A wrestling coach supervises practice.

Get to Know: Clarke Central Softball, Wrestling Coach Will Lance

As an alumnus of Clarke Central High School, Coach Will Lance cares deeply about the community at the school. Lance is the winningest softball coach in Clarke Central history and finished 11-14 this season. Recently, he has transitioned to coaching the wrestling team, which has brought challenges but also familiarity.

Will Lance talks about his experience at Clarke Central and what being a coach means to him.

Coach Will Lance supervises drills at Clarke Central’s wrestling practice on Dec. 18. (Photo/Welch Suggs)

Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Q: How did you get into coaching at Clarke Central, and did you have any sort of coaching experience at other high schools before?

A: I was working at a tire shop in Oconee County. I had just graduated college, and I was trying to decide if I was going to go with my degree in criminal justice or what I wanted to do. I got a phone call from Oconee’s baseball coach and he said he talked to my old high school coach and said that he thought I’d be a good coach, and I was just, like, we might as well, let’s go try it. So I was a coach for Oconee (County) High School for probably three years, and then I kind of realized that if I was going to do this, I would want to do it for my old high school and where I live and where I grew up. So I reached out to the Clarke Central baseball coach and got a job with them. So, I had no experience up front and then doing the late coaching was kind of my way into coaching high school.

Q: What’s your coaching philosophy when it comes to player development especially at a high school level?

A: I guess my first thing is always just establishing a culture and building relationships. I mean it’s really hard nowadays for kids to really buy into, oh, I have to do x, y, and z every single day over and over again and get really, really good at it, even when I don’t want to do it. And if we tie ourselves to wins and losses, that’s even harder. So now you’re judging your worth on all this stuff if only if you win. In the sports that I’ve taken over, it’s predominantly teams that haven’t traditionally won very much. So always the fallback is just building a culture and a sense of pride in what you’re doing. It’s always been my No. 1 thing, and then from there, if you’ve got kids bought into what you’re selling and how to do things the right way, then they tend to see the results in the wins and loss column.

Q: How do you foster a kind of mental toughness when there are low points in the seasons or difficult games/matches?

A: I always lean back on my life experiences. I was in the Marine Corps, so there’s things that I can fall on where it’s hard and it sucks but you have to get through it. I try to put myself into, all right, what was high school Lance like? If he was in this situation, how would you talk to him right now? This is a sport, yes, but sports really resemble life in a lot of ways where there’s going to be ups and downs and sometimes you can do everything the right way, and you still don’t get the result you wanted. When those moments come up, you kind of love the kids and then sometimes you gotta be real with them like, hey, this is a product of you not taking it seriously 24-7 and doing your job and executing in the right way.

I don’t look at any coaching job that I’ve done as the season starts in August, it finishes in October, and that’s my job. I look at it as year-round — working with these kids in all aspects of their lives whether it be their grades, their personal life, the weight room, all the stuff that you can do. So that way when those moments hit, you can always say look how far we’ve come, look at what we’ve accomplished to this point, like we can’t let this one result define a whole year or sometimes four years of work.

Q: You are the winningest coach in Clarke Central’s softball history. What does that mean to you coming into this program again with a sport that traditionally hasn’t had that many wins?

A: It definitely felt great, but it’s just like it kind of was like a validation of everything that, again, me and the girls put into this. It was a sport where they were in, I want to say, 21 years, and they had 17 different head coaches, so it’s like you knew going into it that nobody committed to it and gave it a real fair shot. I took pride in that it was going to be really hard, and I think more importantly than the wins was just the fact that we as a program were able to get girls to buy into a sport that nobody really cares about at our high school. And I think that was an awesome feeling where all of a sudden now our stands are, I’m not going to say packed out, but we just broke the most sales for one game in softball, and so the girls got to play in front of a crowd. And we’ve been better than baseball the last three years as far as the wins and loss column, and that’s something that’s never been done at Clarke Central, too.

It just it kind of just validated everything because it wasn’t easy. It took a lot of hours mentally and physically from me and then from there putting it onto the girls. But, it’s definitely awesome. To me, that was never the end goal. So when I hit it, I was, like, oh, I didn’t even realize at the time. There’s still so much that we as a program want to accomplish, and until that gets done, then personal success doesn’t mean much to me.

Q: What kind of relationship have you been able to build with the softball team and also the girls during your time working with them?

A: I think it’s been really good for me, and for me personally, it teaches me another side of patience. Ideally, you would love to say that coaching boys and girls are the same, but they’re not. Then there’s things that I’ve learned where I hold the girls to a higher standard and work them harder. Probably no one’s ever pushed them like that. That’s when I don’t see gender. I’m like, no, this is what we’re gonna do regardless.

But it’s been a good relationship. It seems to be that I’m becoming more of a dad and coach. I don’t have kids, so it’s kind of a new feeling. It feels like I have like 30 daughters, and you got to deal with everything — relationship issues with their boyfriends or whatever family problems, drama that happened in the school, just stuff that you never think about when you say you’re going to be a head coach. If they’re focusing on everything outside the lines, they’re not going to get anything inside the lines. So we’ve always got to make sure the outside the lines are squared away, so then for those two and a half hours that we practice inside the lines, that’s when it matters.

