Porto: Coaching For Life

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(Host) Commentator Brian Porto is Deputy Director of the Sports Law
Institute at Vermont Law School. And as the college football season
winds down, he’s considering the career of a coaching legend.

(Porto)
The sports world can teach important life lessons if one looks beyond
the box scores and the personality profiles to find them. I was reminded
of that recently, when newspapers around the country reported the
retirement, at the tender age of 86, of John Gagliardi, who won more
games than any other coach in college football history.

In one
sense, Gagliardi became a coaching legend in the usual way. In his
64-year career, his teams won a record 489 games, lost 138, and tied 11,
giving Gagliardi a better-than-77 percent winning percentage. His success
earned him induction into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2006, and
the trophy awarded every year to the outstanding player in the NCAA’s
Division III bears his name.

But in another sense, John
Gagliardi’s career is quite unusual. After coaching at a small college
in Montana, where his teams won three conference titles in four years,
Gagliardi moved in 1953 to tiny St. John’s University in Collegeville,
Minnesota, where he coached through the 2012 season. Founded by
Benedictine monks, St. John’s is located far from the epicenter of
college football, in the NCAA’s Division III, whose members are small
private colleges and small state universities without athletic
scholarships. In this atmosphere, a player may quit the football team to
spend more time studying or with his girlfriend, without financial
penalty. Still, Gagliardi built a juggernaut that won four national
titles, went undefeated in conference play five times, and lost three
games or fewer in thirteen consecutive seasons.

More
surprisingly, though, the juggernaut was built on an unconventional
philosophy called "Winning with Nos" – no tackling in practice, no
hitting blocking sleds, no mandatory weight training, no blowing of
whistles by coaches, and no practices lasting longer than ninety minutes
– that is heretical in most football programs. And nobody was ever cut
from a Gagliardi team; indeed, his teams routinely carried nearly 200
players, more than twice the number his competitors had.

The
best indication of the success of Gagliardi’s philosophy is found in the
comments of former players, like Joe Mucha, a retired corporate
executive, who said, "I can tell you I built my career modeled after the
things I learned from John – the way he prepped for a game, the way he
made you believe in yourself. Very few people you meet in the world
affect you that way."

Coaches in Vermont and New Hampshire
should learn from the example John Gagliardi has set. Prepare
thoroughly, be well organized, make it fun, don’t be afraid to take
risks, and remember you’re in the business of long-term human
development. That philosophy may not result in a trophy being named
after you, but you will be satisfied in knowing you touched many lives
in a positive way. No trophy compares to that.

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