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AFM Magazine

AFM Magazine


Personal Decision

Some veteran coaches are happy to stay at the high school level
by: Richard Scott
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The questions hang around the high school stadium whenever a veteran coach with some championships and a reputation for excellence stalks the sidelines.

If this guy is so good, why didn’t he get a coaching job at the college or professional level? Why is he still coaching high school football?

Frank Lenti has heard those questions before. As one of the nation’s most successful high school head coaches at Chicago’s Mount Carmel, Lenti knows that people wonder why he’s still coaching high school football after 28 years in the coaching business. He also knows such questions come with the territory.

“The way much of our society is going today, people always think that more is better or bigger is better,” Lenti says. “Even when I’ve gone around the country and spoken at various coaching clinics, or even college coaching clinics, coaches will ask me all the time, ‘are you interested in coaching college football?’ I just tell them, ‘never say never, but not at this time.’”

When people read about top level coaching salaries and the perceived perks of being a big time coach, it can be tough to convince them that successful coaching at the high school level need is more than just a steppingstone to a higher profile, more lucrative coaching job.

The reality is, a lot of great coaches don’t consider high school football to be a first step, but a worthwhile, highly rewarding destination. Any great coach of football, regardless of level, will probably agree that a coaching pedigree isn’t always determined by where you’re wearing the headset. After all, college and professional coaches are regularly fired.

Many veteran high school coaches came to the conclusion that they like coaching high school football. They believe in it. They like high school kids. They like teaching. Despite all the hours they spend working on equipment and fields, the effort they expend dealing with difficult parents and college assistant coaches baring scholarship offers, and the financial struggles that come with the job, they still value the purity, the simplicity, the last vestiges of innocence that exist in the high school game. They have very few regrets about not having coached at a higher level.

Lenti is one of those coaches who made that commitment and never looked back, despite opportunities to coach with Lou Holtz at both Arkansas and Notre Dame.

“In the last 16 years we’ve played in 10 state championship games and we’ve won eight of those, and with all our success people ask me, ‘why don’t you move on? Why don’t you go to the next level?’” Lenti says. “I tell them, ‘you never say never, because you don’t know what life holds for you later down the road, but at this point and time in my life, at 50 years old, I feel like I have the only job I want.’

“At various points in time, I really thought about trying to go on and be a college assistant. But we’ve had great support here at Mt. Carmel from the Carmelite fathers, from the faculty and the administration. We have great kids, great staff and great parents for the most part. After awhile, you realize, ‘You know what? You’re making a pretty good impact on a lot of youngsters’ lives at this level.’

“We have great respect for the kids we have here and hopefully they have respect for us. It’s a lot of work, but it’s a lot of fun to watch youngsters grow – to watch them start out as freshman, move on and graduate and then come back and you can see how they’ve grown and developed as young men.”

This is a common thread among veteran high school football coaches. American Football Monthly selected four of those coaches and asked them to share their reasons for committing their career to high school football. It’s important to note that all four coaches have had serious opportunities to move on to college football, and all four chose to remain at the high school level.

FRANK LENTI
MOUNT CARMEL HIGH SCHOOL
CHICAGO, ILL.


Lenti was a high school football player when he first realized he wanted to coach. He started coaching elementary school kids in high school and college, and after college, he started teaching and coaching at the high school level. In 28 years of coaching, he’s spent 20 at Mount Carmel, 18 as the head coach, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I think it’s the best level for impacting youngsters,” Lenti says. “They’re starting to reach maturity. You can really have an impact on their core value system. Around here, we talk about being a good person first, then a good student, and then a good athlete. We tell them if you’re not a good person and a good student, you won’t have a chance to be a good athlete here.”

Lenti can back that up with a legacy of outstanding graduates. Not just NFL players such as Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb, Tampa Bay Buccaneers defensive end Simeon Rice or Pittsburgh Steelers tight end Matt Cushing, but a long list of players who went on to play for and graduate from Harvard, Princeton and Yale, as well as the military academies.

Another example is Eddie Stewart, who never played a down of tackle football before coming to Mount Carmel but ended up playing linebacker and starting on two state championship teams and serving as captain of Mount Carmel’s 1989 state championship team. He went on to captain Nebraska’s 1994 national championship team and is now an associate athletic director at the University of Missouri.

Maintaining a high standard of accountability and achievement isn’t getting any easier in today’s “me first” culture, but it provides another excellent reason for Lenti to stay at the high school level.

