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AFM Magazine

AFM Magazine


Mark Speckman

The coach. The player. The inspiration.
Salem (Ore.) Statesman Journal
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Mark Speckman, like every football coach and player on this planet, has seen many a penalty flag he thought absurd.

One in particular, from his playing days at Menlo College, stands out.

The memories have faded, but the irony has not.

Speckman, a linebacker, was asked one game to fill in on the offensive line for a few snaps and was penalized for illegal use of the hands.

The ironic part is that he was incapable of committing the infraction. Speckman was born without hands.

"Obviously the guy was pass rushing me, beating me bad," Speckman recalls. "I was just trying to grab him. Of course everybody howled and screamed and yelled."

With an uncanny sense of humor and an undeniable sense of determination, Speckman overcame the odds to become an honorable mention All-American. Those same traits enabled him to become a successful high school and college coach.

"I really think in a lot of ways it really made me better as a player and a coach," says Speckman, the head coach at Willamette University, an NCAA Division III school. "When you have a handicap like this you get really proficient at other things, for example, problem solving and just looking at things differently.

"Thinking outside the box in football has been a tad easier."

Speckman is regarded in the coaching ranks as one of the gurus of the "Fly," an unorthodox offense he brought with him to Willamette in 1995, when he became the program's offensive coordinator.

The system relies on motion, misdirection and deception, and is as hard to describe as it is to defend.

"To me, our offense is kind of like the Legos blocks you played with when you were a kid," says Speckman, who just completed his second year as the program's head coach. "There were six or seven pieces, but you would put them together different ways to make an infinite number of toys out of it."

The Fly has served Speckman well. He compiled a 113-48-3 record in 14 years as a high school coach in California, and the success followed him to Willamette. The Bearcats are 42-12-1 since he joined the coaching staff, including 22-2-1 in the Northwest Conference. They have won four conference titles and made three postseason appearances, and they have rewritten the school record book in the process.

The seeds of his success were planted 44 years ago, when Speckman was born. Raised in Belmont, Calif., a suburb of San Francisco, he was the son of a homemaker and a custodian. Physically he was different than the other children, but his parents never coddled him, instilling in him the motto: "Figure it out."

"They just kind of dropped me off at school and just left me there," he says. "I became very skilled in being adaptable."

Speckman was one of the youngest people in the United States to be fitted with hooks, at the age of 13 months. At a very young age he realized he would be better off without them, but his parents insisted he wear them, which he resented at the time.

"They didn't know any better," Speckman says. "That's what they were told that you did.

"You have no tactile sensation. You can't touch, you can't feel anything, and I thought they looked goofy."

He naturally was the target of constant teasing from his peers, but the cruelty didn't deter Speckman from doing anything and everything the other children did.

"For whatever reason, I had a spirit about me that just kind of deflected it," he says. "I'm sure a lot of things were going on. Teachers worrying and parents agonizing."

The hooks came off for good when Speckman turned 15. It was at about that time that he set his sights on football, one of many sports he enjoyed. He undoubtedly raised eyebrows when he stepped onto the field for the first time.

"As a kid, I didn't know any different, so I just assumed there was no reason why I shouldn't be playing football," Speckman says. "I had great high school coaches and great college coaches who always gave me a chance. That's all you can really ask for."

A chance was all he apparently needed. He proved he could excel at the sport, even without hands.

"I think it made me a better football player because I had to become a great tackler," he says. "I couldn't rely on grabbing. I had to actually wrap and hit."

He was good enough to go on and play in college, first at Menlo, then at Azusa Pacific University.

Jim Milhon, the defensive coordinator at Azusa Pacific at the time, remembers the toughness Speckman displayed on the football field.

"He could really do a number on guards who tried to block him," Milhon says. "He was a very, very tough customer as a linebacker."

Speckman never once thought being born without hands limited his ability to compete on the field.

"I can't even think of an instance where it cost me, where it was ever an issue where I didn't make a play that somebody else could have," he says. "To me, my handicap playing football was my speed and my size."

Speckman prefers not to use the word handicap, because if anything, his is a visual one. Many people are noticeably uncomfortable when they first meet him.

Shaking hands, a common way of greeting in our culture, becomes somewhat of an obstacle. But Speckman lets his sense of humor take over.

"I wish kicking in the butt was a way to greet, or hitting elbows," he said.

"I've always called it a visual handicap. Somebody sees me and it's different. There's shock value. I don't think it stops me from doing anything."

There is very little that Speckman can't do because he doesn't have hands. He can write with a pen. He can type on a computer.

Hammering a nail is little more difficult, as is stuffing recruiting envelopes.

"It just takes me 10 seconds longer," he says. "I can't tie my shoes, that's about it."

To solve that problem, he never unties his shoes. He slips them on and off. If they ever do come untied, he simply has someone tie them for him.

As a football player, Speckman remembers a time when his shoe came untied during a game and one of his teammates rushed over to tie it without Speckman even asking. He figures it wasn't always easy on his teammates.

"Nobody liked lockering next to me because they always had to tie my stuff, too," he says.

Sports weren't his only love. He also was a talented trombone player growing up. He paid his way through college on football and band scholarship, and later was a member of a jazz band when he was a teacher and coach at Merced High School.

