What makes a good high school football coach?

It’s a question that has been circulating this week after a pair of Hoover High coaches were put on administrative leave and have now resigned following their actions involving members of the Hoover football team.

Several longtime Alabama high school head coaches who were polled Thursday about their profession — not directly about the situation at Hoover — said it largely boils down to one thing.

Relationships.

“I tell people all the time that a kid doesn’t care what you know until they know you care,” Auburn High coach Keith Etheredge said. “Most really good coaches are really good teachers in the classroom as well.”

Helena coach Richie Busby said he doesn’t believe student-athletes have changed over the years in the way they receive coaching.

“I think you can coach the kids as hard as you want as long as you build a foundation and a relationship with them first,” he said.

Etheredge has been coaching 25 years.

He’ll start his 19th season as a head coach in several weeks. He has won 181 games and five state titles.

He agreed with Busby that student-athletes – while maybe more entitled in today’s world – haven’t changed much. In his experience, they still respond to good coaching.

“I think the biggest thing as a coach – and I tell my coaches this before we start every year and I think this pertains to coaching as long as I’ve been in it – don’t do something that will solicit a negative response from a kid,” Etheredge said. “In other words, don’t put your hands on a kid and don’t cuss them and demean them. You can coach without doing those things. If you can’t then we need to go ahead and let that kid move on and do something else. If you do any of those things to a kid, I tell my coaches, ‘You are going to be the one who is moving on.’ I’m not putting my livelihood on the line for someone who would do that to a kid.”

Etheredge said, that’s not only true for coaching.

“The biggest thing in our profession or any other profession is be professional,” he said. “In any profession, if you put your hands on someone or cuss them out, you are going to get fired. … We are here to teach these boys how to be young men, and I don’t think that teaches them anything.”

Westminster Christian’s Louis LeBlanc started coaching as a volunteer in 1997 before becoming a full-time coach and teacher in the fall of 1998.

“I think there’s a big need for the people that put whistles around their neck to remember the influence of what we’re doing,” he said. “It’s not just to win games. That’s part of it. If it’s just to win games, I’m going to treat people’s sons like commodities. I’m going to use them up and get rid of them, or I’m going to go recruit other people’s kids, because I’ve got to win. I can’t live like that, and we need more people that say, ‘Your sons, your daughters, are valuable and we’re going to treat them like that, and we want to hold them to a standard, and we want to help them develop big character and have integrity.’ And what better place to do that than athletics?”

LeBlanc said he is always conscious of how he and his coaches as well as his school is viewed, and the impact all have on the limited time a student-athlete is in high school.

“We talk about how we could be successful on the field, but if it causes people in the community to have a poor view of Westminster, then we have failed as football players and coaches,” LeBlanc said. “If, in 20 years, these young men we coach see us in public with their families, and they walk the long way to go around us, so they avoid us and don’t talk to us, we’ve failed as coaches. I want them to go out of their way, say ‘Man, coach, this my son, what are you doing, it’s so good to see you.’ I mean that, golly, that’s the goal, man. So, then that’s got to be your goal, whether it’s your starting quarterback or it’s the backup holder, because these kids see the difference.”

Spain Park coach Tim Vakakes played at Homewood for coaches including Gerald Gann, Bob Newton and Dickie Wright. Though that was three decades ago, he said not much has changed in his mind.

“I think the same things about the culture then are still true today,” he said. “Be a consistent model, try to be a leader and you’re going to make mistakes and when you do, fess up to them, admit it and move on. Be humble and treat the kids like you want your own son to be treated. I tell our coaches every day to treat these kids like it’s your son. If you want your son to be treated like that, do it. If you don’t, don’t, nothing more, nothing less. I thank our parents all the time via e-mail for giving us their sons. It’s a blessing to be a part of this four-year stretch with these boys.”

Etheredge echoed the same sentiments as Vakakes.

“The last kid I grabbed coming off the field was my son, and he’s mine,” he said. “I tell parents all the time that I’m going to treat your kid just like he’s mine. The only difference between your kid and mine is I’m not going to put my hands on your kid. I’m not going to cuss my kid. I’ve never cussed him. I’m not going to belittle him. I want him to understand there are ways to get through to people where you don’t have to do those things.”

Theodore head coach Steve Mask is already in the Alabama High School Athletic Association Hall of Fame. He has won 218 games in 28 years as a head coach. He’s been in the profession 45 years.

He said player safety is now at the forefront of every level of football, and that’s been a good thing.

“I think the No. 1 thing is you have to be able to take care of your players, he said. “By taking care of them, you have to develop a trust with your players, so they know that, whatever happens, all your intentions at the end of the day are for the betterment of the player. I’m not saying you can’t coach hard. I’m not saying you can’t get after them a little bit, but the kids have to trust you and they have to know that at the end of the day you are going to do everything you can to prevent harm from coming to them or anyone else.”

Most coaches polled agreed that they need to know their players on a personal level and know what motivates each of them.

“I think the best coaches are the ones that can really teach the game and find ways to motivate so many different kids on your team,” Faith Academy coach Erik Speakman said. “If you have 70 kids on your team, you have 70 different personalities. Finding what gets each kid gets to play hard can be a challenge. You can yell and scream at some kids and they love it, and you can yell and scream at some and they go completely into a shell.”

If all those things are elements of good coaching, what is bad coaching?

“I think bad coaching is not preparing your kids for success, not doing a good job in the offseason, all the things that prepare them to be a football player,” Busby said. “The offseason to all of us is so very important, especially at a lot of jobs where you got to develop kids from your middle school up to your high school and, hopefully by the time they’re juniors and seniors, they can contribute in a positive way. I would say bad coaching is just putting kids in a position where they can’t be successful.”

Mask said good and bad coaching boils down to one five-letter word.

“If you constantly berate them and the kids don’t trust you and you’ve done things to them so they don’t trust you, that will get you in the end,” he said. “If you are not doing things now that encourages them to want to play and encourage their buddies to want to play, that is when you see the numbers drop off. Football is not a lot of fun in August. It’s 105 degrees, but if the kids know you care about them and you trust them, they will trust you.

Trust is a big deal nowawdays.”

Staff writers Dennis Victory and Thomas Ashworth contributed to this report.