Metaphorically Speaking with Heath Cockerham
by Amy Rose Dobson
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| Coach Heath Cockerham |
Hamlet talks about holding a “mirror up to nature” to see your true character. Are there parts of football that can show someone his true self?
Cockerham: Anybody can be a good player or a good coach when they’re winning. The great players and leadership come off of teams that are facing adversity. One of the beauties of the game is that it is a great equalizer. You can’t fake football. This is something mom or dad can’t buy you. We’re living in a generation that a lot of coaches have called the “reset” generation. Because if a player doesn’t like the way the game is going on his Nintendo, he can just reset the game. In the real game of football you can’t reset it. We emphasize that the things you learn on the field are going to have a carry-over effect to your life as well. Life doesn’t have a reset button. You have to keep plugging through and do the best you can.
When have you had to work through adversity?
Cockerham: One of my prior coaching jobs was at a brand new program in Suffolk in the Southeastern District, which is one of the toughest districts in the state. When it opened, the school decided that all their sports would play a varsity schedule. So we started a football program with a bunch of 10th-graders and got shellacked. It was 562-0 our first year. We didn’t score a single point all season. But some of the best coaching I’ve ever seen in my life came out of those first two years under the head coach. By the time I left, his latest season record was 6-4. It was something I’ll be proud of being a part of for the rest of my life.
How did you keep them motivated?
Cockerham: It would sound like clichés now, but we emphasized that you should never, never, never quit. Continue to persevere and we’re here for the love of the game. A lot of the kids we coached were in need of positive male role models and leadership. We were fulfilling a need for them and it ended up being a beautiful thing in the end. We went back the following year to a team that had beat us 69-0, and we beat them 27-3. I couldn’t have won a state championship and felt as good as I felt after that game.
It is surprising that a group of high school students would believe the clichés.
Cockerham: We were telling them from our heart and I think that is what made the difference. I’ve said this about coaching—you can’t BS kids. If you don’t really mean it, they know it. You have to do what you say you’re going to do. And if you don’t, you lose your credibility almost immediately.
What are some other things you know for sure about coaching young athletes?
Cockerham: I have learned from hard-won experience not to always put my best athlete on a punt return. I have to have a kid who isn’t going to take his eyes off the ball so it ends up in the lap of the other team. You would love to put your 4.7, 4.6 kid down there who can take the ball and make it look like a track meet. But it gets back to that Rudyard Kipling poem, “. . . if you can keep your head while all around you are losing theirs. . . .” There is a calmness that has to be there. He has to make sure he has the ball first.
Back to the video games phenomenon you mentioned. Has that changed the way you coach or draw up plays?
Cockerham: We are pretty old school. We use a Wing-T offense. I know that breaks the heart of people who think the spread offensive is the next big thing, but we’ll see where it is 15 years from now. Everybody will be running something different and Wing-T will still be around. I’m a big believer in the run-oriented plays. With passing, only three things can happen, and two of them are bad.
Does all the buzz about the spread offense affect high school games?
Cockerham: What I don’t like is how the rules of the professional game are changing to accommodate the offenses of the spread and that trickles down to our level. That is fundamentally changing the way the game is played. Receivers don’t even play for the ball any more. They play for the call. It used to be that the defense could play these guys physically all the way down the field. Today if you bump the guy there is a flag on the play. Now I love basketball, but I want to see it played in a gymnasium, not on a football field.
Plato said that one of the privileges of human life is to help birth the soul of another. That seems to sum up coaching, especially in high school sports.
Cockerham: It is a commentary you hear more and more today because there is an absence of a positive male role model in many of these young men’s lives. By default, a lot of coaches become that male role model, whether they wanted to or not. It’s not in the job description, but it is a part of the job. The players are always watching you—how you act, how you speak, and how you treat others.
For the first few years you do it because someone did it for you. After a few years you move onto another level where you’re not doing it for that, but for the relationships you build with young people and their families. I’m not going to sit here and tell you there haven’t been times when I’ve thought, “Okay, this is it. This is my last year doing it.” But then you think about it for 24 hours and you think about the look on the faces of some of the young people who you’ve made promises to as 9th-graders. I’m not the type of person who can go back on a thing like that.
About the author:
Amy Rose Dobson is a freelance writer who divides her time between Urbanna and Northern Virginia in search of interesting people with a story to tell. She writes for several national publications and has found the best part of the job is hearing the story behind the one that runs in print. This gave her the idea for a column about how people apply metaphors to their lives, and thus this column was born.
