The football team became the SPC East Conference Champions on Friday, Oct. 25.

1.) How many years have you been coaching? 

This is actually my 20th year coaching high school football.

This is my second year here. I had five years as a head up at Hampshire High School, and before that I had 13 years down in Central Illinois, and a couple other schools. 

2.) How do you handle criticism from others when the team doesn’t meet expectations?

We honestly internalize everything. Others can have whatever opinion they want. We know what we’re doing, and we’re happy with what we’re doing, so we keep pushing on ourselves.

3.) How do you keep your team motivated after a loss, or just in general? 

We’re built on a large path of honesty. We tell them what went wrong and why it went wrong, and how we’re going to fix it. Kind of that always looking forward mentality.

4.) How do you think this year’s football season has been going so far?

It’s been going great. It’s been going awesome. We’ve had some good success. We had guys doing things the right way. It’s been an extremely enjoyable and fun season.

5.) What are you looking forward to overall as the season comes to an end?

I don’t want it to come at an end. It’s been a great season. The kids on the team are awesome. But just being able to celebrate their accomplishments once the season is over and kind of summarize everything for them.

6.) Who are your star players this year?

I mean obviously everyone looks at the quarterbacks. We have quarterback Cody Hogan. On defense we have Brayden Ingram, and AJ Blatchford playing the inside. Our entire D-line kind of stands out:  Jeremiah Ranceful, Jacob Aguilar, Nathan Ibarra, William Sykes, a lot of them on the D-line. Caden Pierceeall is a two-way player for us, plays DV and receiver. A couple of linemen [stand out] who started for a few years- we have Mickey Drain, Zack, are both three-year players. Donte is a three year player. 

7.) In what ways have there been changes from this year to last?

One of the biggest things we focus on is just always harboring that path of positivity and believing that you can accomplish things. Kind of a big one in high school sports is if you can start believing in yourself and you think you’re going to do good, chances are you’re going to have some kind of success.