By Brice Cherry

Tribune-Herald youth sports editor

Call up your local high school office or teacher’s lounge over the summer, and you’re likely to hear a recorded voice message.

Dial the coaches’ office or field house throughout June or July, on the other hand, and you’re bound to talk to a real-life coach.

If the average high school football coach were assigned the standard “What I Did Over My Summer Vacation” assignment, he could simply write, “More of the same thing I did during the school year” and it would ring true. Simply put, there is no summer vacation for most coaches.

Between 7-on-7 football tournaments, offseason strength and conditioning programs, football camps, coaching conventions or clinics and more than a handful of preseason staff meetings, the coach’s day planner does not lack for activity.

“You’ll run into people who say, ‘Man, Coach, it must be nice to have summers off,’ ” said Axtell head coach Mike Cadell. “You think, ‘Buddy, if you only knew.’ Most of the time this summer I got home around 7:30 p.m. I mean, I didn’t get there until about noon or 1, but that’s still a pretty good day.

“But that’s what we do. Any coach worth his salt is working (over the summer).”

Coaches admit that the pace isn’t as hectic during the summer months, but the notion that it completely comes to a stall is laughable.

“The difference is not having to go to class, the school-day regimen,” Robinson’s Brian Lewis said. “But it’s still pretty busy. For us, we started our strength-and-conditioning program once school let out. That went on for seven weeks, and we ended that up last week. This past week we had a football camp for the little kids, those fourth- through ninth-graders, and then this weekend we leave for coaching school. We’ll come back to school at the end of next week for some preparation, and then that next Monday we start two-a-days.

“Unless you take a couple of days here and there, there’s not much of a vacation.”

When the UIL began loosening restrictions around summer workouts and started allowing its coaches to conduct voluntary summer strength and conditioning programs in 2002, most football coaches jumped at the chance.

Now, nearly every school in Central Texas holds summer workouts of varying degrees, deeming them a crucial precursor to two-a-days.

“When we started at Robinson, we had about 20 to 25 kids participate in our summer workouts,” Lewis said. “This summer we’ve averaged about 90. I think the kids understand that to stay in shape and not lose the strength they’ve built up during the school year, those workouts help them stay prepared.”

Workouts a ‘warm-up’

These additional workouts also serve as a “warm-up” for August’s preseason drills in another way.

“The one thing about today that’s different from when I was growing up is that kids aren’t out in the heat of the day anymore,” Crawford’s Delbert Kelm said. “It’s a different world, and you use those (workouts) to get kids acclimated to the heat. You’ve definitely got to worry about that.”

Coaches also worry about burnout. At most smaller schools, the average football player also plays one or more additional sports, and may even compete for a select or AAU team during the summer. The coaches don’t want their athletes spending so much time around a sport that they’re sick of it before the season even kicks off.

“That’s one reason the summer is not as intense,” said Axtell’s Cadell. “If we have a kid come tell one of the coaches that he has a family vacation or that he wants to go to a Rangers game, we’re like, ‘Go! Just go! It’s summer, go be a kid, have some fun. That’s fine.’ I mean, you’re going to have some kids get fatigued. Burnout, or whatever you want to call it, is the nature of the beast, especially on the 1A and 2A level.”

But what about the coaches? Don’t they get tired of the six-hour staff meetings, the sunny summer afternoons spent visiting with an artificial-turf salesman that could seemingly be better spent in the back of a fishing boat or behind the wheel of a golf cart?

Balance the key

Sure, it gets old, the coaches say. Doing it well requires a certain amount of juggling talent, balancing the responsibiliies of the job with time for fun and family.

“There’s an old saying, ‘You give some, you spend some and you save some,’ ” Waco High coach Johnny Tusa said. “That, to me, is the essence of living. You give some time, you take some time, and so on and so forth, but you’ve certainly got to have some balance, otherwise you won’t be long for this profession.”

Cadell said coaching is a job and a lifestyle that can be “a grind” at times. But he also knows that if he doesn’t keep his nose to the grindstone, his team may end up getting rocked.

“You work because you know everybody else is working, and you’ve got to keep up with the Joneses,” Cadell said. “If you don’t, you’ll get left behind.”

bcherry@wacotrib.com

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