A coach-style monologue arguing that 'toughness' is a core, teachable value in football and life. The speaker defines toughness as mental and physical strength to do what is required regardless of circumstances, emphasizes teaching it in high school and college football so young people learn resilience, and defends the physical nature of the game as essential to those lessons.
Chapters
I want them to have a couple core values, and one of them is toughness. And it's a word that people hear and people talk about, but not many young people really know what it means. I tell our guys, toughness is the mental and physical strength. It's strength, mental and physical strength to do what you're supposed to do, no matter what the circumstance, no matter how hard it is, no matter what the conditions are, no matter how you feel. And it's strength. It's not a talent, it's a skill. It's something that you can develop. And I want our kids, I want them to leave and learn all kinds of things, but I want to make sure that they're tough, that they don't make excuses and they don't let other people make excuses for them, that they don't let the strain of life break them. I mean, it can bend them sometimes. We all know that, man. Life hits us, football hits us, and it makes us bend. It makes us weary, but we can't break. And if they don't learn it now in high school football, if they don't learn about toughness from you and from me and from us in college football and high school football, when are they going to learn it? If not from us, from who? So as I leave here and I'm on this mission to have a tough football team, I just want to encourage you. We gotta make sure that the game that we leave behind is the game that we love. Football is the greatest game in the world because you take your two hands and you put them on another man and you move him where he doesn't want to go. As my college coach, Coach Maternal used to say, it's the greatest game because you knock someone down, you help them back up, and then you knock them down again. And I didn't do a lot of knocking down all the time when I was a player. So I think it's a great game because when I got knocked down, I learned to get up. And that's what I want my kids to understand because they're growing up in a society where they could just hit restart, or if they don't like what I'm saying, they can just stop texting. And I want them to learn these lessons. And part of that is being physical each and every day is in my job. People tell me, like, it's not okay to be quite as physical anymore and all. All these things. And I say, no, we can't leave the game behind. It's just seven on seven.
