By JOHN JAMES MARSHALL, Journal Sports
If there’s a list of games a new coach would like to choose for his opening game, there’s a really good chance that playing on the road at West Monroe wouldn’t be on.
“If you had to pick it,” said Huntington’s John Simon, “you wouldn’t pick that one.”
But that’s what Simon and the Raiders faced. It probably went as expected as the Rebels won 41-18. After swapping early touchdowns, Huntington fell behind 28-6, but hung in there the rest of the game.
The 46-year old Simon, who spent the last three years as an assistant coach at Grambling State, has his eyes focused way beyond Week 1 of his first season with the Raiders.
“Never be average,” Simon said. “I want our kids to know that anything they do, do it to be great. Do it to be the best, entertain the fans and honor God.”
It will be a challenge for Simon this year as he inherits a team that lost 36 seniors from a year ago and only has a handful of seniors at the top of the depth chart.
“It’s been a good process,” he said. “We’re a very young team. We’re rebuilding the program. So we’re just getting it started and our focus is on just being competitive right now and just trying to do things the right way. And eventually we know the wins will come.”
District 1-5A, which starts next week for Huntington against Captain Shreve (also on the road), is no bargain and there is also a non-district game against Class 2A power Calvary on the schedule.
Which will be an interesting night for Simon, since he had two sons recently play for the Cavaliers and are now at Division I schools (Louisiana Tech, Texas).
After a college career as a four-year starting running back at Tech, Simon played three seasons in the NFL before getting to coaching. Huntington is not his first head coaching job {Franklin D. Roosevelt in Dallas), but it is the first time he’s taken over a program after not previously being on the staff.
“The one thing that I was told about Huntington is that there’s really no barrier to success here,” he said. “You have administrators that have been around the game and are passionate about this community. The pride and tradition in the school is here, the fan base is here, and they have two great middle school feeders to where there’s a ton of talent that just walks in every day in this building. There’s no barrier to success of what we can build if we take our time and build it right.”
Simon has coached at a number of colleges, including Arizona State where he was wide receivers coach. Coming from outside of the program, a coach never knows what to expect at a new school.
“I’ve just been impressed with the buy-in from the administration, from the community, even from the kids,” Simon said. “They’ve come, they’ve worked, they’ve accepted me in a short time and we’ve jelled together and they understand where we are and they understand their mission.”
The Raiders are led by senior quarterback Justin Whitaker, a transfer from Dallas, who threw a touchdown pass with 16 seconds remaining. “He’s adjusting to me and how I want things done,” Simon said. “He’s done an unbelievable job of embracing the challenge and coming out to perform and lead this team.”
He may be in a new situation, but Simon hasn’t wasted any time bringing his philosophy to the young Raiders.
“The one thing I tried to instill to my kids is that every day is game day,” he said. “I try to create as much anxiety for them during practice and holding to the higher standard of doing things the right way in practice so that when they do get to the game, then it’s just a carryover from what we’ve already done. The game is just like another day of practice.”
Contact JJ at johnjamesmarshall@yahoo.com