Starting from scratch

Jim Puryear likes to share a bit of advice he regularly hears from his father.

“Whenever I play golf with my dad, he tells me the same thing,” the first-year Valley Christian football coach said. “He says ‘You don’t play this game enough to get upset about it.’ I tell my players that all the time.”

Puryear has the daunting task of creating a football program at a school that has never before fielded a team.

And with players who for the most part haven’t played organized football since their peewee days. Of the 17 players on the Valley Christian roster, only a couple have any recent experience playing football.

“I have a couple guys who tried turning out for football at another school,” Puryear said. “Since we didn’t offer it here, you’re allowed to do that. A couple of these guys have, but it’s really hard to do that. It’s difficult to play a sport when you don’t go to classes with your teammates.”

In essence, Puryear and his staff of volunteers are starting from scratch in the purest sense of the phrase.

“I told the kids on the first day of practice that I had to take them from one-plus-one to advanced calculus in three weeks,” he said. “After two games, I’d say we’re just starting algebra.

“We started out with ‘Guys, this is a football,’ and now we’re learning how to fine-tune our offense and our defense.”

The downside of the equation is that his players have no experience, the coach said. The glass-half-full view is that they don’t have any bad habits to break.

“That’s it exactly,” he said. “Everyone is starting from the same point. They’re all the same.”

With just 17 players on the roster, manpower is in short supply. There aren’t enough players to scrimmage a full squad, so the first time the Panthers were able to go full-speed against another group of 11 players was their first game at Soap Lake.

“We have eight kids who never come off the field,” Puryear said. “They play offense, defense, special teams – they play everything. We’re playing iron man football here – we’ve even embraced that. We’re having T-shirts made up that say ‘Iron Cats’ on the front.”

Progress has been steady. The Panthers scored their first touchdown in their first game.

Junior Brad Heden has taken to his role as starting quarterback and senior David Jackson has been a leader while playing tight end, wingback and linebacker as well as backing up at quarterback. They are two of the most experienced players.

“We had our problems, sure,” the coach said. “Our first play on defense they were kind of running around trying to figure out where they were supposed to go and they kind of blew us up for a touchdown. But we figured some things out and I think we responded to the situation pretty well.”

And while they lost their first home game by a 44-0 score to the Liberty Lancers, the coach was again pleased with what he saw.

“We moved the football pretty well against Liberty,” he said. “And our defense made a lot of progress – I’m an old defensive end, so I admit that I wish my defense was ahead of where they are, but I can’t complain. It takes time to learn how to play defense – to get to where you’re reacting to the play and not thinking about where you’re supposed to be.”

Puryear has installed a double-wing offense that allows the team to use multiple runners who can attack from the wings. And the base defense is designed to be flexible.

“I’m not married to any of these schemes,” he said. “We have more defenses that we want to install once we understand what we’re doing with this one. My concern was to find an offense and defense that fit the personnel we have.”

Puryear and his staff studied the way head coach John Tully and his Whitworth Pirates approach the game. He wants his players to attend the football camp that school offers next summer.

“They were terrific about letting us come in and ask question and observe what they do,” he said. “That really helped us get our feet on the ground.”

Overall, the coach is pleased with his team’s progress – especially when he sits down to analyze game films.

“If this were a veteran team I’d go in and look at the film and all I would be looking for are the mistakes,” he said. “But with these guys, I look at that film and all I can see is how many things they’re doing right.”