Category Archives: Uncategorized

February 2, 2013 · 9:42 PM

“Keep going, keep going, and keep going.”

My kids showed me this video tonight at dinner. It is very awesome. We all need a pep talk. I, for one, needed it big time. Submission time. You know that time when it’s so hard to hit SEND, so hard to put your butt on the line.

Kid President, thanks for reminding us to be awesome and to keep going out and trying to create awesome.

“Boring is easy.”

“Don’t stop believing…unless your dream’s stupid. Then get a better dream.”

“We got work to do.”

“We were made to be awesome.”

Okay, time to kick it up. Time to keep grinding to create something awesome. Wish me luck as I hit send.

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December 19, 2012 · 6:51 PM

Step Up

Coach Pat Kelsey’s courage shown in his press conference trumps everything I had in line for the The Coach Hays blog.

Decent human values are important.

They must be taught

They must be lived.

Be an agent of change.

It is time.

Step up!

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December 7, 2012 · 8:46 AM

The Isaiah Awesomeness

“For to us is born, to us a son is given; and the government will be upon his shoulder, and his name will be called ‘Wonder Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.’ Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end, upon the throne of David, and over his kingdom, to establish it, and to uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time forth and for evermore.” (Isaiah 9:6-7).

Regardless of religion, faith, or beliefs, these words from Isaiah are magnificent. An amazing couple of sentences; perhaps even a couple of the most beautiful sentences recorded in mankind’s history.

It’s definitely one of the best introductions in written history. Can you imagine the guest speaker at an event taking the podium with an introduction using the words from Isaiah?  “Holy moly, Ralph! I didn’t know the upholder of justice and righteousness from this time forth and for everyone is our Noon Optimist Club speaker this week.”

I want to be better when I read these words, especially when the narrator in my head uses his James Earl Jones voice reciting them. These words inspire me to be a better husband, father, writer, scientist, athlete, and coach. In other words, they just make me want to be a better human being.

Wonder Counselor! Are you kidding me? That is next-level awesomeness.

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December 1, 2012 · 4:08 PM

Leap Of Faith, Trust Your Cape

Being a part of a marriage, a family, or any sort of a team requires the players to take a leap of faith to achieve success. To build this type of faith, there needs to be built a trust between all involved. Faith and trust that the other members of the team unit will take care of their role and do the thing, or things, they are supposed to do. It is a simple concept of a team unit. Everyone has a job and needs to focus on accomplishing that job.
It’s not easy, though. It is not easy to trust that someone else will hold their own, especially when you know their faults and their weaknesses. It’s easy to lack faith in each other and try to perform all the parts yourself. This doesn’t work very well, believe me.
Trust doesn’t come prepackaged and FedEx’d overnight at our convenience. This type of trust and faith needs to be pounded into shape with consistency and time and repetition. Perform adequately. Every time. Over time. The harder the challenge, the more faith and trust is built; a baptism by fire, as I like to say.
When you trust those around you, it’s like wearing the superhero’s cape. Your cape gives you powers beyond just yourself, it makes you stronger, and it makes you a better individual. With a team, a family, or a marriage, the more intertwined the individuals are, the stronger the unit becomes. We need to help those around us build with their own capes by being faithful and trustworthy teammates.

Young Super Hero Standing on Laundry Machines
So, be a true and faithful teammate, wear your capes proudly, and live life as Guy Clark wrote in his song, The Cape:

“Yeah, he’s one of those who knows that life is just a leap of faith.  Spread your                            arms and hold your breath and always trust your cape.”

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September 3, 2012 · 6:56 PM

Football Is NOT Life: Reprise 2012

I originally wrote this post for me, to help me get over myself being down in the dumps over another year not coaching football. I wrote is as a therapeutic reminder that, even though I miss coaching dearly, this great game of football is not, and should never be, the MOST IMPORTANT thing in life.

I am re-posting the blog piece, Football is NOT Life, for you.  You know, you folks out there who have let things slip out of focus. The ones who are half crazed with the emotion and the frustration and the disappointment associated with sports, especially when things are heading south in a hurry.

Everybody wants to win, it is written in the marrow of our bones. However, not everybody can win and we need to remind ourselves there are worse things in life than losing a game of football, no matter how much it hurts.

