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Madison County Coaches’ Jobs Demand Unforgiving Hours
Posted by Randell Owens at Oct 17, 2007 5:00PM PDT
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reprinted from The Madison County Journal's October 18, edition
by Ben Munro
Strapped for time as usual, Raider head football coach Randell Owens had to go ahead and grab the sanitation supplies and tackle the visiting locker room while he conducted a job interview.Owens worked as he asked questions, but when he took a break from scrubbing a toilet with a wire brush, he noticed the prospective hire grimacing at what he saw.
“He said, ‘Really, I just always pictured being athletic director and head football coach at a high school program as more glamorous than this,’” Owens said.
Owens laughs when recalling this story. But it offers some keen insight into the often-misunderstood life of a football coach.
“It’s kind of like being a mom,” Owens said. “You’ve got a lot of things to do that nobody thinks about. They just get done. Nobody really appreciates it … You’re underappreciated, but you love them anyway so you just get it done.”
Owens is sure that most have no idea what a coach’s week involves — from cleaning to play calling — as they cram for a Friday night game. Perhaps even the Raider players don’t even know the depths of their coaches’ labor. “Other than our wives, I don’t think anybody has clue about what’s involved,” said Owens, who leaves his house at 6 a.m. and usually doesn’t return until around 11 p.m.
Offensive coordinator Chris Smith said he tries to spend as much time as he can with his young family during the hectic season, but said that time is in short supply because Raider coaches work every day and often for long hours getting ready for another opponent.
It comes with the territory.
“A lot of people, they say ‘Well, they don’t do anything, they just show up and coach,’ but that’s not the case,” Smith said. “Some places might do that, but we don’t do that.”
“You’ve just got to love what you do,” said defensive coordinator Mike Haynes, who’s been on the Raider staff for 12 years under three different coaches. ‘If you don’t love it, it’s not worth it.”
Perhaps Owens sums up the job best by saying this: “It’s not a job,” Owens said. “It’s a lifestyle.” Of course, it’s a lifestyle that suits him just fine because he said football is never far from his mind.
Owens said it’s hard for him to talk with people outside the football realm because football is all he wants to discuss and he fears he’ll bore people to death. “My wife complains that all of our friends are football coaches,” he said. “I’m like, who has time to sit around and talk to people who aren’t coaches.”
Well, it doesn’t happen much.
Raider coaches likely put in over 80 hours a week during the fall on the job. Owens has been known to lose track of time and stay at the office until 1 a.m. “I’ll look up and think, ‘Oh, God, How did it get that late?’” Often times, Owens will go to the car after work and find his son, quarterback Jacob Owens, already asleep. The coach said his only deal with his wife is that their son sleep in his own bed at night. “But she didn’t say how long he had to sleep in it,” Owens quips.
So what do these guys do during a week? It takes Owens about half an hour to explain it all, but here’s the cliff note.
Owens said 90 percent of decisions are made before they ever step on to the field based on hours upon hours of study. And these guys are bona fide film critics. Game footage — both the Raiders’ and the opponents’ — is broken down to a fine grain by the time the Raider coaches are through with it. Every play for the past week’s game has been dissected at least three times. Every play on any available opponent film is poured over meticulously, a process that takes five to six hours if done right. Then practice is four days a week, each of which is carefully scripted, typed out on sheets and put onto players’ wrist bands so everybody will be on the same page.
Owens can recite the details of what has to be assessed and accounted for during a week down to the minuscule — what equipment must be repaired, who behaved well on the bus ride home from the last road trip or just making sure the locker room has been sanitized because of “all the psychosis over staph infection,” he said.
Oh, and yeah, somebody has to line the field off before games — middle school, ninth grade, junior varsity and varsity — or wash the jerseys after them. In fact, doing the laundry can be a four-hour job.
“Just cleaning up,” Owens said. “Haynes (defensive coordinator Mike Haynes) is smarter than the rest of us. He just goes and gets a bag of quarters and goes to the laundry mat.”
By Wednesday, the game plan is usually complete. Thursday is a “short” 12-hour day for Madison County coaches after they’ve stayed and watched sub-varsity games before Friday, which can be an all-nighter after the game is in the books (because of clean up, washing and cutting film).
“Sometimes, there’s not much point in going to bed,” Owens said. “The sun’s coming up and instead of going to bed, you just go get coffee and come back.”
Throughout all this, there’s probably not a day that toils with Owens’ emotions more than Sunday. That’s when the staff really starts heavily implementing offensive and defensive schemes and figuring out how they’re going to win the next game.
Owens remembers throwing up before games as a player and said that tradition continues somewhat as a coach.
“It’s not uncommon for me to go throw up on Sunday evening,” Owens said. “Sunday evening is like the kickoff. Sunday-Monday, there’s so much tension you can cut it with a knife. It’s so thick.”
But the Raider coaches will tell you the long hours are worth it to mold good young men. These coaches feel like they’re also teaching the proverbial game of life in all this, too.
“You take your lumps, learn from it, get back up and go right back at it,” said Smith, who’s in his 30s but already been coaching for a decade. “That’s something we try to teach the kids. The big thing, the reason I do it, is that I love being around kids.”
Haynes said he likes being part of something bigger than him.
“The camaraderie of the coaching staff and being with the kids is something that you don’t have everywhere in life … the team is bigger than any individual player or coach,” he said.
Owens said it does take that something extra to be a coach, to keep on working the hours beyond just wanting a paycheck.
There is no glamour job here — like the one that job candidate had envisioned — just commitment. So with that, Owens equates the job to another popular labor of love — marriage: You don’t marry the girl you just like.
