On a softer side, imagine the excitement of your first child being born. Then your second. And the family you now have.
Now, imagine the excitement of taking over the Missoula Sentinel High School football team.
The same Spartans who have finished dead last among Class AA's 13 teams the past four years?
The same team which - in the previous 14 years - has had separate 24-game and 30-game losing skids and will enter the 2007 season on another 24-game losing streak.
You serious? Sentinel? Which hasn't been to the state playoffs since 1989?
Yep, yep, and triple yep.
That is exactly the excitement of Pete Joseph, who this fall begins his third season as the Spartans head coach.
Joseph is trying to turn things around, create a culture of winning - not losing - at one of the state's worst football factories. It all started as a ninth grader, when Joseph dreamed up a list of the five things he wanted to do in his life.
“Number one was to have a family,” Joseph says. “Number two was to be a head football coach Š
“Number three was to skydive and number four was to catch a marlin. I knew at a young age what I wanted to do.”
He's gone 0-20 since 2005 when he took over, but the city's youngest coach is already breathing new life into a once free-falling squad with a set of standards not seen at Sentinel in years.
“He's the new guy on the block,” school athletic director Scott Whaley says. “He's been working really hard. The other day he had 60 to 70 kids in the weight room. It's been awhile since we've had those kind of numbers.”
Some have pointed to enrollment numbers and depth, others to bigger budgets and stronger traditions when assessing Missoula's misfortunes.
It seems Sentinel's woes have been linked to one thing: Attitude. Both from its players and its coaches.
“It was tough to get motivated to work hard,” former Spartans linebacker and fullback Matt Ventresca says. “Nobody was interested if all we were going to do was lose.”
“There was this culture at Sentinel,” says Chris Polhemus, a quarterback from 1999-2000, “that there were other sports to play and you could be good. Why play football?”
“We were struggling,” says Whaley, who was a coach and a dean of students prior to taking over as AD in '99. “Struggling to get kids to make the kind of commitment they needed to make.”
That's about to change, says the Spartans biggest supporter.
“One of the things I'm stressing to our kids is that we are not going to be defined by the past,” Joseph says. “I don't care what happened before. Our kids are building a culture of success and winning and that's all I care about.”
Sentinel's been Class AA's whipping boy for so long that Joseph insists they needed a makeover, starting with their weight room, locker rooms and even the coaches' offices, the basement room of concrete and steel they affectionately call “the submarine.”
The weight room is getting new-and-improved plaques for its record holders. Athletes can join 600-, 700-, 800- and 900-pound clubs with max-outs.
The locker rooms are due for a paint job, the submarine will get an upgrade with game tape playback machines and there's $7,000 worth of new equipment on the practice field.
“As an educator you don't go into the classroom and say ‘Hey, we're going to try to get Cs this semester.' You shoot for straight As,” Joseph says. “We push that same concept here. We're going to set the expectations high.”
Spartans are hitting the weights in record fashion. The coach - who could pass for a student if it weren't for the Brian Urlacher-style shaved head - opens the doors for 6:15 a.m. workouts. If players are late, Joseph is on his cell phone calling a parent, a sibling, whoever it takes.
“If you're going to create a culture that is going to succeed, this is the expectation,” he says. “That's AA football in the state of Montana now.”
“We haven't had fewer than 55 kids in this weight room from Jan. 1 until ... today,” adds Joseph during a recent tour of Sentinel's facilities.
Senior defensive tackle Mack Moss has done so well with Joseph's weight training he bypassed the 900-pound club and went right to the 1,000-pound club.
The new standard is not radical, says Joseph, as much as it's the status quo.
“We're basically getting to where other teams have been for quite a while,” he says. “Are we radical? No. Are we doing what's expected? Yes. Do we have to do it to compete? Absolutely.”
Joseph is a Missoula Big Sky High School graduate. He played for coach Gary Ekegren during Ek's first season at the school in 1990-91. The Eagles went 1-8 Joseph's senior year. Their only win was against Sentinel.
Joseph knows first hand the obstacles of Missoula's football programs and coaches like Ek and Hellgate's Jeff Dohn.
“I've got a lot of respect for (Ekegren). A lot of what I do out here is because of what he instilled in me as a player and a coach,” Joseph says. “We've got great coaches in this city. I don't think anybody should ever question that.”
