“How do you get them to play football?” Limon coach Mike O’Dwyer asked.
It’s the question every coach asks about his players heading into each season.
Limon and O’Dwyer seem to have gotten the best and most answers with a Colorado-leading 18 championships and a state-record 50-game winning streak that was ended in the 2006 Class 1A semifinals.
To feed a top-flight program and sustain it, O’Dwyer said, an influx of talent, offseason work, sound coaching, establishing a ground game and having a sense of pride for incoming players to maintain tradition are vital.
However, successfully executing a team’s selected bread-and-butter is what really matters.
The players see that it works and can’t challenge it.
“You have to have that one play where you gain 5 or 6 yards,” O’Dwyer said. “Then (the players) see that it works. And if it works, everything we do goes off of that.”
O’Dwyer cited two examples. He said Columbine players “buy into” their midline option attack “more than anybody I’ve seen.” And he said when Class 1A rival ahd defending champion Akron, coached by Brian Christensen, has sound personnel to run its single wing, the Rams are dominant.
In particular, O’Dwyer added, “Whatever it is your kids buy into, whatever you’re selling, for it to work you have to have good things happen as a coach. For me, it’s more the defensive side. I’m the coordinator and if I told my kids something, I’d better be right.”
In all, O’Dwyer said: “The idea is everything looks the same. If they buy into the first part, then we’ll run a variation. The kids understand what it does because we can run that one play.”
