GT: What are some
of the basic elements of your
coaching philosophy?
Coach Lewis: We have one rule with our football team and that’s, ‘Do
what’s right.’ We all know right from wrong, and do we sometimes make mistakes?
Yes we do, but ‘Do what’s right’ covers a lot of different aspects, as we tell
our kids. The easy test to solve that equation for yourself is if your mom or
dad, grandpa or grandma were standing right there, would you do it? And if you
wouldn’t then you probably shouldn’t be doing it. As coaches, we want to put
our kid’s best interest at heart. If we do that then hopefully everything else
will take care of itself.
Talk about the preparation you go through before
training camp and the season.
What a lot of people in Evansville and probably throughout the state
don’t realize, if they don’t know about their football program, [is] that it’s year-round,
unlike what it used to be. Now it’s a year round thing and our kids are lifting
in the winter, lifting in the spring and lifting in the summer. They’re doing
agility work; they’re doing speed work to get ready for the season. Because of
the new rules in Indiana you can basically practice most of the summer except
for two weeks – moratorium weeks – that you can’t do anything with football. We
have a lot of practices before the actual practice starts for the season. This
coming year starts August 2; by that time we will have probably had 15-16
practices. Can that be a lot for a kid? Yes it can, but to go along with that
we encourage our kids – along with weightlifting, agility and speed work – we
want our kids to play in as many sports as [they] can throughout the year.
What are some of the essential traits you look
for in a young man who plays for you?
Number 1: We have to be able to trust him. If we can’t trust him there’s
a good chance he won’t play. Number 2: He has to be a hard worker; number 3: He
has to be loyal to his teammates and the staff as a whole. And probably one of
the most important things is he has to put his team above his individual
accolades. This past year the theme of the year was ‘Play for Each Other.’ We
told the kids if you’re playing for each other and not worrying about yourself
and put guys that you’re lining up next to first as apposed to putting yourself
first, then we have a chance to have a special year. It’s amazing what you can
accomplish if nobody cares who gets the credit. That goes right along with the
theme.
What did you learn from coaches, mentors or teachers
of your own that you use in your coaching?
Number 1: Organization; number 2: Don’t be afraid to delegate responsibilities
to different people. I can remember my first head coaching job in Ohio; my
first year I didn’t know the assistant coaches because I hadn’t ever been at
that school and I made the mistake of trying to do everything myself, because I
didn’t know what they could handle and what they couldn’t handle and I looked
like a skeleton by the end of the year. I probably lost 20 pounds and my wife
and I looked at that picture and we thought, ‘My God, you look terrible.’ Number
3: ‘Let coaches coach.’ If you trust in the coaches, you’ll let them coach, do
their job, and as long as they’re doing it for the right reasons, if you have
trust in them you’re going to let them do their job. I have a great trust in
our coaching staff; I think it’s a great staff. Organization, delegation, and
let them do their job!
Coaches differ about this, but is there such as
thing as a good loss?
I don’t know that I’d ever say there’s a good loss, but there’s a lot of
things that can be learned. Last year, when we got beat over in the Border Bowl
in Kentucky against Owensboro Sr., I think our kids came back and rededicated
themselves to doing the little things right. That loss actually, I think,
helped us down the road; it refocused our kids and refocused our staff and made
us realize we couldn’t just show up and expect to win; we had to do the little
things right to do that.
Having said that, in your time as head coach at
Reitz, you've only lost twice, by a total of only seven
points. To what do you attribute your success?
Having good players (laughing). We
have good players. We have been blessed with good leadership from our seniors;
we’ve had good senior groups in both years. We have a great staff, a great
assistant coaching staff that puts our kids in the position to be successful. I
think those are the main things.
Describe your feelings when it hit you that
your team would become the State Champions.
Excited. Excited for our kids who worked their butt off from
the winter-on. Excited for our staff who put in tons of hours away from their
family and [I’m] obviously privileged to be a part of such a neat experience.
Thanks to Coach Lewis for giving Go Team his time. For the unabridged version of this interview, visit www.goteammagazine.com.