There's Tough Days Ahead For Tippecanoe Valley
September 7, 2016 at 4:32 p.m.
By Roger Grossman-
It’s definitely not a 9-to-5 job.
Duane Burkhart is the AD at Tippecanoe Valley High School, and his job got a lot harder this week.
The football team is 0-3, and not only that but all three losses were blowouts. They were never in any of them. Completely uncompetitive. They have lost by an average of almost 47 points per game.
Two of their losses came at home, including a 47-0 drubbing on a night when they dedicated the new home bleachers and press box in honor of their former coach, Scott Bibler, who was killed in a plane crash last October.
You can imagine how discouraging that could be.
There were a lot of stories circulating around the program.
Everything from arguments between coaches to accusations of players being inserted into games when they were injured. When that stuff starts happening, whether any or all of it is true or not, it never ends well.
For head coach Darin Holsopple, it ended Monday morning.
The second year coach resigned on Labor Day, citing health concerns as the major reason why. He told me Monday afternoon he had lost 20 pounds because he wasn’t eating, and he wasn’t sleeping either.
When you are 35, and this is happening to you … you conduct inventory of your life and start reassessing everything.
He let go of being the head coach at Tippecanoe Valley.
So the questions of the day are “what happened” and “who’s to blame.”
I don’t have answers to those questions, and I won’t pretend to be a Valley football insider anymore. As is usually the case, when things go catastrophically wrong like they have the last 14 months for the Vikings, there are a lot of people and things to blame.
Remember, Burkhart learned that Bibler was going to step away from coaching to work in the private sector very late in the school calendar. Burkhart hired Holsopple, a very respected and talented young assistant coach away from Fairfield, less than a month before official practices started. It was a really good hire and a lot of Elkhart County football people were convinced that this was a steal for the Vikings.
But when you have basically three weeks to meet your kids, get to know your coaches, and lay the foundation of your program – that’s a tough task.
The Vikings went 3-7 last year, but they lost by a single score in each of their two non-conference games, came back to start 2-0 in the conference, and ultimately started the season 3-3.
They lost the bell trophy to Rochester, 17-10, and then the Wabash game happened. Few people who were there could argue that there was not a lot of fight in the Vikings that night – a 39-15 loss on the road.
They have not won since.
They played that same Apache team the next week in the TRC playoffs (a concept that I love by the way), and lost only 13-6 in a much better effort. But it was another loss – another close loss. And the pressure began to build.
Then the dedication ceremony night and a 47-0 home loss, a 65-14 loss at Western and a 55-13 conference-opening loss to North Miami at home Friday.
The Valley football pot boiled over.
Makes you wonder: what if Holsopple had a whole spring and summer to infusing himself into the football community before that first game? What if he had time to get to know people and them him – to show kids and his assistants what he wanted from them and what he offered them in return?
There is also the fact that Holsopple was not “Valley Family.” This will rankle people, but there were going to be people who were never going to buy into what he was selling for that reason. He did things differently.
Add to that he was a first-time head coach. He was going to make mistakes. He was going to have a plan of what he wanted to try when he became a head coach, and then adjusted to those things to what worked and what didn’t.
And even if you assume the coaching hasn’t been up to snuff (which is not a fair assumption) a school the size of Valley should have enough players with talent and want-to to be competitive against CMA, Western and North Miami and the rest of the TRC field.
Put it all together and you get what Valley has right now – a program looking for its fourth head coach in four seasons (the fourth actually being the first again, Jeff Shriver, who is sharing the duties with Aaron Norris the rest of this season).
And if you are a Valley fan and you are thinking or saying or posting “now we can get back to Valley Football”, what is that exactly? Go back 10 years and you will find as many 3-win seasons as you do 7-win seasons. This isn’t 1977 or 1979. Changing coaches a third of the way through the football season is not going to save this season. Just eyeballing it, there might be two winnable games on the schedule … maybe.
In this time of crisis, everyone associated with Valley football must take a long look in the mirror and ask themselves if they are part of the solution or part of the problem. Then they have to get down to the business of getting better today, and a little better tomorrow, and a little better the next day. That’s a life lesson, for those of you scoring at home.
And then Burkhart, who cares about Valley sports as much as any person cares about their school’s sports programs that I know, will be challenged to find the right man to lead his football program.