In the same span that Ekegren has been at Big Sky and Dohn at Hellgate, Sentinel has seen three changes at head coach.
Tim Kerr coached the Spartans for seven seasons, including their last postseason appearance, but left after back-to-back 0-9 campaigns in 1993 and '94.
Tim Arthur took over in 1995 and went 1-26 in three seasons. Mike Lyons, a SHS grad, was next in line. He led the Spartans to a 13-57 mark, including a 5-5 season in 2000 - the first time in seven years Sentinel didn't finish with a losing record.
Sentinel's slide can be traced to the numbers - its enrollment is the smallest of any Class AA school - and its soccer and basketball programs probably drew more athletes away from football than the other two Missoula schools.
“There were a lot more fun things to do, rather than lose,” Polhemus says. “So nobody wanted to (play football).”
But a certain amount of Sentinel's fate has fallen on the shoulders of the men leading the program. One of the things that sticks out, is not having the head coach “in house” or employed at the school.
Kerr was teaching in the elementary system while he was coaching Sentinel, thus never interacted on a daily basis with the high school students.
Arthur retired from Oregon's school system and came to Montana, where he concentrated on just coaching - a laughable attempt to some.
“He's the coach who had our receivers line up in the three-point stance,” Ventresca says. “How can you expect any one to take you seriously when your receivers are still lining up in the three-point.”
Ventresca played for Arthur for three years and one year for Lyons. He's a varsity assistant at Helena High and this fall will begin his fourth year of teaching fifth-grade at Bryant Elementary, a feeder school to the Bengals. They completed a day camp for first through fifth graders just last week and he saw some of his kids wearing Helena High T-shirts this last weekend.
Ventresca says Missoula's way of handling sub-varsity football is off compared to Helena and the rest of the state.
The freshmen teams elsewhere start playing the other AA schools as soon as they come in. Missoula's frosh play intracity games only.
Venstresca says it's “almost mandatory” that the freshmen and sophomores at Capital and Helena High compete in other sports like track and field. And there's their history of weight training, too.
Ventresca, who played for the Spartans during their 30-game losing streak, believes a coach needs to be in the public eye more.
“They need to get the seventh and eighth graders interested before they get into high school,” Ventresca says. “That way they start to build that tradition.”
Ventresca thinks Joseph is on the right track so far.
“Pete's doing a good job of getting some energy and revival of that program,” he says. “A guy's got to coach, too. He could be a great motivator, but you have to coach and vice versa. It's the total package.”
Ventresca says he still receives a bit of grief from his buddies for his days at Sentinel. He tells the story of playing for Carroll College and during his junior season with the Saints finally breaking .500 for a high school and college career mark.
“We were in the locker room after a game and Casey Glenn announces to everyone that I was finally .500 for my career,” Ventresca says. “All the guys applauded.”
Finding that right mix of teacher/motivator/inovator is one reason why Sentinel often switched leadership.
“When you're struggling and it's hard getting the kids to believe, you lose faith in the coach,” Whaley says. “And when you're at the bottom of the heap, you give more of an opportunity to someone else to turn it around.”
Whaley believes all of Sentinel's coaches from the past to present did their best to get the Spartans back on track.
“Whether it's the impatience of parents or the community, it's hard on them,” says Whaley of those staffs. “It tears 'em up. It's difficult to be a coach, the highs and lows are tremendous. The people that coach give a lot.”
The new guy on the block won't dissect the past or grade his predecessors.
“I don't really know what went on before,” Joseph says. “I didn't really ask or care to sit back and watch. I just walked in and said ‘Boom, here's my culture. Here's my three rules. Follow them or be done.' ”
Those three rules are: Citizenship, academics and sportsmanship. So far his guys are meeting those rules. They are helping to build a Habitat for Humanity home. They're fundraising for their own gear and with any luck a spot in the this fall's playoffs.
“That would be huge,” Joseph says “not only for the school, but for the entire community that supports Sentinel football. “There are a lot of people out here that want to see the school and the program succeed. I think they'd go nuts.”
Reporter Chad Dundas may be reached at 523-5361 or by e-mail at chad.dundas@lee.net; Nick Lockridge may be reached at 523-5298 or by e-mail at nick.lockridge@lee.net.
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