On the opening night of the 2009 season, the North Penn Knights – minus the nucleus of last year’s league and district championship squad – rolled to 42-10 win over defending state champion Liberty. Coach Dick Beck reflects on that win and also offers some insights into his coaching philosophy in SOS.com’s first one-on-one interview of the 2009-09 school year.
SOS.com: Comment on your team’s 42-10 win over Liberty last week.
Coach Beck: I don’t think we’re 42-10 better than Liberty. I don’t think we’re that good, and I don’t think they’re that bad. To be honest, I think our kids just played so hard. The effort was inspiring. We saw very little – during film sessions – where guys were loafing. All of our mistakes were mental. We did not have any laziness or guys not going full speed or anything like that. It was good.
What’s great is they’ve raised the bar. They’ve set the expectation – this is what we did on probably the hottest night we’re going to have all year, and this is what we’re going to expect. That’s encouraging.
I think we’re lucky that we’re playing Lansdale Catholic this week because I don’t think you have to worry about looking past LC, which is such a deep-rooted rival. That’s a good opportunity for us to say – okay, we’re going to come down from this high of Liberty, but then we’ve got LC. The kids will be focused. I know that.
SOS.com: Did your team surprise you with its performance against Liberty?
Coach Beck: I don’t want to say I was surprised, but I was generally pleased with the toughness and guts we showed, especially on the defensive end. You don’t see it when you watch it, but not only was the guy who was making the tackle making tackles, but the other people on the team were pursuing to the ball and getting into their lanes and making blocks and not standing around.
You can watch the entire game and never see a guy who was standing there, who was going half speed. I thought we got the tough yardage when we ran the ball – Todd Smolinsky running the ball and getting hit for a two-yard gain and falling for a five-yard gain or Craig Needhammer getting hit at the line of scrimmage and making it a four-yard gain. People don’t see that in the stats, but those plays are huge for us.
There’s a kid like Matt Donovan who was a back-up, and then Ryan Hessenius goes down and he steps up. Dan Gevirtz is a sophomore who played safety all summer, and then T.J. Gill becomes a safety, and Gevirtz moves to corner and never complains and does a great job. He doesn’t say, ‘Well, I played safety all summer. Why can’t I play safety?’ He just moves to corner and plays corner. You have Chuck Knower who no one ever heard of before, and he comes out and plays a solid game, making the tough plays, and if he wasn’t making the tackle, he was taking blocks up and blowing to the ball. These guys are all the no-names, the people you don’t know much about.
Our secondary probably played one of their best games against the number one quarterback in the state. If you take away the one throw of 53 yards, which was an absolute mental breakdown by the corner covering the kid, they didn’t really do much passing the ball.
SOS.com: Were there any specific moves that played a role in the win?
Coach Beck: The big change we made this week – I wasn’t comfortable with Steve Trabanas at left tackle, so we thought he would do a better job at center even though he had never played center for us or had ever snapped the ball for us at the high school level.
We came to him Monday and said J.D. Dzurko was going to move out to tackle. Not only did they both do a great job and we only fumbled one snap – they never complained, they never pouted, they never said, ‘I can’t do this. Why do I have to change?’ All they said was, ‘Okay, if that makes the team better, that’s what we’re going to do.’ That’s an overall theme of this team and our teams of the past – the team is so much more important than the individual.
SOS.com: How do you keep your program at such a high level after losing the majority of the players from a team like last year’s final four squad?
Coach Beck: We gave them until the second week of January, and then we brought them in together and started to lift weights. I don’t think you can start too high. You just say – this is where it all begins.
The development of who plays where on the depth chart doesn’t happen in two weeks. It happens in six or seven months - from weight lifting to speed training to what they’re doing in the passing leagues to how they’re preparing for the season. Ultimately, they’re going to finally put the pads on, but it’s a long process.
We want kids that we can depend on, that we know they’re are going to be there when the chips are going to fall. The kids that are there every single day for seven, eight months – they know they can depend on each other.
SOS.com: What do you look for in your players?
Coach Beck: The number one thing is they have to be unselfish. They can’t be worried about what position they play, what number they’re wearing, how many tackles they have, how many carries they get, how many balls they catch. We preach that from day one.
There’s no single player that’s more important than another player. There’s no single position that’s more important than another position. We try to reward each player, whether it’s the backside tackle or the star running back that just ran for 90 yards. All the kids are treated equally, and I think each one has a very important role. Not one role is more important than another.
SOS.com: What makes players like Craig Needhammer – who’s listed at 5-7, 170 – so successful? It seems to be a recurring theme in your program where players who might not be prototype football players go on to excel.
Coach Beck: What you can’t see when you look at him is his character. There’s an old Mike Pettine saying – you don’t get the ball until you block. I can teach anybody to run the ball, but I need guys that can block. If you can’t block, you don’t get the ball.
Needhammer is probably the perfect example of a guy that is small in stature, but he’s not afraid to put his nose in there. Not only is he good at blocking, he wants to block. He takes that challenge on.
SOS.com: What do you tell your players after a win like Friday’s 32-point win over Liberty?
Coach Beck: I think the phrase was – let’s not break our hands patting ourselves on the back, and that’s true. If we come up this Friday and lose, that will put such a damper on what happened last Friday. It will make it a negative thing instead of a positive thing.
The (win) was exciting. It was fun. It generates a lot of excitement in the school and in the community. There will be a big crowd this week for the LC game, and then we play St. Joe’s Prep. These kids are going are going to really go out and play hard. They’re going to be worth seeing. I think a lot of people will be interested in seeing this team.
North Penn will host neighborhood rival Lansdale Catholic on Sept. 11, 7:30 p.m., at Crawford Stadium.
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