Coachspeak: Mount St. Joseph football's Blake Henry
When Blake Henry took over the Mount St. Joseph football program, he said he expected the Gaels to be in the hunt for the MIAA A Conference championship every year. Nineteen months later, they are.
Friday night's 21-14 victory over then-No. 4 McDonogh boosted the Gaels into a tight race for second place behind No. 1 Gilman, which is 4-0 in the seven-team conference. The Gaels are 3-3 overall and 2-1 in the conference heading into Saturday's home game against No. 11 Loyola. This week, the Gaels broke into The Baltimore Sun's Top 15 poll at No. 13.
A 1998 Loyola graduate, Henry played football at Northwestern for a year and then transferred to Wake Forest, where he was a first-team All-ACC offensive guard as a senior. Henry, 32, had a brief stint with the Atlanta Falcons after signing a free agent contract and then returned to Loyola to join its coaching staff in 2003.
Henry, a phys ed and health teach at St. Joe, took over a Gaels program that had gone 2-8 through a disappointing, injury-riddled 2009 season. Last fall, they finished 3-6. As this week's football Coachspeak guest, he talks about the Gaels' turnaround and the challenge of competing in the A Conference.
What are the challenges you face as a new head coach when you have to rebuild a team in the A Conference?
It was an inexperienced team in that the seniors I inherited had not played a lot. Changing the offense and defense and getting them used to me as a coach and our coaching staff and our style took a little bit of time. We have a lot of good kids here and the kids are willing to work hard. Most of them accepted what we brought in and the ones that didn’t aren’t playing football here anymore. The challenge for us was to put in an off-season program. They really hadn’t done a lot with that. Getting the kids to come in four days a week in the summer at 8 a.m. was a struggle at first, but once the kids started seeing the benefit of getting stronger and being better football players, they really bought into it. We’ve had a much better response to that this year than last year. Teenagers want instant gratification, and in football you don’t get that. You prepare for five or six days for one game a week.
How difficult is it to win in the A Conference?
It’s the toughest league in the state and I know that because teams won’t schedule us. I can’t get a lot of teams I ask to play us. It was the same way at Loyola and people around the state know we have a great reputation in the league. We won two games in the league this year and our guys were all going nuts after we won. If you win a league game in our conference, it’s like winning a playoff game. Now we have playoffs (for the first year in the A Conference) and everyone is fighting for those spots. For us, it’s come down to the last possession of the game in each game we’ve won.
What does that say about this team that they’re able to win games on the last possession?
That’s the biggest difference between this year and last year when our guys kind of folded. This year, every game but one was won or lost on the last series of the game. One wasn’t. That was in Ohio and we fumbled the ball and they won. We were down by a touchdown with three minutes to go in the game and we fumbled the ball and they picked it up and ran into the end zone. That’s the one game we lost by more than one score. We were up 14-7 against McDonogh and they ran the kickoff back to tie the game. That would have deflated our team last year, but this year, they got over that quickly. That shows their growth as players.
Do you like having a playoff in the A Conference?
I love having a playoff, because if you lose a game early in the season, it still gives you something to play for. It gives your kids motivation for the next week. Looking at the numbers, if you lose more than two games, there’s a chance you might make the players, but we know the margin for error is very, very small right now with three games left to go. (A playoff is) a reward for our guys. Football, at our school at least, starts the day the season ends. It starts in November, so some of these guys work almost all year around and they deserve to have a playoff as part of football tradition in our country. It’s great for our conference.
What is your coaching philosophy and how did it develop?
My coaching philosophy is try to get the kids to play to their full potential by keeping them accountable every day and teaching them to compete. If I do that, have the best chance to win on Saturdays. We do that by having off season workouts and guys have to make a certain amount of workouts in the off season. If they don’t, they have to prove to the team that they’re in good enough shape by passing a grueling conditioning test. They have to be accountable, because everybody’s position is on the line every week. We’ve juggled our starters at almost every position every week based on who played the best that week. We do a tug of war every week. That’s one of the ways we teach the kids to compete. There’s a clear winner and a clear loser. We’ll bring a rope out and everybody gathers around and one guy pulls the other over the line. It gets everybody riled up. As for my coaching philosophy, I had a good high school coach (Joe Brune) and then I had four college head coaches. I went to Northwestern for a year and my coach left and I transferred to Wake Forest. Just being around good coaches and thinking about football the whole time, you learn. My life is football. I think I was preparing to be a coach when I was a player. I was always evaluating a player and what he was doing, because in the back of my mind, I knew I might want to be a coach one day. I had two head coaches at Northwestern and two at Wake, so that exposed me to a lot of different styles.
