Coach's Corner and QBC Blog

From Five Years Old to Senior Year: Unpacking Your Core Reason to Play

Written by Coach Bill Marshall | Oct 17, 2025 3:00:49 AM

So, I don't know how many of you guys watch SportsCenter or get the SportsCenter ticker updates on your phone, but we're kind of hosting this in combination tonight with our Pop Warner brethren, all right? They are providing dessert tonight, so please give them a huge round of applause as well.

Now, The reason I bring up Pop Warner is not just because tomorrow is again one of my favorites other than Patriot night which is Meet the Vikes Night where we get to visit and have our middle schools as well as the 230 plus football players and a hundred plus cheerleaders that they're gonna bring to the game tomorrow night that will someday fill your shoes.

But I think it brings us back and it centers us and when I mean centers us and I mentioned and I reference ESPN. There's a gentleman by the name of James Franklin, who if you're a Penn State fan you might be applauding this, but they just bought out his contract for 48 million dollars to basically say guess what over the next six years we don't want you to be our coach. We're gonna pay you not to be our coach.

That is where the game of football and I'll say all semi-professional sports have gotten. Okay, now you think that that's crazy... it's crazy money. I can't even fathom that type of money.

But what's even crazier than that is that it has already trickled its way down into interscholastic sports.

It's trickled its way down now not from just the professional level and semi-pro, but now it's in college.

And now it's making its way down into high school and I'm gonna tell you a story that kind of sickened me the other day.

It made its way down to the middle school now. Not buyouts and money and things like that okay.

What really got to me was I had one of our and I won't use which school, but one of our middle school coaches came up to me says. "Hey Bill, how do you handle this? I have a seventh grade player who is splitting time between the B team and the A team. And I was just approached and confronted by his dad because I'm hurting his exposure for a future scholarship by not playing him the full time on the A team."

And I had to sit there and I said, you know what, that is one question I've actually never been asked in all my years of coaching. From the middle school level, hurting my son's exposure.

Now again, granted, we have guys in this room, guys that have graduated several times over these last 20 years that I've been doing this, that have gone off and played football, scholarship football. In fact, every single one of our kids from last year's team that went off had zero stars in their ratings.

Zero stars, combined, zero stars in their ratings.

But the problem we're starting to see is this infiltration, this trickle down, where every player, and I would say maybe not every player, but definitely a lot of parents, families, start buying into this atmosphere of it's all about this.

It's all about exposure.

It's all about money, it's all about the money, and granted, I know the cost of an education. Guys, I went to a private school, trust me. I know the cost of paying to go to school, because I had just finished up, now 20 years removed, those student loans.

But what we've done, and I'm not just speaking in here and in these terms with that one reference to the middle school, I'm talking collectively in youth sports and beyond, is we've taken away, in my opinion, the real purpose and reason why you play this game. Now, again, you notice I focus on this game.

All right, this game has given me the world's over in regards to repayment for the amount of time that I spent being able and blessed to play it. It's given more back into my life than I probably was able to give it as an athlete, to be honest with you. And that's what I'd like you to focus on tonight. The activity that I'm having you do is not something that's new to this program. It's probably new to this group. And I've used this before. 

I've used it at the beginning. I've used it in the middle, and I've used it at the end of seasons.

Well, this is not the end of our season. It's the end of our regular season.

But I think it's a good time to stop and pause and reflect. And I'm not dissuading anybody from pursuing college football. I have, and I will continue to push for you in every aspect of that, to make sure that you realistically know what you can do, your potential, and that you can live that out and play that like nine of your teammates are doing right now from last season. But what I want you to write about, and I want you to give it some thought, is this.

Why do you play football? That's the question I have for you.

What drives you to play football?

Why football?

I know you have multiple sport athletes in the room, but this is unlike any sport that we offer at this high school, maybe with the exception of wrestling, but that's more individual than anything else in terms of toughness, hardness, resiliency, pain, suffering, injury, all of the above, okay?

So I don't want you to do what I think some of you might do. Man, I like bashing heads.

We know that. Some of you, we know that you like it excessively, okay?

But here's what I want you to do. I want you to give it some real honest-to-goodness thought. And now, I'll be honest, it could backfire and you're like, I don't know, I quit. I hope not, I'm just joking, all right? But I want you to think about that.

Is it because it's about family, your family playing?

Is it because of the love of the sport, the game, the camaraderie, the life lessons, those types of things?

And it's maybe something nobody has ever asked you because it's just like, oh, it's fall, I must be playing football.

But now I'm asking you to reflect on that and go ahead and leave out the stats, the accolades, the scholarships and everything else, unfortunately, that the sport has turned into and had a trickle down.

At your core, at the core of what Pop Warner does, why did you start?

Why did you continue?

And why are you still here?

Do me a favor, take five minutes, get your thoughts down. Captains, you will be our first, I mean, volunteers to go ahead and stand up and let us know what your thoughts are, but I'm gonna call on random, so to sit there and pretend like you're in class and not do anything will not be allowed. All right, five minutes on the clock, go.

And here's what they came back with.....