By Rick Unruh and Tim Racicot
(January 3, 2022)
The sun broke through the late autumn clouds as we followed our captains off the field, gravel crunching beneath our shoes. As always, the five-minute walk was a time to process. I prioritized possible defensive adjustments. It was halftime of our 1997 Montana state championship football game, and we were down 20 – 7 against the highest-scoring team in the state. Though we had played well enough to stay in the game, three turnovers in our own territory had cost us. Nearing the locker room, Tim, the head coach, bumped my elbow and nodded towards four young men (later we learned, former opponent players) walking alongside our captains. One of the young men said, “So you’re number one in the state? Sure, doesn’t look like it.” To which another added, “That’s hard to believe! Sure, as hell won’t be much of second half.”
Our three captains kept walking without saying a word, we looked at one another, having a good idea of what was going through their minds—stay focused, trust the process, fix the mistakes, and play the second half. Turnovers aside, our offense had rushed for 130 yards. And our defense had played well, shutting down the opponent’s running game and pressuring their quarterback, perhaps the best passer in the state that year. He had thrown for nearly 200 yards and made a handful of spectacular plays, by avoiding pressure and scrambling to find an open receiver. We watched our captains confidently walk into the locker room.
By the fall of ‘97, Tim and I had coached together for 21 years. In those years our football teams had been in the Montana state football playoffs 14 times. Though we appreciated the challenges of coaching in playoff games, our greatest satisfaction came from the days and hours we spent coaching 60-70 high-school boys throughout the season, including the constant challenge of making ourselves better coaches who could identify and apply adjustments that would improve our program.
By 1999, Tim and I had taken different professional paths, but we stayed in touch, always visiting one another when I was back in town or when he was passing by our home in Washington state. We always caught up on family first. Then we talked about former players, wanting to know where they were and what they were doing. Finally, we reminisced about a special game or outstanding performance. After one of our visits, I read an article in Sport Coach America that highlighted the coaching principles of Hall of Fame and gold medal-winning high school basketball coach, Don Showalter and recalled some of the efforts and performances of our players over the years and how, in many ways, they embodied Showalter’s coaching principles which included hard work, positive teamwork, and humility.
Through our first years of coaching together, Tim and I emphasized hard work. Having played for demanding coaches on successful high school and college teams, we knew what hard work was, but learning how to define, apply, and reinforce the concept of hard work for our players took a few years. At the end of our fifth season together, in 1980, our team was undefeated through the season and into the playoffs, advancing to our school’s first state championship game. Although we lost the game, we were pleased that our players had, week by week, consistently accepted our challenge to work hard and be better conditioned, more technically sound, and more focused teammates. Through the early ’80s, hard work, more often than not, improved our players’ intensity, resilience, and adaptability on both the practice field and in games. But at the same time, Tim and I encountered another challenge. Some of our players were losing their competitive edge at various times during a game or part of a season.
Through a couple of years of player evaluations, program reviews, talks with mentors, and collaboration at coaching clinics, we had become more aware of how coaches’ harsh reactions to mistakes, half-efforts, or lack of focus could adversely affect players. More and more, we understood that some players become less motivated, losing intensity and focus, when coaches brow-beat, yell at, or show anger toward them. This negative feedback too often affects practice and game performances. For example, in the 1982 playoffs, we won a quarterfinal away game against a formidable opponent after making a number of first-half mistakes and coming from 16 points down at halftime to win in the final minute. We thought we were on a roll. But the following week, we coaches dwelled on the previous game’s mistakes, making too many belittling, snide comments, and using sprints and ladders to punish practicing miscues. Throughout the week, the tone of the practices also built tension among the coaching staff. By Saturday the edge from the previous week’s spirited win was gone, and we played less well, losing a semi-final game we should have won.
