LONGVIEW, Texas — So much of coaching is not what happens on the field. It is the values and knowledge passed off the field that helps to define a coach's legacy.
During Kerry Lane's time as an assistant coach in Gilmer, one man had a major impact in who Coach Lane has become.
"Matt Turner. He taught me so much my first year coaching at Gilmer," Coach Lane said. "We were up there every night late, and he taught me how to play a practice and how to coach details."
Coach Lane began writing the advice down. It helped him to learn to write everything down when took over as head coach of Pine Tree.
"I'm always in practice with my script, and I'm writing down, maybe we wouldn't have good leverage on a block or maybe think we spend the covers right away or whatever," Coach Lane explained. "I bring it up with the coaches later and the kids, and I would say I write that."
That organization goes a long way in developing his team.
In his fourth season as the Pirates' head coach, Pine Tree is in a three-way tie with Whitehouse and Marshall for the regional championship.
He says his program has five core values:
- Trust from the kids
- Trust from the community
- Caring
- Perfect effort
- Competing
Trust was the first value they developed.
"I think the number one thing we had developed was trust, and that was the kids trusting us and letting us coach," Lane said. "Then just trust in the community."
The next step was developing the perfect effort.
"You're never going to play perfect, but you can always have perfect effort. So it was perfect effort in the weight room. It was perfect effort on how we clean the locker room," Coach Lane explained. "We just worked on those things first, and then we got into our, you know, phases of competing."
However, like Turner's impact on his life, Lane hopes his players look at their time playing under him as an experience that goes beyond the field.
"You get to, not necessarily be a father to them, but you get to kind of teach them some of those lessons that you know they're going to lead need later on in life," Coach Lane said. "And when you see them sink in, it's a lot more important than winning games. That's the best part."