WEST POINT — Chris Craven isn’t a selfish or a boastful man.
The Oak Hill Academy football coach understands he is far from perfect, but he has been around the game long enough to know the core principles teams need to have success: Hard work, belief, and trust.
Craven should know because those things were essential ingredients for him when he played football at West Point High School and at East Mississippi Community College. While Craven admits he wasn’t a superstar, he feels he made the most of his abilities and overcame the obstacles he faced as a 5-foot-9, 200-pound lineman.
The lessons Craven learned as a player and as an assistant coach provided him an ideal template to work with in his first season as head coach at Oak Hill Academy.
For that plan to work, though, Craven, a longtime assistant football coach at the school, needed another element — trust — to help make the others work.
“We talked about that all year,” Craven said. “It was the kids’ choice to buy into it.”
In a season filled with injuries that created constant changes to the lineup, Craven’s ability to maintain that trust was a key element in Oak Hill Academy advancing to the first round of the Mississippi Association of Independent Schools A-AA playoffs and finishing 7-4.
For his accomplishments, Craven is The Dispatch’s co-Small Schools Coach of the Year.
“I don’t want this to sound out of place, and I say this with humility, I wanted them to be like me,” said Craven, who graduated from West Point High in 1994 and EMCC in 1996 and went on to attend Mississippi State and to graduate from Blue Mountain College. “I wanted them to do fight when they needed to fight, do what was right, be where they were supposed to be when they were supposed to be there, and trust in God and trust in each other and let’s try to doggone win. That is the way I lived my life playing, and that is the way I live my life as a grown man.”
But any coach knows, especially one who works at a school that has had as many head football coaches in the past several years as Oak Hill Academy, that it takes a special touch to develop the relationship with the players for them to trust you. Craven said he tried to engender that respect with his players by putting them first. He stressed that in his first season as the head coach by telling his players that God always comes first and then the team comes before the needs of any one person — player or coach.
Those beliefs were tested by injuries ended the seasons of starting quarterback Ken Dill and starting tailback Drew Riley. He said there were trying times, but he said he tried to treat those injuries as “tests” he and his players had to overcome. On some nights, especially those when Oak Hill Academy had only 11 high school football players, he had to continue to set a positive example for the players because he knew any wavering on his part could have damaged the team’s confidence and focus.
“I think once they know a coach means business and shows that, they will follow you to the end of the world, ” Craven said.
Craven said it was easier to establish trust as part of the program’s foundation because many of the players knew him from his years as an assistant coach at the school. He said he tried to be a man of his word and lives his life as a servant more than a master. He believes those tenets helped the Raiders overcome the myriad injuries they suffered nearly every week of the season.
Needless to say, the ups and downs Craven had to navigate in his first season as a head coach weren’t expected. He said it “wasn’t always easy” to coach his players up when he knew they were down in part due to the injuries. He said there were times he felt like his team couldn’t catch a break. Still, he tried to maintain a positive, honest approach.
“I even had people at school sometimes say, ‘You are snake bit, aren’t you?” Craven said. ” ‘We might be bit, but it is not by a snake,’ is what I would say. Sometimes we were just as honest as we could be and say, ‘This is where we are and what we must do and we are going to have to learn a new position for you and you’re going to have to start doing this and this means that you sure enough don’t come off the field now.
“Then you look at them and say, ‘You can do it. If you want to, you can. It ain’t going to be easy, but you have to trust, you have to believe, you have to do the work, and you have to decide you don’t want your rear end kicked.”
As much as Craven takes pride in what the Raiders accomplished on the field, he hopes the example he set showed he is trying the best he can to emulate God in this lifetime and that he is doing what he can to help others know God in a better way. He feels those things are more important than wins and losses because his players can take those lessons with them to become better men, husbands, and parents.
“You can’t go through this life not trusting anybody,” Craven said. “You have got to get together to do something great. You can’t do everything on your own. I want you to see that putting others before yourself matters. I want you to see trusting in God is the greatest hope you will ever have. I want you to see these things and know these things. I want you to learn to fight and that you don’t have to be defeated and that regardless of what it is, fight, fight, fight, fight. Don’t give up, and that your attitude controls everything.”
“That is the reason I wanted them to be like me. I was trying to be like someone else for them. I was trying to point them to God and to doing right in this lifetime more than I was trying to get them to try to be like me.”
Follow Dispatch sports editor Adam Minichino on Twitter @ctsportseditor
Adam Minichino is the former Sports Editor for The Commercial Dispatch.
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