After the ’82 season, Tim and I agreed that as a staff we needed to be more positive toward our players. Each week of the 1983 season, we moved further and further away from reacting to players’ mistakes with negative feedback. By mid-season, harsh reactions to mistakes became a thing of the past, allowing us to improve our abilities to identify and correct our players’ mistakes. We more clearly understood how negative reactions tended to short-circuit our communication with our players and blocked our ability to teach and our players’ abilities to listen and retain. Instead, we reacted to mistakes in a calm manner, exploring, often with players’ input, a problem or mistake and identifying appropriate behaviors and correct techniques. With each passing week, our players became more focused, intense, and increasingly humble. After winning our first state championship, we made playoff runs in ’84, ’85, 86, and ’88.
Then in 1990, after we lost the first-round playoff game, we realized our players needed more mental and physical toughness than the football season itself could offer. We urged our players to participate in other school activities and began to reinforce and reward their out-of-season efforts. Players increasingly participated in other athletic programs, music, drama, and student government. The more they participated in off-season programs, the more we found they became both physically and mentally stronger. Through the early 90s, we were in the playoffs every year, playing in four state championship games and winning two. Hard work, rewards for hard work, sharing successes, and encouraging humility was paying off in more consistent player performances on the field and in the classroom. In fact, looking back, of 11 playoff losses from 1980 through 1996, eight were to the eventual state champs.
In the middle of the pandemic year of 20-21, Tim and I again had time to reflect back over years of coaching. We watched the game films of the ’97 team and were reminded of how close they were as teammates. We found ourselves surprised at what we had forgotten. Their intensity on the football field was almost startling. Intensity had been this team’s most defining characteristic, and their play had embodied it through every game of the ’97 season.
I followed Tim into the locker room, hearing the talk of blocking assignments, double teams, and pass coverage. The voices quieted as I began writing on the chalkboard, listing a few defensive adjustments. Then Tim asked questions. The answers were pretty much what we knew—running backs had to protect the ball, corners had to tighten coverage, and the defensive line had to change up the pass rush to keep the opposing QB in the pocket. On the run, he was fast, extending plays; and he was accurate, putting the ball where his receivers could catch. We emphasized that we had to control the game in the second half and could if we held onto the football. We would run, run, and run until our opponent committed one or both safeties to help stop our running game. Then our play-action passes would burn them. Finally, Tim reminded the team that other times over the years we had come from behind to win. They only had to focus on their responsibilities, support one another, and work as hard as they had in the first half and in practice.
We kicked off. Again, the opposing QB made a few spectacular plays, but after an offensive holding penalty, he threw a sideline pass from a quickly collapsing pocket. Our corner, playing tighter, easily stepped in front of the receiver to intercept the pass and return it for a touchdown. We shut down their next possession, and our running game controlled the football. We scored two more touchdowns in the third quarter. We rushed 30 times in the second half for over 200 yards. As it had all year long, our intensity increased in the fourth quarter. We continued to slow our opponent’s offense. But as a good quarterback can do, especially when down by only seven points, he moved his team downfield in the final minutes, scrambling and completing passes. His final play was a tough, twirling, and juking scramble. Barely escaping the grasp of our defensive end, he sprinted to his right with our linebacker on his heels. Nearing the sideline, he leaned off his back foot and lofted a 40-yard pass to the goal line. Tim and I watched the arc of the spiraling football, waiting. Our corner, in perfect position, leaped above the receiver, intercepted the ball, and returned it twenty yards. From there, we ran out the clock with a 45-yard drive of intense blocking by the O-line and tough running by our QB and running backs.
We had won our fourth state championship, 27-20. But more importantly, we had grown as coaches, becoming more and more aware of our players as young men taking another step in their lives, a step that many of them would remember and use as they moved on in life. Whatever they did, whatever they accomplished, I would like to think that most of them believed that their successes came from the same coaching principles, Coach Showalter shared in the article that sparked my memory: hard work, positive teamwork, and humility.
Editor’s Note: Longtime friends, Tim Racicot and Rick Unruh coached together for 25 years at Frenchtown High School in Montana. Today they continue to get together, often spending Thursday afternoons in the fall watching the University Montana Grizzlies’ pregame practices and catching up, remembering the fun of coaching, and talking about the accomplishments of their players.
This article was originally published in PHE America on 9/12/21.
