FROM POP WARNER TO PREP SUPERIORITY

Can’t blame Bill Powers much for pinching himself once in awhile to make sure this is all real. After all, how else would you explain a former Pop Warner coach with no prior high school coaching experience turning a doormat of a football program into Florida’s winningest prep team in the last four years? “I really don’t know if there is another story in the world like mine,” he said from a cell phone on his way back from delivering a sold-out clinic session on special teams that was sponsored by Nike in Orlando. “But I seriously doubt it.” The roots of his success go back over twenty years ago when he played alongside former NFL All-Pro linebacker Sam Mills at Montclair State University in New Jersey. The hard-nosed, gritty approach he brought to his game has now brought a nearly defunct program back to life.

A Rise From The Ashes

It almost ended as quickly as it started. It wasn’t too long ago that Jupiter Christian High School, a private school of 250 students in Jupiter, Florida was considering dropping football in 2004 – only two years in from its inaugural season. Tired of banging heads with larger, perennial Florida powers like Glades Day and American Heritage High School, the school hadn’t succeeded yet and they certainly weren’t close to it.

All the while, Bill Powers knew he was the right man to turn the program around. Trouble is, no one else did. A Pop Warner coach with tremendous ambition, Powers applied for the head coaching position during the school’s first season. He loved a challenge, and the eight-mile commute from his house would get him home in time for dinner. But a prior agenda at the school prevailed. Though he might have looked the part, Powers was just a local Pop Warner guy with no high school coaching experience. After all, this is Florida High School football, and Pop Warner football is, after all, just Pop Warner. “We wanted to bring in a big name person with some big game experience,” says Leslie Downs, who was in on the selection committee and has since become school president. “We made a mistake going for the name and not the person.”

Downs and her committee went through two coaches in the program’s first two years, arguably the worst two seasons in Florida prep history. The Eagles lost 17 games in a row by a combined score of 716-52, including one loss by forfeit because they did not have enough healthy players to field a team. It got so bad that the last coach stormed into Downs’ office and turned in his whistle, calling J.C.H.S. a “dead” program with no facilities, no kids and no hope. “The wind kind of went out of our sails at that point,” remembers Downs.

The search for a new coach began again. But this time, the man right under their nose wouldn’t be slipping away. Downs called Powers, who happened to be her son’s youth football coach, with an offer that he accepted. With that, new life was brought into the program. Since Powers took over, Jupiter Christian has a 47-5 record in four seasons and has taken home back-to-back Florida 1B state championships. The Eagles have won 27 straight games, which is the longest current streak in the state. Incredibly, the school finished 2nd in last year’s adidas National 7-on-7 Championship, competing against national prep powers as a last-minute substitute for a school that had dropped out. To say Powers knew it would happen might be suggesting too much. But his success was all part of a plan that was devised well before he landed there.

Reflections of a Winner

Subconsciously, Bill Powers was learning how to win by absorbing the personalities of all the successful people he came into contact with during his playing career. “You can count the losses I’ve had in my career on my fingers and toes,” said Powers. He was fortunate enough to play for a New Jersey high school football coaching legend, Warren Wolf of Brick Township High School, who won 361 games in 51 years at the helm. Being too small to play in Division I, he landed at nearby Montclair State University where he learned his biggest lessons in winning by observing a man who was small in stature but huge in determination – 5’ 9” linebacker Sam Mills. “I remind my kids every day about Sam Mills,” says Powers about his former teammate who, tragically, died of cancer in 2005. “When a player of mine wants to play in college, I never tell him he’s too small to go here or too small to go there. I know, beacuse of Sam, that good things can happen. I tell them a guy with your size made it. But this is what he had to do to make it.”

Usually, his players do make it, but not without a ton of tough love from their coach. “The main thing that I’m about is being tough on my kids,” said Powers. “We are never satisfied with what they are doing. But I believe in kids. I’m a yeller, but I have to tell them I love them afterwards. I’m going to push a kid a little harder than they’ve ever been pushed. I try to get the most out of them. I tell our kids all the time that they can’t take my yelling personally. I wear my emotions on my sleeve. I’ve found it has less to do with X’s and O’s and more to do with giving them ownership of the team. It’s a corporate approach to football where I become more of a manager than anything else. Our kids now breed perfectionism. They can do anything and now they believe it. We have three different sayings – overachieve, everyone has what it takes and champions do what it takes. We preach that they have the tools, now they need to act on it.”

The Pop Warner Approach

And act they did. In their first season under Powers, the Eagles went 10-2 and capped it off with a berth into the Florida class 1B state playoffs. Powers combined lofty goals with an emphasis on fundamentals to engineer the turnaround. “The first thing I did was go in there and set a goal of winning a state championship,” said Powers. “They must have thought I was crazy to do this. Other coaches I knew around the area laughed at us. The truth is I didn’t really believe it was realistic, but I had to establish a mindset that our kids were there to play football and things were going to change.”
The change came quickly, and it was Powers’ method that propelled it. Instead of trying to do too much, he simplified the game by concentrating more on fundamentals than anything else. Most successful high school coaches follow the same philosophy, but its how Powers implemented his plan that is different. When he first got the Jupiter Christian job he only had 19 players on his roster – less than half of his opponents. Worse, he had only one full time assistant – offensive coordinator Jim Davis. He had to find ways to make the most of his time. Instead of spending the majority of his practice plan on group and team work, he and Davis would take the entire team and consistently work blocking and tackling to the point where it became a natural progression.

“Since we only had two coaches, during game weeks we would spend two days on offense and two days on defense. Thursday we would work all special teams,” said Powers. “I would take the skill guys and Jim would take the lineman and we would work 25 minutes on blocking or 25 minutes on tackling. It depended on the day of the week it was.” The numbers in Power’s program eventually increased as some of his former Pop Warner players turned from local public schools to play for their long-time coach and taskmaster. But what didn’t change was his philosophy and it carried over to his offensive scheme.

“We just had to be real simple. Offensively, we have four main runs – dive, lead, power and sweep. We don’t even have holes in our scheme for backs to memorize. It’s just ‘get the ball and go’. That’s the way we call it; dive left, dive right, etc. We have a strong and a weak side offensive line that aligns to where the run strength is. We have three main formations – a spread 2x2 formation, a pro I with a tight end and a double tight set that we can run anywhere on the field.” But don’t let the philosophy fool you. It’s not like Powers has his team line up with their arms extended to ensure the proper split. He’s not carrying all of his Pop Warner traditions over. Powers implements a no-huddle system where he will signal in a single digit and his players execute the play based on the digit. “Let’s say 1 is a lead play. That means that I’ll signal in a 1 and the kids will execute the lead no matter the formation. Or, if we’re in spread set 1 would mean a bubble screen. Every kid has a wristband and no one’s figured it out yet. We even set our snap count based on down and distance. On first and third down we would always go on one but on second and fourth downs we would go on two. When we’re in trouble, we’ll have a freeze play tagged with a number so if the defense doesn’t go offsides, we’ll run the number. It’s really so simple.”
Simple yes, but effective. In his short four-year tenure, Bill Powers has proven that less is more. After all, he’s seen it. Now he’s living it.