Q: How hard has it been to kind of navigate coaching from a sport like softball to a sport like wrestling, which also hasn’t had the most hype around high school athletics?

A: I’m not gonna lie, I was scared just because it’s new, I knew how much it took in softball and how much that takes out of me and to know that you’re not only you’re gonna finish the softball season, you got two weeks and then you’re doing it wrestling. But it’s been a lot smoother than I thought it would have been. I’ve got two assistant coaches that I really trust, and they help out a ton. Because I was in the Marine Corps, I kind of get to be that guy again with wrestling, something that I kind of thought that maybe I lost along the way, but there’s a familiarity to it,. It’s not easy, don’t get me wrong, but it’s a lot smoother than I thought originally. [It’s the] same thing that I dealt with softball in that first year — you’re getting these kids to buy in, and why are they doing this? They’re going to come every single day for two and a half hours to physically get their butts kicked. You’re going to have them trying to make a certain weight, and they’re going to have to wrestle over their Christmas and Thanksgiving breaks. What’s the why? If it’s the wins and losses, that’s not going to be enough to to keep them coming, so it’s kind of fostering that relationship again, establishing that this is what we do and this is how we’re going to do it from here on. Building those relationships and getting the kids to see the why and don’t think short-term. Or I got my butt kicked yesterday and now coach Lance is going to ask more from me. One of the things that I think is a testament, not to try to toot my own horn, but one of my softball players followed me from softball to wrestling, which has been awesome. There’s been a few other ones that are wanting to come next year, so it’s kind of a cool thing to to think obviously they don’t hate you too much to go back-to-back seasons with you.

Q: Can you kind of describe the team culture of the softball team and also what you’re just now seeing from the wrestling team?

A: In softball, they don’t miss practice. They know they’re going to be there when they’re supposed to be there. If they’re going to be late or anything like that, they have to tell me. If they get tardies in the school building, the whole team runs for it, so one player can cause everyone to run, and that holds them accountable. I think with softball they know it’s a job, and I try to keep it light-hearted, and they also know that when it’s time to work, I know how to flip the switch and they’ve got to be able to flip the switch. I think this year was the first year where the girls competed at a very high level against teams that honestly were way more talented than us, and you could see them starting to believe in this idea. I’ve always had the high expectation, but now they’re starting to put it on themselves, which helps out a ton. It works out well, but it’s a culture that knows it’s got to work and again, we have a lot of fun. I always show them the softer side.

Wrestling transitions into that where we have some funny moments and I give it to them a little bit so they know like it’s not coach Lance is like this 24-7. I give them kind of that funner side, but most of the time right now, we’re nowhere to a point where we can let up right now. So it’s definitely a lot of yelling and a lot of pain, and then I’ll give it to them after practice or in the school building. I just have to correlate that when that door shuts, it’s for work. It’s a job, and all that other stuff we can do when the doors open up again.

Q: What are some goals or expectations you have for the wrestling team this season?

A: One of them is the Classic City Championship. Cedar Shoals is our rival. Apparently the last three years, Cedar’s been better than us, so right off the rip, beat Cedar. That’s always a goal of mine no matter what sport it is. Ideally in that Classic City Championship past beating Cedar, you would like to try to finish Nos. 1 or 2 (in the tournament). That could be, you’re going against kids that have been wrestling for a long time, so if we beat Cedar, we can finish second, and that would be really awesome. EDITOR’S NOTE: Clarke Central defeated Cedar Shoals 52-24 to win the tournament Dec. 10.

More important, right now, it’s just compete. The top two teams in the region go to state, and I would really like us to at least finish third. Ideally, I think we could get in the second, and that is the goal. That’s the only thing we’re preaching is going to state. If you ask me behind closed doors away from the wrestlers, if we finish third, I mean that hasn’t been done since 2016, so we’re in a good spot. Then on an individual level, third for the team or second to go to state with your team and then having kids individually qualify for sectionals and getting them to state it’d be nice to have a couple kids wrestling.

Q: Just as student-athletes have to balance playing well and also the academics, how have you had to balance teaching and development coaching style outside of the classroom?

A: It’s hard because you get back late, especially with wrestling and even softball depending on where we’re playing. You get back home at 11:30 p.m., and you got to go teach the next day. I used to be a special education teacher, but now I’m P.E., so I’m very fortunate in the fact that as far as an academic-level class there’s not a huge expectation. A lot of the kids in my class want to play some kind of sport, so it’s not terrible. But when I was on the special education side, it was really hard because you have two people or two groups that need you, and I’ll be damned if I was going to let either one of those groups down. It took a lot out of me. To know that you’ve got to be elite on the field but you gotta be an elite teacher in the classroom, it was definitely hard, a lot of sleepless nights. I am very fortunate right now being a head coach in two sports that I’m in PE. If I was an academic teacher, I mean I’ll get it done, but there wouldn’t be that many smiles going on every day.

Maya McKenzie is a second-year journalism major pursuing the sports media certificate.

 

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