Respect the kids and respect the coaches. Respect the work and effort everyone invests, no matter how disappointing the outcome is. Use games and sports to build character in our young people, not to expose poor character. Please read this post and think about it.  If it helps, then pass it on to the next person before we adults take all the fun out of this great game.

Football is NOT Life! (originally posted on September 21, 2010)

I know this may sound highly irrational and maybe even a bit hypocritical coming from me, but contrary to what the t-shirts say, FOOTBALL IS NOT LIFE!.

Football is the greatest damn game ever invented, but it is not life.  Football is intensity, competitiveness, sportsmanship and violence, but it is not life.  Football requires immense strategy and teamwork, but it is not life.  Football provides education, drama, entertainment, and a solidarity which binds communities, campuses and fan bases throughout the nation, but it is not life.  Football is universal, it is played by presidents and paupers, genius and idiot, big and small, aggressive and passive, rich and poor, but it is not life.  Football should not be all consuming.  Football should not be the top priority.  I know this for a fact, I have tripped and fallen down this hole before (see my story).

Football can be like a package of Oreos, both need to be consumed in moderation.  You’ve been there, you open the package of Oreos and leave it out on the counter.  Sooner, rather than later, the whole package is gone and you don’t feel so good.  But if you open that package and only take a couple of Oreos and place the package in the cupboard for a later date, they not only taste spectacular, but last and satisfy for days upon days.  Football is not life.  It should be taken in moderation and/or with a tall glass of milk, (1% or skim preferably).

Football has it’s proper place, it has it’s proper perspective. Football is not the primary reason for the existence of high schools, colleges and universities.

Yes, football is important.  It is important to compete.  It is important to work hard to be the best coach or player you can be.  It is important to compete with purpose, pride and passion.  But I think Coach Paul Lane said it best with his prioritization of the sport, “Faith, Family, Football, in that order”.

Football is important to me.  But football is not life.  Let’s work to keep football in it’s proper perspective and place. I would hate for you to get a football belly-ache.

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August 30, 2012 · 5:44 PM

“In football…”

“In football a man was asked to do a difficult and brutal job, and he either did it or got out.”      – Frederick Exley, novelist.

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July 14, 2012 · 8:33 AM

A Friday October Night Interrupted

You are lying on a bed of green grass on a crisp October night with stars swirling about your head. Muffled music from a high school marching band floats from somewhere near. You smell the Fall in the air; a mixture of fallen leaves with a hint of winter. For a millisecond, life is beautiful.

Then a whistle blows. Your full senses snap back and the reality drops on your chest like a 24 megaton bomb. You’ve just been physically beaten into the ground by your opponent. At this moment a singular thought invades every cell of your being,

“I wish I would have done the work in summer conditioning.”

Do the work. The clock is ticking.

Hard work is the magic.

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June 18, 2012 · 7:49 PM

F=ma

It is that time of the year, when an old, ex-football strength and conditioning coach still becomes obsessed with one thing. Summer conditioning would have started by now and that one thing would be written and saved on the whiteboard. Written down before the Four P’s (Purpose, Pride, Passion, Performance) were given board space or before the Performance Triangle (Nutrition, Hydration and Rest) discussion. That one thing would seep it’s way into everything we did. It would be the one factor driving the whole strength and conditioning program. What is that one thing? Force. Force as represented in the physical formula, Force = mass (m) * acceleration (a).

Everything we did in our program was about playing explosive. We were (and still are) a physical pool of tough, athletic, middle weight wrestler genes. We needed to play offense, defense and special teams with chaotic aggression in order to compete. In order to play in an explosive, aggressive fashion, we first had to generate force. Everything depended on our ability to generate enough force to be able to hit the opponent like a cannon shot and hit like that from play number one until the clock read 00:00. I remember reading many years ago a quote from Mike Arthur, a strength coach at the University of Nebraska.  Coach Arthur said Head Football Coach Tom Osborne wanted the ground-breaking strength program at Nebraska to develop athletes who would hit hard every play. His philosophy was to hit and hit the opponent until their will was broke or until the opponent became overwhelmed physically and everything the strength program did was to that end. I liked that philosophy and immediately adopted it.

Force was developed by incorporating explosive power development into everything we did. Warm-up was dynamic, speed work, footwork and foot placement was practiced and perfected every day. The lifts were done in explosive fashion with generating weight velocity being more important than the amount of weight. I would rather see an athlete push press 150 lbs. in a fraction of a second than see an athlete take 5 seconds to push press 200 lbs. overhead. The lifting cadence was always 2 counts on the negative portion of the lift, followed by a rapid 1-count explosive positive part to drive the weight through the full range of motion rapidly.

