Legendary Coaches: Jack Lengyel

As mentioned in the previous We are Marshall movie post, the DVD has a great special feature called Legendary Coaches which includes several great coaches in their own words.

Over the next several days, we’ll post some highlights. First up is Jack Lengyel, head football coach of the Marshall University Thundering Herd from 1971-1974. He was responsible for rebuilding the team after the team’s tragic plane crash in 1970 (the subject of the movie). “It was a team thing.” (Lengyel)

Jack Lengyel’s comments are very similar to what his character said in the movie. Here it is …

And that while we may not have many victories on the scoreboard, our victories will come in the years to come, in other years, and we will share in those victories knowing that we had some small part in building this foundation for this football team. You have to set your goals high, and if we had to go under it, we went under it, if we had to go around it, or if we had to jump over it, we did it. It was a team thing. It was coaches, players, it was our goals. And once you immerse yourself into that particular philosophy and get everybody to buy into that system there’s very little that you can’t accomplish.

We all want to win TODAY. But sometimes our job as leaders is to prepare the team to win TOMORROW. Jack Lengyel understood that and did an amazing job at that task, and getting the whole team to buy into that vision.

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