“When you’re dealing with kids and parents, there are going to be ups and downs,” Lenti says. “We’ve had a lot more ups than downs, but most of our downs have come from people who think this is all about ‘them’ rather than ‘us.’ We tell our kids it’s a ‘we’ thing, not a ‘me’ thing. The downs come when people want your program to be a farm system for their youngsters. There are a lot of parents that would rather their sons be all-state than have all their sons win a state championship. We try to teach our players that you’re going to be a lot more successful in your life in the long haul if you try to be part of a ‘we’ thing instead of making everything a ‘me’ thing.

“It’s unfortunate that so much of college athletics these days is that the players see it as the farm system for the NFL or the NBA, without really realizing how good you have to be to play at that level. There’s so much more to life, and that’s what we’re trying to teach at this level. We’re not just talking the talk, we’re walking the walk.”

CHUCK KYLE
ST. IGNATIUS HIGH SCHOOL
CLEVELAND, OHIO


Chuck Kyle knew he wanted to coach at the high school level before he even began his coaching career.

Due to the influence of his high school coaches and his college coaches at Division III John Carroll, Kyle already had models for the life he wanted to pursue.

“When I first set out to do this, I really wanted to be a high school English teacher and a coach,” Kyle says. “That’s what I wanted to do. Along the way, when some possibilities to move up came along they took me by surprise and they were flattering, but after just a little bit of time to think things through I came to the realization that: ‘wait a minute, I never set out to do that. I didn’t set out to be a college football coach. I didn’t want to get talked into doing something I didn’t want to, and I think that happens to people in this profession sometimes.”

For the past 30 years, Kyle has devoted his career to coaching football and track and teaching English at the high school level. At 51, he really can’t see himself doing anything else.

The one time he did give college football brief consideration, a college head coach called with an offer and eventually forward Kyle to one of his assistant coaches for more help in persuading Kyle. Instead of encouraging Kyle to make the move, the assistant was brutally frank about some of the aspects of coaching college football that Kyle realized he didn’t want in his life.

“When I look at what I do now, I realize I would miss the teaching part – teaching English in a classroom,” Kyle says. “The two combined, the coaching and the teaching, is really very fulfilling for me. I don’t know if I’d be that comfortable centering my life on preparing for just 12 football games a year. I just can’t see myself doing that.”

And then there was family to consider. Kyle always wanted a wife and children, but not if he wasn’t going to be around as a husband and father.

“We get all sorts of college football coaches in here to recruit kids, from Division I to Division III, and I don’t envy their lifestyle at all,” Kyle says. “To be quite candid, it seems like there is a high divorce rate because the coach isn’t at home being a husband or a father very much. I know my children would have been pretty upset to be moving around the country all the time. I didn’t think that would be fair to my family.

“I see a lot of young coaches who are single, and they become graduate assistants and then they move up. Then they’re always going to the convention looking for a way to step up to a higher level and then be a coordinator and then maybe a head coach, and that’s fine, but I never set out to do that and I don’t ever plan on it.”

For Kyle, the opportunity to teach English and a multitude of life lessons to young men has proven to be just as significant and meaningful as the actual coaching.

“I think coaching is a tremendous teaching opportunity,” Kyle says. “Sports still provides an excellent teaching tool, especially when you can talk about commitment and teamwork, duty, contributing to the whole team, learning how to be unselfish for the greater cause. Those are things that kids aren’t born with – they learn them. It’s tremendous to be a part of that process.

“They come in here as ninth graders, as little kids with pimples on their cheeks and they don’t even shave, and four years later they leave as men and you’ve been a part of that. And my kids and my wife have enjoyed being part of that through the years, and that’s really made it so worthwhile.

“Hey, I put food on the table, pay for the kids’ education, buy a house, and other than that everything is pretty superfluous.”

RICHARD MCFEE
HUGUENOT HIGH SCHOOL
RICHMOND, VA.


Richard McFee knows that walking the walk is vitally important at the high school level because he’s selling more than just football to his players, many of whom come from lower-economic backgrounds. He’s also selling opportunity to the young men who play for him at Huguenot High.

