Announcement
I spend alot of time trying to figure out ways for our team to win. As I told my coaches in our first pre-season meeting – if this team doesn’t win a Championship before they get to High School then we have failed them. My job as Head Coach is multi-faceted. I need to recruit talented atheletes away from Pop Warner and Soccer. I must develop an offense that is flexible enough to adopt to any defense. I also need to call the correct plays at the right time. Defensively, I need to make sure we know how to tackle and that we can can read offenses. Those are X’s and O’s – but my most important job isn’t about X’s and O’s, or about recruiting talent. We have loads of talent on our team – and that’s great. We can’t win without talent. But what I value even more than talent is HEART.
The most important (and most difficult) job I have is to develop heart, and we need a lot more of it on this team. This is my 3rd year as a Head Coach and I have never had a team come from behind to win a game. Mostly that’s because we just don’t ever get behind, which is a good thing. But I’m not sure yet if we have the heart to come from behind, because I’m not sure about our players’ love and trust of one another. Do we believe in one another? Or do we rely on a few "elite" players to bail us out all the time? Our runners must believe that our blockers will block. Our blockers must believe that our runners will read the blocks correctly and take the correct routes. Everyone must believe that our defense will always dominate our opponent. When we stop hoping that Tommy will score for us or that Brock will make a desperation tackle – and start doing our jobs all over the field – when we stop wondering how someone else will bail us out and start thinking about how I will do my job to dominate my opponent – and when the "elite" players remember that they go NOWHERE without the help of every other teammate – when every player plays with not just DESIRE (which everyone has, strong, weak, good or bad) but HEART (which is rare because it costs you something to show heart) – then by God we will have what we’ve been looking for all along. We wont just have HEART – we’ll have ONE HEARTBEAT. And if we ever do… there is no limit to where we can go.
-Coach Little
