Coaches plot different
routes to the end zone
By Justin A. Rice Globe Correspondent / September 10, 2009HANOVER - Fran Armstrong, Matt Johnson, Joey Shisler, and Brett Wheeler can joke about the practice sessions now, reflecting a year later, as seniors on the Hanover High football team.
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As juniors, they were seen, not heard.
“No juniors or sophomores could talk,’’ said Shisler, a running back/linebacker, recalling the workouts under the direction of first-year coach Brian King.
“When a junior said, ‘Oh I think this will work’ [the coaches] would say, ‘Oh, you don’t have a speaking part.’ ’’
Turning an underachieving 5-6 team into the school’s first league champion since 1988, King provided a jolt of discipline to the players: There was no walking, no taking a knee, and no dawdling between drills.
“If you undid your helmet, they’d ask you if you were on scholarship,’’ said Armstrong, a team captain who plays guard and defensive end.
At the end of the season, the seniors told King the structure he introduced made the difference.
“Players want discipline, continuity, all that stuff,’’ said King, a longtime assistant at Plymouth North and Pembroke who led the Indians to an 8-4 mark.
“I learned that as an assistant and I brought that to Hanover. People noticed right away the way we ran practice. We were doing something every minute; everything was scripted. They noticed things like that and that went a long way.’’
Turning around a high school football program, however, takes more than a healthy dose of discipline. The key to halting a losing cycle, according to a number of coaches in the area, is to create a winning culture.
Herb Devine, a former player and assistant at Whitman-Hanson, was named head coach at Scituate last summer, three weeks before the start of the season. He guided the Sailors to a 7-4 mark, a drastic turnaround for a team that had been 2-9 in 2007.
The program’s fifth coach in four years, he made sure players were held accountable for their actions and streamlined practices that had run long the previous season.
“The game of football wasn’t fun anymore; there was no enthusiasm and the morale was just kind of beaten down,’’ said Devine, who was the first high school coach from the state to take his team on a tour of The Hall at Patriot Place in Foxborough.
Devine also scrapped a five-wide spread shotgun offense in favor of a wing-T formation he thought would be a better fit for backs Marty Noenickx and Kyle Crowley. He was right. The Sailors won their first five games and the backfield duo nearly combined for 2,000 yards rushing.
What’s the key?
Devine said coaches can’t waver in their football philosophy and have to believe in themselves.
“I believe in where I come from. I believe in the way my coaches taught me and what they instilled in me as a player.’’
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Ironically, Devine’s mentor at W-H, Bob Bancroft, is trying to rebuild the program at Pembroke this fall. In his run at Whitman-Hanson from 1983 to 2001, Bancroft led the Panthers to 16 league championships, including 12 in a row. Pembroke, on the other hand, has won a combined five games in the last three seasons, including going 3-8 last year.
Bancroft, who struggled to restore the winning ways in his first three years at W-H, said the biggest difference at Pembroke is that the players don’t have a winning foundation to fall back on or to compete with.
“Whitman-Hanson had a history,’’ Bancroft said. “People in town liked football, attended games. They had a base. These kids are creating their own, which is hard but also fun for them. Down the road, they don’t’ have to say someone else built it; they can say they built it.’’
Once the program is built, however, it’s difficult to sustain.
Plymouth South endured a decade of losing before Scott Fry came on board and turned the program in the right direction. South went 7-4 in his third season, followed by 8-3 and 7-4 marks before dropping to 2-9.
“I look at some of the programs that have been consistent year in and year out and it is amazing when you have a program like that,’’ Fry said. “It’s very difficult. It’s not like college, where you can recruit.’’
Finding players willing to work year-round and provide senior leadership is a cycle that is bound to break every few seasons.
“As a coaching staff, you have to get through those tough times,’’ said Scituate’s Devine. “Kids go through bad years. But getting kids to still believe in the program and the coaches during those seasons, those are the coaches that are most successful.’’
One of the biggest traps teams fall into, according to Bancroft, is being too loyal to seniors.
“We try to give seniors the first look if they’ve been on three years,’’ Bancroft said. “But if they aren’t the best people, you gotta be able to go ahead and make a decision to get the best 11 or 20 guys on the field.’’
Bancroft taught Devine how to create constant competition among players regardless of grade levels, making everyone better and staving off complacency among upperclassmen who think their job is safe and underclassmen who think they have to wait their turn.
Devine has taken to printing players’ names on the back of practice jerseys.
“It doesn’t say senior, junior, or sophomore on the back of your shirt; it just says your name and number,’’ he told the players.
“My coaches do not just want to play seniors; we want to play the best players because the success of the program depends on it.’’
Bancroft believes in creating competition at each position.
“A player may not start the game but he may feel like he played a full game,’’ he said. “We might not have had a 1,000-yard rusher [at W-H] or Parade All-Americans but we knew we’d have football teams on the top of the list every year. But kids have to buy into that and that’s tough to do.
Hanover’s players bought into King’s system wholeheartedly last season. But it helped that a core group of juniors had an allergic reaction to losing. Playing together since third grade, they only lost two games in eight seasons together.
“Once we realized we could do it, it became natural,’’ Shisler said.
They’ll try to kick off another successful run tomorrow night, in the season opener at Abington.
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