No One Makes It Alone

I didn’t really enjoy high school. I didn’t do a lot of loud stuff, make a lot of scenes. I don’t have any true horror stories, I didn’t really get bullied, I had numerous friends, and I got passable grades… I just didn’t like it. One exception for me - playing football and basketball in my senior year. By then, I was good enough, I guess, that for the first time in my life, I felt noticed. I floated through my senior year.

Crystal City, MO Hornet athletics in 1975, the year I graduated from the local high school, was the lifeblood of the townsfolk. On basketball home game nights, it was always a full house in the school gymnasium, a utilitarian structure that also served at varied times as, concert hall, graduation stage, prom venue, banquet hall, and, on occasion, funeral parlor. Winning coaches could be a dominant personage in that sort of place, legends in the making to a grateful and proud factory town.

From 1980 until 2024, with a couple of short breaks, I coached high school and college athletic teams, the first four years as an assistant, the other years as a head coach. My wife does not buy it, but today in 2025, I am done. Probably.

My approach evolved over the years to praise them when they hit the standard but never lower the standard. When you take care of your athletes, help them grow, the winning will take care of itself. Saying no, not yes, was hard initially for me to master. It took a few years. It is very easy to say yes. But when you say no you build a culture of accountability, you literally get to the soul of your athletes.

Coaches Rodney Mills and Dick Cook were my high school football coaches. In unique and divergent ways, both got to my soul. My personal coaching ethos became, “remember how fun it was to play and imagine you are coaching 1975 you.” I wanted to do for my athletes what those two did for me.

Coach Mills, a 1955 Hornet grad, began coaching at CCHS in 1962. He stayed until he retired in 1986. He told me once he was, “too ornery, too cussed independent,” for any other school to take a chance on him, so he stayed. By day, Coach Mills taught the complexities of the structure of the English language to an often-unmotivated captive audience of 15-year-old sophomores. After school, he corrected the errors of would-be football lineman with a combination of inspirational practice field quotes and the surgically precise placement of the pointed end of a size 12 Wilson coaching shoe up the butt of the player in need of direction.

Coach Mills told me at halftime in the first high school football game of my career, a JV game, that if I shanked just one more punt, “I am going to raise more hell than the alligators did when the pond went dry.” Not my fault, I pleaded. The up-back blocking for me backed into me.

Coach Mills immediately waved me off. You can make excuses, or you can get the job done, but you can’t do both, was his brutal message. Coach Mills, I finally figured out, would recount the disasters to demonstrate his fidelity. He had seen me at the outset at my worst, and he hammered home to me my inadequacy. Now our relationship had nowhere to go but up - you are a horrible punter, but you are “my” horrible punter. I learned a valuable lesson from Coach Mills - never try to con a con man.

Every Quixote needs his windmill. For Coach Mills it was the hated cross town rival Festus Tigers. Just the mention of the name would send CCHS’s version of the Renaissance Man twirling around in a gale. Coach Mills gathered us seniors together before a Monday practice and said, "Friday night you will play Festus. For the rest of your lives, you will carry with you YOUR senior year Festus game." It was that big of a deal.

One of our seniors attended the first half of the school day at the Vocational Tech School at Jefferson College in Hillsboro. All the county public high schools bussed students there. From a Festus football player and VoTech classmate of one of our teammates, Coach Mills learned that the Tigers, who were suffering a down year while we were rolling, had a desperate plan for Friday night. The hapless Tigers were spending the week installing the archaic Single Wing offensive formation. They were going to catch us unprepared. This unorthodox strategy would be the equivalent of pulling the 1970’s Wishbone offense from the football mothballs in 2025. Crazy. But maybe just crazy enough to work?

Coach Mills had our defense locked in on how to defend the Single Wing. There were many reasons why teams no longer ran this offense, and Coach Mills knew them all. When Festus huddled up for their first offensive play from scrimmage, Coach Mills had the defense chanting, “Single Wing, Single Wing.” The surprise factor was gone before the first snap. For the master of “One Upmanship,” it was Coach Mills at his best. Our defense owned the night, shutting out Festus in their Homecoming game 28-0. We had earned, at least for that evening, Main Street cruising bragging rights.

