Coachspeak: River Hill football's Brian Van Deusen
Brian Van Deusen has been one of the area’s most successful football coaches since he took over the River Hill program from his father, Don Van Deusen, in 2000. Under the younger Van Deusen, the Hawks have won two state championships, five regional championships and eight straight Howard County championships (sharing it last season with Hammond). They had a run of 48 straight county wins before Atholton ended the streak last fall.
Van Deusen, the 2007 All-Metro Coach of the Year, graduated from Atholton in 1992 and was the Howard County Player of the Year in football and baseball. A quarterback, he went on to play football at Western Maryland College (now McDaniel College) in Westminster.
With a rematch looming Friday night at home against Atholton -- their first meeting since the Raiders’ 10-0 victory in October -- Van Deusen, 37, has guided his team to a 2-0 start. As this week’s football Coachspeak guest, we asked Van Deusen to answer five questions about being a coach’s son, the success of his program and the quick turn-around after beating Long Reach, 35-14, on Monday.
Did you always want to be a football coach, growing up watching your dad coach?
Yeah, I think I always wanted to be a coach. Actually, baseball was probably my favorite sport growing up. I wasn’t very big. In high school my freshman year, I was about 5-foot-2 and 92 pounds. I actually didn’t play football until my 9th grade year and went on and did pretty well my senior year in high school and went on to play at Western Maryland. Early on, I was thinking I was more interested in baseball, but getting to college and having that experience, at that point was the time I realized I wanted to be a teacher and a coach. Growing up with my dad coaching at Atholton – he was coaching football, basketball and baseball in the 80s – if I wanted to see my dad, I had to go up to school. In the spring, I was the bat boy and in the fall, I was the ball boy, so that was my chance to hang out with my dad and the guys at school. It was a great experience. There were several great coaches I had at Atholton and a lot of stuff I do today is because of the coaches I had over there.
As a high school and college quarterback, you had good passing numbers. How did your coaching philosophy develop into one of primarily running the ball?
That’s kind of an interesting story. In high school, we went to the run-and-shoot and when I got to Western Maryland, we had a new coach come in, coach Tim Keating who’s still there. He also brought in the run-and-shoot, so personally as a quarterback, I loved throwing the ball. There was one game in particular in college where we threw it 67 times. That was pretty cool. When I got into coaching, early on we tried to throw the ball a good amount. In the first couple years, we were a little outmanned because it was a new school without many seniors. We were in a situation where we almost had to throw the ball. But the more and more I got into it, I realized that we’ve got to be able to run the ball. First of all, we’ve got to be able to stop the run on defense. In high school football, if you can run the ball – because we don’t have turf fields right now and we play several games in the rain and mud – you can control things a little better and when we get to the playoffs in November and December, it gets tougher to throw the ball, so our philosophy has changed over the years to where we’re definitely a run-first team. We feel in those tight games against the good teams that you’ve got to be able to control the line of scrimmage and you do that by running.
How are you able to sustain such a strong program that has contended for a final four berth every year for a decade?
There’s a lot of things. The first thing you look at is consistency in the coaching staff. That’s huge and fortunately, we’ve had the same JV coaches now, most of them, for eight or nine years. We don’t bring many younger kids up (to varsity), so we like to use that JV team as a developmental team and get those guys to experience winning and we really stress the fundamentals with them. We make sure the JV is run in our system so when the get to us, they’ve had two years in that system and we can expand on it from there. It all starts there and on varsity, we’ve had almost the same group of coaches for the last decade as well, so that consistency is big. I think another reason is the off-season work that we do. As soon as our season’s over in December or after the state championship, we’re in the weight room four days a week all the way until Aug. 15. That commitment to year-round training and four days a week lifting and running, that certainly puts them in good shape in August and gets our kids bigger, faster, stronger. And another thing, I think, is we’ve been able to establish a good, sound offensive and defensive scheme that’s flexible and we’ve spent the last eight years as county champs, so we’ve been able to adapt to our personnel with an offense and defense that can get the most out of our players.
What makes River Hill-Atholton such a great football rivalry?
You can go back to five or six years with Matt Winger and some of those guys they had when they were making the playoffs two or three years, so they’ve had a pretty good five or six years. A couple years ago with Matt Robinson and (Kalvin) Seamonson, they were pretty talented. We had to get through them twice to win the regional championship and they were close games. I think, all in all, the whole county has really gotten tough in the last three or four years with some new coaches (coming) in that have really stepped up their off-season training. I think the coaching’s gotten better and last year, we get upset (13-7 by Wilde Lake in the regional semifinal) and then Wilde Lake goes on to beat Damascus and win the state championship, so the county in general is getting tougher and tougher. Each week, you’ve got to come ready to play. Atholton, in particular, I think is just so close. We kind of share some of the kids. A lot of the kids are friends. They went to middle school together growing up and so they know each other and that kind of creates a rivalry there.
What is the challenge in preparing for a Friday game after you’ve just played on Monday?
It’s tough. Fortunately, everybody is in the same position in our county. It’s tough getting three days in. Tuesday after just playing a game on Monday, the kids were banged up and sore, so there wasn’t a whole lot we could do other than a walk through and watch some film. We’ve just been trying to catch these guys up as quick as we can with the game plan and watch a good amount of film. You can’t do a whole lot of hitting over these three days. You want to make sure they’re fresh for Friday. It’s just more the mental stuff and polishing up some stuff from last week. Three days to prepare for Atholton is tough, but we’ll just do the best we can to get the kids prepared for Friday.