“No, you marry the one you can’t imagine living without … It’s just a psychotic crazy thing without any rational foundation of thought,” Owens said. “I’m pretty fortunate that I’m surrounded by crazy people like me.”
Raiders End Slide, Refocus on Postseason
Posted by Randell Owens at Oct 17, 2007 5:00PM PDT
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reprinted from The Madison County Journal Thursday, October 18, 2007 edition
BY BEN MUNRO
A one-point win Friday has perhaps altered the path of the Raiders’ season entirely.
A bothersome four-game losing streak — the program’s longest since 1999 — is now history and Madison County controls its own destiny in claiming a spot in the Nov. 9 region playoffs. Two more wins will get the Raiders there, but they had to have Friday night’s 15-14 win over Loganville first.
“The coaches wanted it bad,” Raider tailback-receiver Al Allen said. “We needed to have it. That’s a game we had to have.”
The Raiders’ first subregion win puts Madison County in the drivers’ seat for the fourth and final pass to the region playoffs. Wins over Jackson County (Oct. 26) and Winder-Barrow (Nov. 2) would give Madison County the chance to play its way back into the state playoffs with a Nov. 9 cross-over matchup against the 8B-AAAA no. 1 seed.
However, if Madison County loses either of those games, they’ll play a meaningless game on Nov. 9 to simply finish out the schedule.
“In effect, we’re in the playoffs now … A loss anywhere along the way and we’re done,” Raider head coach Randell Owens said.
The players relish the chance they have before them now.
“It feels good, really good,” said Marcus Hall, who secured a game-clinching interception Friday. “We’ve just got to keep it up and keep going – one game at a time.”
Those region playoff hopes were in jeopardy when Madison County trailed 14-2 in the third quarter Friday night in its first-ever trip to Loganville’s new field. However, the Raiders pulled the victory out in the second half with two touchdowns and some timely defense.
A 93-yard Spencer Baird-to-Al Allen touchdown pass off a trick play in the third quarter stoked the Raiders, and a seven-play, 59-yard scoring drive — Allen covered the last five yards on the ground for the touchdown — proved to be the game-winner.
“We pushed on,” said Allen, who had 105 yards on three catches and added 65 yards on the ground. “All practice we worked hard to make sure we’d get the first (subregion win). We’ve got to win one.”
Madison County hadn’t won since a Sept. 7 rout of Elbert County and could have folded after facing a double-digit deficit in the third quarter, but Allen said that’s not in this team’s makeup.
“When we get behind, we don’t ever let up and when we get ahead we don’t ever give up,” Allen said. “That’s how we did it.”
After pulling ahead 15-14, Madison County iced the win with Hall’s interception with 1:20 left in the game. Loganville had driven near mid-field as it tried to move into field goal range to win the game.
But Hall’s pick was part of an overall gutsy effort by a Raider team that blocked a field goal, picked up a safety and forced two turnovers against the Red Devils.
“We just didn’t give up, man,” Hall said. “We just kept going at it. We just kept fighting.”
The victory will certainly make the upcoming off week that much better, too.
Madison County can spend the week not having to think about a losing streak any more and refocus thoughts on the postseason.
“By winning, you put yourself in a situation to look to the future … It definitely changed the whole outlook of the season,” Owens said.
“It feels good, man,” Hall said. “We deserve it.”
| Individual Defensive Statistics | |||||||||||
| Tackles | Fumbles | Other | |||||||||
| Player | 1st Hits | Assists | Sacks | Total | Caused | Recovered | PBU | INT | Block Kick | TD | Safety |
| Adams, T | 1 | 0 | - | 1 | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| Allen, A | 6 | 3 | - | 9 |
- |
- |
1 |
- |
- | - | - |
| Anglin, J | 2 | 2 |
- |
4 | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| Bodiford, K | 0 | 0 | - | 0 | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| Butler, K | 0 | 0 |
- |
0 | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| Dalton, B | 0 | 0 |
- |
0 | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| Escoe, C | 7 | 8 | - | 15 |
1 |
- | - | - | - | - | - |
| Ginn, N | 3 | 2 | - | 5 | - |
1 |
- |
1 |
- | - | - |
| Hall, M | 4 | 6 |
1 |
11 |
1 |
- |
- |
- | - | - | - |
| Johnson, C | 0 | 0 | - | 0 | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| Kraeling, A | 1 | 1 | - | 2 | - | - |
- |
- | - | - | - |
| McGuire, TJ | 0 | 0 | - | 0 | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| Orr, J | 1 | 0 | - | 1 | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| Pittard, A | 3 | 2 |
1 |
6 | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| Randall, D | 3 | 1 | - | 4 | - | - |
1 |
- | - | - | - |
| Russell, Brad | 0 | 0 | - | 0 | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| Russell, Brent | 6 | 3 |
1 |
10 |
1 |
- |
- |
- | - |
- |
1 |
| Stevens, A | 0 | 0 | - | 0 | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| Stuchell, J | 0 | 0 | - | 0 | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| Tilton, A | 4 | 3 | - | 7 |
- |
- | - | - |
1 |
- | - |
| Turner, B | 4 | 6 | - | 10 |
- |
- |
3 |
- |
- | - | - |
| Vaughn, C |
0 |
0 |
- |
0 |
|||||||
| Young, A |
6 |
5 |
- |
11 |
1 |
|
2 |
|
|
|
|
| Team Totals | 51 | 42 | 3 | 96 | 4 | 1 | 7 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
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