Meet Evergreen head football coach Matt Van Praag
EVERGREEN, Colo. — When it comes to developing talented young football players, Evergreen High School (EHS) Head Coach Matt Van Praag takes a holistic approach. The former high school quarterback and team captain has learned a lot from his own experiences as a player and 15 years as a coach, but he’s boiled it all down to the current EHS team motto: Trust, honor and love.
“Love is the great equalizer in all things,” Van Praag shares. “We challenge our players to display love once we earn their trust. For teenage boys, love is often associated with romantic love, so their reception of love from coaches takes time. My proudest moments are hearing, ‘I love you, coach,’ or ‘I love you, too.’ To create change, love must be present and our culture [in EHS football] allows it to be present daily. As the players learn this concept, it creates positive change in our hallways and in our community. To see our young men graduate from college, get married, have families and start successful careers are the sights that ultimately determine our success as a coaching staff.”
In addition to helping players develop healthy internal values and characteristics, Van Praag and his staff also aim to ensure their healthy physical development. During football season, players do weightlifting to maintain their strength and Monday and Thursday practices are limited to either walk-throughs or film study, with recovery days on the weekends.
“We believe in maintaining our players’ bodies through recovery practices, which is not the norm in high school football,” says Van Praag. “In-season, we believe in providing our players with ample opportunities for their bodies to heal from competition so they are fully recovered by game day. Conserving the athletes’ bodies has a history of success at EHS since 2020, and this process is critical to our performance on Friday nights.”
The Cougars have celebrated several successful seasons in recent years, although Van Praag is quick to note that the expectation to win isn’t enough for sustained success. He explains that the standard of excellence for the Cougar football team is to compete and work towards perfection – regardless of the opponent. One of the team’s most memorable games took place in 2021, after Coach Tom Poholsky had passed away during the middle of the season. The Cougars had stumbled through two losses following that tragedy and found themselves competing against a talented Lewis-Palmer High School team. Led by Coach Poholsky’s son Tommy Poholsky — who threw for five touchdown passes — the EHS team defeated Lewis-Palmer by a score of 53-12.
“The final score was a culmination of the players’ hard work in healing from their grief and our execution as a team was nothing short of admirable,” Van Praag recalls with pride. “We made Coach P. proud that night as he sat in his coaching booth in the sky.”
Although winning games is important to Van Praag – he is a competitor, after all – creating and nurturing a supportive team culture that sustains staff and players beyond the wins and the inevitable losses is the ultimate goal.
“[The] biggest lesson [I’ve learned] is that team culture is more important than X’s and O’s,” he shares. “When I first began my coaching career, I [thought] I needed to know everything. I [thought] my schemes would win more football games and I threw myself heavily into gaining schematic advantages. However, in my first year as offensive coach at Evergreen, I realized that the scheme side of football could help to score points or set school records, but it doesn’t always help you win football games — and it certainly doesn’t create change. Once I turned my attention to the individual accomplishments of each player on and off the field, I started to notice the culture taking shape. As I earned their trust, players performed better. As I changed my coaching behavior to be more connected with the players, I saw them impacting the community [more]. Combined with the scheme, our trust model allows our [players] to be successful in all walks of life [and prepares] our athletes for their next steps, regardless of if their futures include football.”
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