There are first week jitters and there are first-week-at-a-new-school-that-didn’t-win-a-game-last-season jitters. First-year Thompson Valley coach Michael DeWall has the latter.
DeWall inherited the 0-10 Eagles when he moved over after eight seasons at Class 2A Platte Valley, where he won the 2007 title. He’s spent the summer, as he puts it, “trying to change the culture.”
“That’s been the biggest difference right now,” DeWall said. “After eight years at Platte Valley, the culture was established. It was less work to get to where I felt real comfortable on Friday night.
“There’s so much that goes on under the radar that people don’t see on Friday nights that goes into making a great program.”
It’s the other side to being a football coach, the glamour position among high school sports.
“I feel like I have this list of things in my head of things that just need to be done because there are things that quality programs do, and at other places, they’re already in place,” DeWall said. “Here, they’ve got to be done.”
How’s this for a first test? Thompson Valley gets cross-town rival Mountain View, the preseason 3A No. 1 whose campus is a 15-minute drive across Loveland. The game is one prong of the battle for city bragging rights, with Loveland High completing the triangle.
DeWall said when he was first hired, Thompson Valley principal Mark Johnson jokingly gave him a reminder of that battle: “We don’t care how many games you win,” Johnson told him, “but you have to win at least two: Mountain View and Loveland.”
“There’s that kind of unspoken expectation,” DeWall said. “We’re all vying to be city champs.”
DeWall’s debut didn’t get any easier this week when he learned that star running back Dorian Brown, who rushed for nearly 1,900 yards last season, was lost for the season.
The coach had already been planning to tweak the offense so that it didn’t rely so heavily on the star senior. Now, he won’t be able to rely on Brown at all, and instead will split carries between three backs.
“We want to really try to be a balanced offense and have multiple threats,” DeWall said.
Among those threats is 6-foot-2 sophomore quarterback Spencer Shook, who heads a downfield attack.
“We really don’t have to change the gameplan, it’s just that we really don’t have that weapon to fall back on now,” DeWall said.
