Coaching Character: It Starts with Adults

BY MARK A. TORRES ATHLETIC COORDINATOR/HEAD FOOTBALL COACH - BUDA HAYS HIGH SCHOOL

In today’s world of prep athletics, we have to be cognizant of the fact that every eye and ear is on everything we do and say. With that in mind, we feel that in our program we have to begin each season with a clear vision of our purpose as coaches and relay that information to all of our athletes and parents.

What is our “WHY”?

Wade visits our program multiple times a year to help train our coaches, inspire our athletes, and help us hit the reset button as the school year moves on.

One of his sayings is, “Your character is better kept than recovered”. That has always stuck with me because it is directly in line with the way we approach the game of football. You never take plays off, or at least we do our best to preach that as coaches. You leave no stone unturned in preparation, or at least we do our best not to. Most importantly, when we work with our athletes, we stress that you never get this opportunity back and each day is a gift.

Keeping your character is just like staying in great physical condition. You have to work at it each day and there are many components to achieving this at a high level. As an adult, when we establish our relationship and results values during our “Hawk Maker” we are setting the tone for what kind of reflection our players are going to be of us as individuals, as a unit, as a team, as a program, and ultimately as a community.

3 Checkpoints...

Checkpoint #1:

Wade will visit our program sometime in the summer to introduce the new curriculum and theme for the season, along with a formal training and assessment to help us improve from last year. Right around this time we will be in our summer “Flight School” with our team. Each coach will draw a word of the week for the season and will be given time during this week to present and grade their word along with the team. By the end of the week, all of our words will be graded and we will have an official “pre-season scorecard”.

Checkpoint #2:

We will assign each word to a week in our scrimmage and regular season. These lessons will be given during athletic period on Monday and established as the theme of the week. Once we get to word #2 we begin that lesson by awarding the previous words character competitors of the week (each level and a teacher for each level) and grading our word for the second time.

Checkpoint #3:

At this point, our football season has officially ended; and we award the program’s character competitors of the season for the Varsity, JV, and Freshman teams, as well as a teacher for each level.

In Conclusion

As a staff, we feel it is important to reflect on our season, identify our value system, commit to improvement, and hold each other accountable to that throughout the upcoming season. Working on that as adults is the most important aspect, because it is our responsibility to set the example and the tone for our programs. The days of “Do as I say, not as I do,” have been gone for a very long time. Our athletes in today’s world need to know why; and as adults, we need to provide those answers to the best of our ability.

Read the entire January 2025 Issue of Texas Coach here: https://issuu.com/thscacoaches/docs/jan25upload?fr=xKAE9_zU1NQ