We also created an environment to promote the development of force. We worked fast, hard and aggressive getting as much done in a 40 minute workout as was humanly possible. In the summer program, I now will admit, I drove the kids like dogs. The workouts were brutal and intense, we blasted loud music and certain coaches shouted and pushed and squeezed every ounce of energy the kids had.  Every day. It was so much fun. We had a “Stand Tall” rule. If a coach caught an athlete bending over, sitting down, leaning or relaxing in any way, shape or form they would have ten push-ups to do.

F=ma. If you want to generate force and you have a limited mass, then you better damn well be able to move that mass rapidly toward a target. But, it does not happen on its own or by accident, the only place one can wake up with explosive force is in a comic book. Force must be developed in every aspect of a program; it is an attitude. It is a way of life.

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June 9, 2012 · 8:19 AM

The Last One Consumption Psychology

One cookie left in the package on the counter. I’ve passed it thirty or forty times and it’s still there. It’s been there for several hours sitting in the wide open waiting to be eaten; the package emptied and tossed into the trash can in an act of finality. But, instead nobody touches it.

What is it about the “last” that forces us to avoid eating the last one? What forces us to sip no more than half of the minute remnants from the milk container because we know in theory that we can sip half as we approach infinity and there will always be a theoretical half remaining?

Boys are the worse. Growing up in a house of five boys, I lived this phenomenon on a daily basis. Our house was strewn with bread sacks with one piece of bread left, boxes of Stover’s candies with one piece left (99.99% of the time a piece of some crappy fruit creme chocolate with the investigational thumb poke through the bottom), a half dozen crumbs-on-the-bottom bags of chips in the cabinet and a fridge stocked with a collection of Kool-Aid, juice, milk, tea…etc. containers with microscopic amounts of liquid product staining their bottom side.

Is it the psychology of not wanting the label of being the greedy S.O.B. who ate THE LAST ONE? Do we not want the to accept the responsibility when The Mom throws a holy hell outrage about who ate the last one and didn’t write the need for a replacement on the grocery list? Do we not want to accept the responsibility as the final consumer, with the inherited duties of clean-up and disposal? Or perhaps, it it just plain laziness?

Many questions but few answers.

I just don’t know. But, I am going to sit here and keep an eye on that one cookie for awhile while I try to figure it out.

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June 3, 2012 · 5:42 PM

“But church had a different kind of math.” -Jack Gantos, Dead End In Norvelt

Sublime. The word I’ll use to describe this excerpt from the 2012 Newberry Medal winning book by Jack Gantos, DEAD END IN NORVELT.  This short excerpt explains to perfection how I feel in church and why I have always felt more comfortable sitting in the back. The excerpt assigns words to my feelings about church and finally provides the perfect answer to the oft-asked question to why I attend church. For me, church has always “had a different kind of math” and that, my friends, is the sublime.

-excerpt from DEAD END IN NORVELT by Jack Gantos, Chapter 13, page 182

“But the best part of sitting in the back was that my mind could wander aimlessly, because church was so dreamy. Real life was lived like doing a math problem: one and one always equaled two. But church had a different kind of math. You could never be sure what anything added up to, which meant that what was in your imagination while sitting in a pew was just as important as what the preacher was saying-maybe even more important. It’s like when you read a book and you know that the words are important, but the images blossoming in your imagination are even more important because its’s  your mind that allows the words to come to life.”

I have read 3 of the last 4 Newberry Medal winners, with GRAVEYARD BOOK by Neil Gaiman (2009) and  MOON OVER MANIFEST by Clare Vanderpool (2011) being the other two.  There is a reason these books win awards; they are magnificent stories masterfully executed.  These books, on first read, were so intimidating for me as a writer that my first impulse was to run up the white flag, throw in the towel, and give up even trying to write.  But as I read, re-read, then re-re-read these books their craft and skill emerged, serving as a model for what can be and for what standard of writing I should shoot for.

Note: Chapter 8 of DEAD END IN NORVELT, where Jack visits Mrs. Dubicki’s house to see if she is alive or dead, while wearing his Grim Reaper Halloween costume as a disguise, is one of the funniest things I have read, it is spit milk through your nose funny. Read this book!

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