And that will be hard.
It’s definitely not a 9-to-5 job.
Duane Burkhart is the AD at Tippecanoe Valley High School, and his job got a lot harder this week.
The football team is 0-3, and not only that but all three losses were blowouts. They were never in any of them. Completely uncompetitive. They have lost by an average of almost 47 points per game.
Two of their losses came at home, including a 47-0 drubbing on a night when they dedicated the new home bleachers and press box in honor of their former coach, Scott Bibler, who was killed in a plane crash last October.
You can imagine how discouraging that could be.
There were a lot of stories circulating around the program.
Everything from arguments between coaches to accusations of players being inserted into games when they were injured. When that stuff starts happening, whether any or all of it is true or not, it never ends well.
For head coach Darin Holsopple, it ended Monday morning.
The second year coach resigned on Labor Day, citing health concerns as the major reason why. He told me Monday afternoon he had lost 20 pounds because he wasn’t eating, and he wasn’t sleeping either.
When you are 35, and this is happening to you … you conduct inventory of your life and start reassessing everything.
He let go of being the head coach at Tippecanoe Valley.
So the questions of the day are “what happened” and “who’s to blame.”
I don’t have answers to those questions, and I won’t pretend to be a Valley football insider anymore. As is usually the case, when things go catastrophically wrong like they have the last 14 months for the Vikings, there are a lot of people and things to blame.
Remember, Burkhart learned that Bibler was going to step away from coaching to work in the private sector very late in the school calendar. Burkhart hired Holsopple, a very respected and talented young assistant coach away from Fairfield, less than a month before official practices started. It was a really good hire and a lot of Elkhart County football people were convinced that this was a steal for the Vikings.
But when you have basically three weeks to meet your kids, get to know your coaches, and lay the foundation of your program – that’s a tough task.
The Vikings went 3-7 last year, but they lost by a single score in each of their two non-conference games, came back to start 2-0 in the conference, and ultimately started the season 3-3.
They lost the bell trophy to Rochester, 17-10, and then the Wabash game happened. Few people who were there could argue that there was not a lot of fight in the Vikings that night – a 39-15 loss on the road.
They have not won since.
They played that same Apache team the next week in the TRC playoffs (a concept that I love by the way), and lost only 13-6 in a much better effort. But it was another loss – another close loss. And the pressure began to build.
Then the dedication ceremony night and a 47-0 home loss, a 65-14 loss at Western and a 55-13 conference-opening loss to North Miami at home Friday.
The Valley football pot boiled over.
Makes you wonder: what if Holsopple had a whole spring and summer to infusing himself into the football community before that first game? What if he had time to get to know people and them him – to show kids and his assistants what he wanted from them and what he offered them in return?
There is also the fact that Holsopple was not “Valley Family.” This will rankle people, but there were going to be people who were never going to buy into what he was selling for that reason. He did things differently.
Add to that he was a first-time head coach. He was going to make mistakes. He was going to have a plan of what he wanted to try when he became a head coach, and then adjusted to those things to what worked and what didn’t.
And even if you assume the coaching hasn’t been up to snuff (which is not a fair assumption) a school the size of Valley should have enough players with talent and want-to to be competitive against CMA, Western and North Miami and the rest of the TRC field.
Put it all together and you get what Valley has right now – a program looking for its fourth head coach in four seasons (the fourth actually being the first again, Jeff Shriver, who is sharing the duties with Aaron Norris the rest of this season).
And if you are a Valley fan and you are thinking or saying or posting “now we can get back to Valley Football”, what is that exactly? Go back 10 years and you will find as many 3-win seasons as you do 7-win seasons. This isn’t 1977 or 1979. Changing coaches a third of the way through the football season is not going to save this season. Just eyeballing it, there might be two winnable games on the schedule … maybe.
In this time of crisis, everyone associated with Valley football must take a long look in the mirror and ask themselves if they are part of the solution or part of the problem. Then they have to get down to the business of getting better today, and a little better tomorrow, and a little better the next day. That’s a life lesson, for those of you scoring at home.
And then Burkhart, who cares about Valley sports as much as any person cares about their school’s sports programs that I know, will be challenged to find the right man to lead his football program.
And that will be hard.
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