“Sometimes I hear high school coaches say they don’t work to help their kids get to college,” says McFee, who has coached since 1974. “They say, ‘it’s not my job to get my kids scholarships. It’s my job to win football games.’ But when I go to the middle school to talk to the eighth-graders who are moving up to Huguenot, I always explain to them that if they come in and do the things they’re supposed to do in academics first, then discipline second, then football third, I promise them when they leave Huguenot I’m going to do all I can do get them a scholarship somewhere. It might not be Michigan, Penn State or Notre Dame, but they’ll get to go to college and get an education. I’ve made that promise to all of them, and I’ve been fortunate to fulfill it 150 times.”

Six of those players are now in the NFL, but McFee is just as proud of the players who don’t go on to be college stars.

“You’re supposed to help young people who want to do something with their lives,” says. “I introduce players to the nuances of life, not just football.”

McFee actually tried coaching college football at one point, leaving to be defensive coordinator at Virginia Union to work for a good friend, but came back after two years.

“I decided to take a chance at it, but after two years I just felt like coaching at the high school was better for me,” McFee says. “College football is so time consuming. High school football is time consuming, but it’s nowhere close to college football. That’s 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. I enjoyed the coaching part, but it was so much traveling because of the recruiting, and it takes you away from your family completely.”

McFee also interviewed for positions at Virginia and Penn State, but when the jobs didn’t work out he never looked back.

“Part of me really wanted to take a shot at the level, because it’s big-time football,” McFee says. “But I feel like – and I say this constantly – the reason why I didn’t get either job is because that’s not what the Lord wanted me to do. He wants me to keep on coaching at the high school level and working with these young people. I’m satisfied with that and I don’t regret anything about not coaching at that level.

“I don’t regret not coaching at that level because I have a lot to be proud because of the number of kids we’ve had to go on and be doctors and lawyers and school teachers. It does my heart so much good to see these kids success and become viable people in our community.”

TONY SEVERINO
ROCKHURST HIGH SCHOOL
KANSAS CITY, MO.


When Tony Severino graduated from college and set out on his coaching career, he knew he wanted to be a head coach someday and actually thought he might end up pursuing his dream at the college level. Back then, a high school coach could still make a direct move to being a college head coach, just as Gerry Faust had done by moving straight from Cincinnati’s Moeller High School to Notre Dame.

Not only did college football change dramatically during Severino’s first years in coaching, he also realized he wanted more out of life than the status that came with being a head coach at the college level. As his family grew and established roots at Rockhurst, Severino found he had less and less desire to uproot them just so he could take a shot at coaching college football.

“I’ve always taken the philosophy that sometimes you have to make personal decisions, and sometimes you have to make professional decisions,” says Severino, who is 54 years old with 28 years of coaching experience. “One of my personal decisions early on was that I wanted to be a part of my family’s life and be part of my kids’ growing up, and I never really felt like I could do that at the college level. I wanted to be able to be involved in their grade school years, coach them through high school, watch them grow up through high school. I can always find a way to go and make more money, but you can never get back the times and opportunities you have to be involved with your kids while they’re growing up.

“It’s a decision you have to make, and from one end you might have to give up something from a financial standpoint, but from a personal standpoint I couldn’t be any happier.”

Along the way, Rockhurst won five large-class Missouri state championships, Severino earned USA Today’s National High School Coach Of The Year award in 2000 and his own kids grew up and moved on, allowing him to accept a college job without the same consequences. Yet, after so many fruitful years at the high school level, Severino finds it more and more difficult to leave a place where he has invested so much time, effort, energy and passion for the past two decades.

“It’s fun to be here and get letters from former players and see what happens to them and they tell you that you made such a different in their life,” Severino says. “I don’t think you’re going to get that as much at the college and pro level.”

On those hot summer afternoons when Severino is in the field house checking 300 pairs of helmets and shoulder pads for damage and preparing for the upcoming season, there is a part of him that remembers that most college coaches aren’t worrying about the same problems, and they’re doing it for a lot more money. Those moments are brief, and his regrets are few.

“It’s truly a choice,” Severino says. “There are so many outstanding high school coaches who could have coaches at any level – college and pro – but it’s just not what they chose to do.

“To be honest about it, I really feel like you have an opportunity to touch so many more lives at this level than you do at this level than you do at the next level.

“If you’re just in it from a financial standpoint, and that’s what is important to you, then try the college or the pro level if that’s what you want. If you’ve got other priorities, like family and a desire to teach and have an impact on young people, that’s what I suggest you do. I wouldn’t trade what I’m doing for all the money in the world.”





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