January 2020 - 27

Taking the
reins
Valdosta State football coach Gary Goff discusses the daunting
challenge of taking over a national championship team
By Kevin Hoffman, Editorial Director
Gary Goff was elated earlier this year when he was
given the opportunity to return to his alma mater as the
head football coach. But the circumstances were a little
unnerving.
Goff, who just ended a successful eight-year run as the
head coach at Tiffin University in Ohio, was handed the
unenviable task of replacing Kerwin Bell, a man who just
led the Valdosta State Blazers to a national championship
and their first undefeated season in program history.
Unlike the coaches who are hired to rebuild a failing
program, Goff was tasked with preserving the Blazers'
reputation as team the beat in Division II.
Coach & Athletic Director sat down with Goff in
October, just days after his top-ranked Blazers' improved
to 9-0 and stretched their winning streak to 23 games.
The first-year coach talked about the challenges in taking
over a winning program and how he overcame doubt
within his own team.
You were hired at Valdosta State to replace a
coach who exited after an undefeated season
and a national championship. Did you have a
plan to win over these athletes?
I had a plan, but I was extremely worried about it.
At Tiffin, I took over a program that had not had very
much success. We really had to change that culture,
so how do you do that? We established what we called
our core values, then we started living by those values.
There are some football terms in there and there are
some everyday life terms, but our three simple values
were " tough, attitude and discipline. " I really think the
standards each of us value is what helped us establish
the culture there. When I took over that that program,
we were 164 out of 168 teams. We were almost dead last
in the country.
Eight years later, I'm taking over the No. 1 team in
the country that went undefeated and won a national
championship, so there's nowhere else to go up. I already
knew they had a championship culture here, so the way
we went about introducing those values and standards
was from the total opposite end of the spectrum from how
we introduced them at Tiffin.
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