a few, maybe that pressure has relieved a bit.’ It hasn’t. We still want to win and win a lot. It’s that much more when you do win one or two and you get that taste, and the community gets that taste, and we want to do it again.”
Colquitt County football coach Justin Rogers
The skinny: Rogers took over as head coach at Colquitt County after the departure of Rush Propst, one of the most controversial figures in the history of Georgia high school football. A unique perspective was gained by Rogers when he transitioned from Class AAAAA Jones County to AAAAAA powerhouse Colquitt County.
“You’re always going to feel pressure coming to a program like this,” Rogers said. “The expectations are so high.”
In his first season in Moultrie, Rogers led the Packers to a 9-3 record and a 40-21 loss to Parkview in the second round of the playoffs. Entering his second season, Rogers knows the Packer fan base is expecting a deep run. And there always will be backseat coaches, those “keyboard pirates” who know the ins and outs of the game better than the professionals who coach for a living. And they always voice their opinions, and in many cases, they’re loud.
Rogers: “The average person doesn’t have any idea how much time coaches spend on the weekly prep to play a Friday night game, whether it be through film, studying games, planning meetings and practice. Just the countless hours, long hours that are spent to have that game-prep put together and ready to go out there. And you’ll have your 15- to 18-year olds compete against their 15- to 18-year olds, and you all put that plan together.
“I started coaching in Georgia in 2002 and the landscape and the expectations have changed so much since then. Used to be, it was so much about how you went about things and the way that you went about the day-to-day operations. And now, high school football is just like the college football world to where now it’s so much result-oriented instead of process-oriented. Unfortunately, it’s not as much about the process and what you’re building along the way, as it is, ‘Did you win or lose your last one?’ And that’s kind of the nature of the beast, and it’s kind of a reflection of our society. What’s the old saying: ‘What have you done for me lately?’ Now it’s ‘What have you done for me today?’ You know, that’s our society that we live in. And so that’s changed and hiked more pressures up.
“Our kids are a little different with the social media and things like that. Our staff and I talk about it all the time: adapt or die. Just don’t go backward. So we have to adapt, but at the same time, you try to keep perspective of how important the process is and how important the way that you go about your day-to-day is. And how important that the character and the culture that you build is, as well as the influence that you’re hopefully having on young adults, is a positive one that they can carry a lifetime. And don’t get blinded by results so much that you jeopardize that process of the man that you’re building.
“But yeah, you know, down here in South Georgia, the expectations and the pressures are there all the time. But right now, we try to remind ourselves that this coronavirus is crippling our nation and killing our economy. And you try to, with all that, put high school football at the place that it really has to be at right now. Given the circumstances are where they are, there’s a lot of more pressing issues.”
Archer football coach Andy Dyer
The skinny: Dyer has been with the Tigers since the school’s inaugural season in 2009, compiling an 83-42 record with three region titles (2013, 2014, 2017). Entering his 12th season, Dyer’s team is among the state’s best programs in Class AAAAAAA. Dyer knows pressure exists for coaches, but he said solid preparation helps keep the pressures from filtering down to his players. And keeping pressure off the players is his concern.
“There’s a lot of pressure, but I think it’s a positive pressure,” Dyer said. “I think the great thing about football is that if the kid knows he has prepared all week and his team has prepared all week that he can rely on that preparation. When the game starts, he’s just working and doing what he has worked on all week.”
Dyer: “The big thing is teaching these guys to concentrate on the next play, and if you do those things the results will take care of themselves. Football is a team sport, and each man does his job. When you have a really good team, those guys understand the concept of trusting each other to do their job. Then it gets easier.
“You should be more excited when your teammate does something great than you are when you do it yourself. To me that’s football. It’s a selfless game. Everything you do is selfless. Once you take ownership of that, as a coach, you’re able to do a lot of different things.
“I think college coaches are going to want to recruit from successful high school programs, No. 1, because they know that those kids are going through a similar protocol, similar work . ... Especially once you get out of the (big college conferences), they’re looking for those kids who are program guys who they know are going to come in and help them win their conference. They’re going be team-builders and be part of the process.
“There are different levels of pressure. There’s so much money involved at the collegiate level. That adds a cut-throat aspect to every part of the game, for the players and the coaches. It’s not professional sports, but it’s pretty dang close . ... These kids, they’ve got the innate characteristic to want to compete. That’s what we want to drive. That’s an internal pressure. From an external standpoint, there’s a certain amount of pressure . ... Our guys don’t want to be the ones to drop the ball. We don’t harp on it. But they don’t want to be the group that doesn’t perform well.”