Speckman dusted off the instrument last fall and supplied the opening act for his team's annual preseason talent show, impressing his players and his assistant coaches.

Speckman also impresses his players on the racquetball court. Like everything he has encountered in life, he had to "figure out" a way to play the game. He did so by wrapping the end of his arm with tape, the last few layers sticky side out, and then sliding his arm through the 'V' of the racquet.

His players can attest to how good he is. Speckman has never lost a game.

"I'm getting older. I see the end of the reign coming," he says. "I try not to recruit good racquetball players."

Recruiting can be awkward at times. Speckman never knows what reaction to expect when he visits the home of a prospect and they discover he doesn't have hands.

"We've kind of debated whether I should say something to kids right away," he says. "If a kid wants to shake hands, you shake hands. I just try to keep a distance and read if they're comfortable or not comfortable.

"I don't think it's a negative in recruiting in any way. In many ways, it's a positive. I don't know if we've gotten a guy because of it or not, but the kid's always going to remember me."

Speckman faces more pressing challenges when it comes to recruiting, like finding prospects who meet Willamette's stringent academic requirements. The average incoming student, according to Speckman, has a 3.75 grade-point average and a 1250 SAT score.

"The first thing we talk about with recruits is academics," Speckman says. "There's a lot of good academic schools in the country and there's a lot of good football schools, but there's not many that are both. For a kid who really wants to challenge himself academically and football-wise, I think this is a slam dunk."

Speckman also has carved a recruiting niche because of the offense he employs. The Fly is entertaining, not only for fans but for the athletes who make it go.

The name of the offense evolved because it looks like players are "flying" around with all the motion involved. It has four basic plays: sweep, dive, trap and play-action pass. But that hardly covers the spectrum.

"There's no limit on what you do out of this thing," Speckman says, "We can get into just about any formation. We can look like a run-and-shoot team. We can look like a veer team. That's one of the beauties of it. It's extremely fluid."

Although Speckman receives tons of inquiries about the nuances of the system, he is hesitant to take all of the credit for developing the offense, which he was first introduced to in the late 1970s at North Monterey High School in California.

"What I'll take credit for is developing it into a teachable system," he says. "When I learned it, it was four plays out of one formation. The basic idea is still intact. What I've done is I've just expanded it to more formations."

In one game last season, the Bearcats operated out of 28 different formations.

"There are no rules," Speckman says. "Some of our best ideas have come because a kid made a mistake. You look at it and go, 'Boy, that looks pretty good, let's add that.'"

For the offense to be successful, a team needs depth at running back. Fifteen different backs carried the ball for the Bearcats last season. Eight backs rushed for more than 100 yards, and five rushed for 300 or more.

Fresh legs are important, considering all the running involved on each play, even when a back doesn't carry the ball. The flanker goes in motion prior to each snap, where he can either take a hand off, block for other backs or become a receiver.

"One of the things that attracted me to it is you really need unselfish kids," Speckman says. "I thought it was a great team-building thing. You run an offense where everybody's got to be involved."

As opponents have become more familiar with the Fly, defending it has become less intimidating. Even so, Willamette averaged 318.7 yards rushing during the 1999 regular season, fourth-best in the NCAA Division III.

"Like any offense, if we do it right, I still think we can be effective," Speckman says. "But it gets tougher the longer people have a chance to see it. I still think it's giving us a chance to win."

Apparently other schools think the Fly will increase their chances, too. As many as 10 high schools in Oregon run the offense, and another 10 use parts of it. Division I programs like Penn State, Florida, USC and Wyoming also are sampling it.

"There's been a lot of schools that have run a version of it, but I'm not going to say my version," he says.

Speckman is always tinkering with his version. When he and his wife, Sue, were signing mortgage papers for their new house in November, he doodled with Xs and Os on a scratch pad.

No one can argue with Willamette's success running the offense. The Bearcats have broken 30 offensive records under Speckman's watch, producing such eye boggling numbers as 738 yards total offense against Bethany in 1996 and 554 yards rushing against Montana Tech in 1997.

Speckman's success on the field pales in comparison to the success he has had off the field.

A player once asked him if he understood that he was an inspiration. Speckman, of course, downplayed the notion.

"I don't want to be one of those guys saying, 'Look at me, I don't have hands, my life is really great and I can do all this.' I do think there is a lesson that when something's taken away, something's given."

That something is a zest for life that he passes on to his players and everyone he encounters off the field.

"I believe what he does is extremely important," his wife says. "He touches kids' lives.

"He maybe was born without hands, but I'll tell you, he was born with other gifts and he's used them.

"He just really knows how to motivate kids."

When Speckman was a player, there would be times when a father would approach him after a game and say, "I just wanted my son to see you play."

The gesture was flattering, but Speckman didn't understand why everyone made such a big deal of the fact that he was able to play football without hands.

"I never set out to, but if I inspire somebody or motivate somebody by example, that's great," he said. "But I certainly don't go out thinking, 'Hey, this is amazing I can do this.'"

Every once in a while, Speckman does amaze himself. He can pick up a dime off the ground, for example, something that isn't even easy for a person with hands.

"I don't think it's so amazing that I can do so much," he says. "What I think is really amazing is that other people don't do enough.

"I think people have the ability to astound. I've really had that ability because that's how it had to be. It's not really what I'm doing. It's what everybody else isn't doing."






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