Never stop learning
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Nowhere was Vicknair’s drive for perfection, his attention to detail and his work ethic more in evidence than in his yearly attendance at coaching clinics and his insistence that his assistant coaches hit the road to learn whatever new wrinkle Vicknair wanted to install for the upcoming season.
“He believed if you want to run the Wing-T, you go somewhere to learn the Wing-T,” said Viator, one of many Vicknair pupils who went with him to Angelo State, in San Angelo, Texas, for an annual clinic Vicknair regarded as a must.
“San Angelo had the best coaching clinic in the U.S.,” Viator said, “and it’s a long drive. He’d get (wife) Debbie’s van, and whoever wanted to go, you just piled in.”
Johns said Vicknair practically rounded up area coaches and either invited or persuaded them to go with him. It didn’t matter if you coached for him or against him, he wanted you to come along for the ride. Johns said the camaraderie and football conversations were special.
Hebert said Vicknair was insistent about him attending.
“When I first started coaching,” Hebert said, “he would call me: ‘Hey, we’re going to this clinic. You’ve got to come,’ and ‘You need to get to this clinic, and you need to go do this and go do that, and you need to find out about this and that.’
Sometimes they would travel in the mobile home of football booster Joe Jordan.
Nolan Viator, Matt’s late father and another important figure in the Southwest Louisiana coaching tree, was in the habit of tweaking his son and Vicknair about those coaching clinics. They happened every Father’s Day weekend.
Matt’s dad would joke that Matt was spending Father’s Day with Vicknair, so to even things out, Nolan Viator always said he was going to go spend Father’s Day with Vicknair’s children.
“Go learn the game,” Matt Viator said, the words drilled into his head. “You’d go places. You’d change if you have to change. He got a lot of people involved in that.”
Viator didn’t recall Vicknair having many hobbies in the offseason, saying he didn’t play golf and didn’t hunt until much later in life. Older coaches and family remembered a few more things outside the football world occupying Vicknair’s attention at an earlier age, but not for long. Football was what he loved to do.
“If there was a clinic that he could get to, he was going to be there,” Viator said. Others agreed. It was almost always the first thing everyone associated with Vicknair said about him as the anniversary of his death approached in September 2009.
In 1984, after many years at LaGrange Junior and Senior high schools, Mike Johns went to Sam Houston High. Vicknair became head coach in 1986, and Johns worked for him until becoming head coach at LaGrange in 1989.
Speaking in 2009 in his office at St. Louis High School, Johns talked about Vicknair’s passion for coaching clinics. He would say if you learn only one thing at a clinic, it’s worth going. Go and pick up something you can use for your team, or at least to see what other teams are doing, Vicknair would say.
“Before he died,” Johns said, “we were talking about the next clinic we were going to attend. He was like an encyclopedia, he had a library on clinics. He kept it organized.”
That’s putting it mildly, as Caldarera noted. He said when Vicknair returned to Westlake to be his assistant coach in 2006, he required twice the cubicle space as the rest of the assistant coaches so he’d have room for all his notebooks, his files from clinics.
Caldarera said he teased Vicknair, calling them his trophies from the clinics and saying Vicknair probably hadn’t looked at them in years.
Vicknair replied that he opened them at least once a year.
“Whatever,” Caldarera would say.
Still, he knew those notebooks and files represented the drive within Vicknair, who never stopped being a student of the game and a seeker of new ideas.
“He was always searching,” Caldarera said. “He was searching.”
Colleagues remembered Vicknair going to defensive lectures even if he coached on the offensive side, and vice versa. In this case, as in most others, he did whatever he required of his assistants.
When Shaver was Vicknair’s offensive coordinator at Barbe, Vicknair sent him to Monroe to learn the split-40 defense.
“I said, ‘OK, Vic, I don’t mind going, but you know that I coach offense.’ He said, ‘I know that, but you can’t block the split-40 until you know how it’s run, so I want you to go learn it, come back and teach it to me, then we’ll be able to run an offense against it.’ So I did that and spent several days up there with Wossman back in the old days when they were really good and ran the split-40,” Shaver said.
When Vicknair saw Emory Bellard running a wingbone offense at Mississippi State, the Barbe coaches went there to learn it and returned to Lake Charles ready to run the wingbone — for one year.
“He found the trends,” Caldarera said. “He was a leader in that.”
He’d do something until he wore it out, Shaver said, and then he would do something else.
“He was always looking for a better way.”
Bruchhaus knew that as well as anyone. He said Vicknair was adamant about getting better. He said Vicknair taught him, “Don’t be afraid to ask.”
Vicknair sent Bruchhaus to Florida State to see Bobby Bowden’s coaches and to Arkansas to visit with Lou Holtz and Monte Kiffin. Kiffin invented defenses to counter the veer after it became popular at Nebraska and other places, and he’s considered one of the pioneering defensive coaches in America.
Larry Lacewell, who was on Barry Switzer’s staff at Oklahoma, became head coach at Arkansas State, where Bruchhaus went to learn what Lacewell could teach him.
While at Barbe, Bruchhaus taught P.E. classes and athletic periods, leaving plenty of time for him to visit with college coaches who stopped at the school on recruiting visits. The NCAA rules governing recruiting were less restrictive than they would become years later, so some college coaches could stay at the school all day if they so desired.
