University of North Carolina Athletics
Turner's Take: Seeing The Mountain
January 16, 2014 | Football, Featured Writers, Turner Walston
Long before he was Carolina's associate head coach for defense, before he was the head coach at Wyoming or the defensive coordinator at Clemson, Vic Koenning was riding horses in his native Oklahoma. One of the things that he remembers from his daily rides was how hard it was to rein in a horse when the barn came in sight. “They were OK to leave the barn, and you'd go on this ride for an hour or whatever, but as soon as you started getting close to home and they could see the barn, it was hard to get them to turn and go the other way,” he said.
That analogy came to mind as Koenning talked about changing the culture of Carolina football this week. Throughout the first half of last season, Koenning was very candid about the battles he was having with his players. Many of them weren't buying in to what he was coaching - or into being coached at all - they weren't practicing with a purpose, and the results on the field (a 1-5 start) reflected that. From the defensive meeting room in Kenan Football Center in January, Koenning senses that changing. “Our guys are now allowing us to get them to keep going,” he said. “It isn't like punching a clock anymore. Now, I think we're going to start making some big strides. I'm anticipating us continuing to make strides.”
So even before he takes a look at the depth chart - one that will be updated on National Signing Day when Carolina adds a new freshman class to the roster - Koenning feels good about what's happening with Tar Heel football. “Football is not starting to be something that starts when they get over here and ends when they leave here, it's starting to be something that they think about and do and become more of a way of life,” he said. “Before, it was just an afterthought, it seemed like to me. It was just something they didn't spend enough time on.”
Changing a culture requires success (to add credibility to what's being instituted) plus leadership within a team. It's a chicken-and-egg scenario, so Koenning said a perfect storm of those elements is required. “You've got to have more guys on the positive side of the fence than the negative side,” he said, “because the majority of your guys are going to be on the fence, and the positive guys will pull.”
In his first season at Carolina, 2012, Koenning had leaders like Kevin Reddick and Sylvester Williams who led by example. “I think Kevin is the guy that was probably fighting hard to make it better, but he was too much alone,” Koenning said. Reddick was a leader, but Carolina also had terrific athletes lauded for their athleticism alone, individual success independent of team success. Their teammates saw that, and thought they were on the right path to individual accolades. Koenning said he's confident that the 2014 Carolina defense will be made up of many more blue-collar players who understand that they have to work. “They're going to do the extra things. They're going to train harder and it's going to be more important to them, and so the guys on the fence are going to go their direction. I think that's what I see happening with the culture changing on this team.”
It started to change midway through the 2013 season, when players began to understand that the old ways of thinking were resulting in a downward spiral of a season. Success began to happen and players began to buy in. The result was a 6-1 finish to the season and a Belk Bowl championship. Koenning believes that momentum will carry through into the fall of 2014.
“I think we've got a little bit of momentum now,” he said. “We need to parlay that and continue to progress. Now, we can see the mountain that we want to climb. Whereas before it was too many ranges over and we couldn't even see it. But now it's in sight. Now, what we've got to do is take this off-season, this spring practice, this summer and let's get to the bottom of the mountain so that now we can climb it. We need to get from here to there. I try to give them a visual tool. We've still got some ridges to climb and we've got some rivers to cross, but now at least we can see it.”
