Photo Credit: Dion ClissoI’m not breaking any news when I say we have a very tight coaching community in the Metro. The Greater Kansas Football Coaches Association is one of the strongest high school coaching associations in the country and all you have to do is go watch a game on Friday night and you see excellence all around you.
PrepsKC along with organizations like the Chiefs and DM Injury Law honors those coaches for their work on the field. The Chiefs have been giving a coach of the week and coach of the year award for the better part of 2 decades.
DM Injury Law partnered with us this year to honor the staffs of the head coaches for their work all throughout the season but more specifically for what they did during the week or during a game to help bring their schools to victory.
Each week we have gotten nominations from head coaches touting what their staff has done and trust me there is 10-20 times the worth staffs not just the one we honor each week.
This past week we sent our call for nominations and got lots of great possibilities which ranged from a coach raving about a half time adjustment to a coach jokingly saying they stayed out of his way in the past week.
We also got several nominations from head coaches not for their staff but for the staff of the winner Shawnee Mission Northwest. The nominating head coaches came from different districts and both sides of the state line.
A few weeks ago, during the end of summer workouts Northwest suffered the ultimate tragedy as a player passed away. Ovet Gomez Regalado, a lineman on the team who passed away during a preseason practice session in August.
He was honored Friday night as the Cougars took the field for their season-opening game against Olathe North. Northwest would go on to an impressive 28-14 win but just taking the field after that tragedy was a victory in itself.
The work done by Head Coach Bo Black and his staff to comfort and counsel the players as they continue to deal with a difficult loss shows what coaches all across the Metro bring to the football field every day.
They aren’t just coaching a sport; they are building young people into the best version of themselves. Northwest’s work didn’t go unnoticed and the fact that others nominated them for the award shows just what type of people we have in the coaching community here in the Metro.
There are a lot of things that make Kansas City high school football great. I don’t know if there is anything better than the caring and community of coaches in the Metro have for their game and for each other.