“We used to have coaching clinics every day,” Bruchhaus said, “and those coaches liked to come to our school — at Barbe — No. 1 (because) we had good players. We had Scott Ayres, who was a great player. We had Randy Edwards, who was recruited by LSU, and Doug Quienalty, and David Womack and all those players that were great players and good kids, and a lot of people came in to evaluate those players.”
Bruchhaus said he would bring the college coaches to the office, where there was a chalkboard, and they’d talk football. He said he got a lot of ideas that way.
“If I wouldn’t have met Charles,” Bruchhaus said, “I probably would have gone back to a smaller school and coached and been a principal right now somewhere and never got the opportunity to get into the coaching field like I did. It wouldn’t have been for him, I would have never gotten an opportunity to do what I did, learn what I learned. He taught me to try to learn.”
Bruchhaus and Viator are two who learned from Vicknair and went on to become college head coaches without having played college football. That’s a rarity.
After leaving McNeese, Bruchhaus entered the business world, tried his hand at assistant coaching again in Westlake but decided things had changed too much for him to be able to coach the way he preferred. He moved on to be director of a technical school that prepares students for work in building and contracting.
Perhaps it’s fitting. Vicknair prepared him in some ways, teaching him how to learn — at clinics, and in informal gatherings with other coaches.
Bruchhaus learned he had to have answers for Vicknair’s questions when Bruchhaus returned from a quest for knowledge.
“He was going to ask you,” Bruchhaus said. “When you came back, you’d better have learned something, because you were going to tell him what you learned — because he was going to try it.”
Johns saw that as a coach on Vicknair’s staff and as a coach at rival schools in the area.
“He believed in change,” Johns said, “not getting stale on something that people could pick up what you were doing all the time. Have something in your arsenal that is a little bit different, even if it’s just to make them work on it.”
Bruchhaus said he wasn’t sure Vicknair’s inability to be content with his offensive and defensive schemes was always a good thing.
“To be honest with you, I thought sometimes that he went overboard on a lot of that stuff,” Bruchhaus said.
Vicknair would have changed defenses more often than he did at Barbe, but Bruchhaus liked to stay with what worked. They argued a lot.
“I can remember him and Kirby getting into some knockdown drag-outs over defense,” Shaver said.
Bruchhaus, he recalled, would tinker with things and make them better. Bruchhaus said Vicknair wanted to change things regularly, completely overhauling them.
“A lot of people don’t like change,” Bruchhaus said. “If you were going to be with him, you’d better be ready to change.”
Despite their disagreements about the extent of change necessary each season, Bruchhaus said there’s no way he can explain the impact Vicknair had upon him.
“I like him because of what he did for me. I didn’t agree with everything he did, and he didn’t agree with everything I did, but I respect him a whole lot for what he stands for and what he did and how he did things,” Bruchhaus said. “We’re never going to ... none of us are always going to do the same thing other people do, but it’s the big picture you’ve got to look at, and the big picture was good.
“I owe him my life, as far as coaching.”
Bruchhaus gave himself credit for taking advantage of the opportunities Vicknair gave him to learn.
“He created other opportunities for other people, and they didn’t learn,” Bruchhaus said. “He created a lot of opportunities for other people, but they didn’t go and learn. Matt Viator did.”
Viator learned from his father, Nolan, but he knew his dad wanted his sons to go out and get it on their own. Because Nolan Viator liked and respected Vicknair, he was happy to see Matt go with Vicknair and learn from him.
Matt Viator, sounding almost verbatim like more than a handful of other coaches in Southwest Louisiana, said Vicknair taught them how to work, how to organize, how to set up programs, how to organize a coaching staff and how to organize a team.
“He was an unbelievable worker,” Viator said, emitting the type of laughter that springs forth from a place of awe, not humor. “He had a work ethic like I’ve never seen.”
Was he too fond of change?
“He did change a lot,” Shaver said, “but you know, over my years I’ve learned that change is good. There are some people that do a great job of staying with the same things they’ve always done and always been successful. My experience has been you’ve got to change with the times, you’ve got to change with your personnel, and you’re better off.
“I guess I kind of got that from Vic. He was always moving from one thing to another. Sometimes he’d make me mad about that, because I’m running the offense, and all of a sudden he’s telling me, ‘Go see Nolan Viator. We’re fixing to run what they run.’ So I’ve got a little pressure on me. I’ve got to go learn that and get it over here and present it to them. It made it a little difficult, but you know as I’ve become head coach, I spend all my hours thinking about this stuff too, and I understand where he’s coming from. As an assistant, I didn’t because I didn’t spend all my time thinking about it.
“The only time I thought about it, other than just thoughts, was when I just walked through the door (to the coaches office). Not him, and that’s the way I am now. It’s 24/7. That’s all I think about. That’s all I want to do, and that’s the way he was. When I’d walk in the door I was behind already, because he’d had thoughts all night, and he was ready to go with them.”
Shaver said he eventually started calling his coaches and telling them what he was thinking about, preparing them for the next meeting better than he’d been prepared for meetings with Vicknair.
Viator said Vicknair wasn’t a golfer and didn’t hunt a lot until later in life, so football was his hobby as much as his job. That’s part of why he loved change, Viator said.
“He was ate up with it, and I think if he just ran the same offense and the same defense, he’d have gotten bored. He really would have.”
Mike Collins, who became friends with Vicknair after they intersected for years at summer camps, understood.
“Offensive line and defensive line guys are true technicians,” Collins said. “You never can have enough toys. You never can have good enough technique. There’s always some kind of little thing, and I think that’s what he really was.”
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