His practice field rants were often hyperbolic, but their substance was real. Nobody crossed Coach Mills. Impious and blasphemous, he relished throwing snowballs at top hats. When the teams I coached went on the road for a big rivalry game, I taught my guys to be confident, aggressive and obnoxious, just like Coach Mills had taught us.

Somehow, his varied and disparate approaches would find a confluence and Coach Mills was well liked and successful in both the classroom and on the football field. To this day, sneaking up on 90 years of age, he remains unbroken, irreverent and as he told me a few years back, “loudly humble.”

Coach Dick Cook graduated from CCHS in 1956. He then played football and ran track at the University of Missouri. Coach Cook was the calming voice of the Captain Cook/General Mills dynamic duo, displaying always patience and reason. The two coaches' personalities were a good mix.

As a coach, I started our practice every day by blowing my whistle with: gimme three lines, gimme three lines. One day I decided to be cute, I came out and said gimme two lines and everybody looked at me like I just asked them to cure cancer. Practice was a disaster. A lot of coaching is what you choose not to do, not to see. Coach Cook was adept at not allowing distractions to disrupt the day’s plan. I figured as a coach I was wrong 80% of the time, but it would take too much time to go back and make “me right.” I learned from Coach Cook to not complicate things; check your coaching ego at the practice field gate and just keep moving forward. And when you get lucky, roll with it.

Coach Mills shared a good story with me. Randy Cayce was a star running back on the undefeated Hornet football team of 1965. He later played for the Denver Broncos and the Buffalo Bills, as a teammate to O.J. Simpson. “We are playing up at Fox. Coach Cook calls for Randy to sweep to the right. Of course, wherever Randy went, so did the 11 on the other side. Well, Randy sees he is boxed in, comes to a complete stop, I mean a complete stop with both feet; he looks around and then takes off around the left end and outruns the whole Fox team for a touchdown. Nobody laid a hand on him. I saddled up to Coach Cook on the sideline and said, ‘Nice call Coach, just how you drew it up.”'

In basketball, team chemistry follows the shot chart. Everyone wants to shoot the basketball. You've got to have your best shooter shoot more, but the others must shoot enough. The ability to create and maintain that balance amongst a group of testosterone fed teenage boys takes skill. The task when overseeing a football team, I would assume, is similar. There is only so much room in the next day’s headlines. I was never an indispensable cog on any team, in high school or college, but more than any other coach I played for, Coach Cook made me feel valued.

The cerebral Coach Cook would successfully wear many coaching hats in his long tenure at CCHS and over the years has filled a plethora of civic leadership roles as a respected public servant in support of his beloved hometown. Coach Cook, who won six consecutive state championships between 1984 and 1989 coaching the Hornet’s girls’ track teams, ascended to his current community god like status by sticking to a philosophy that emphasizes the practical and the unpretentious. Win or lose, turn the page.

Coach Cook was instrumental in helping me get a college football scholarship. I lasted one semester. I came home and got a job washing dishes. I dreaded the thought of letting Coach know I was a failure, that I had wasted his efforts. After Christmas break I made my way to the elementary school where he taught PE. In his usual disarming way, Coach spoke for a half hour with me. His message was: "Do what you want with your life; it's all up to you." Most importantly, he offered to again help me. I did not squander my second chance.

Times have changed. I came through at a good time. Coaching high school athletes in the 1970’s was still both manly and honorable. They were unique men, instilling a post-war type of football discipline on its last legs - weed out the weak during summer camp and then "dressout" those left standing. But those coaches were the Last Cowboys. They represented a time that has vanished (maybe for good reason - three-hour mid-day August practices with no water breaks) from high school athletics and from this nation. But good coaches can still teach life lessons that transcend the scoreboard - keep your composure amid chaos, form a plan when all seems lost and find the guts to carry it out.

You manage things; you lead people. Rodney Mills and Dick Cook were mentors to me - authority figures who allowed me to see the hope inside myself. I have tried over the years to pay it forward.  Nobody makes it alone. And we are all mentors to people even when we don't know it.