By FRED KRONER
fred@mahometnews.com
Mahomet, Ill. – The duties of captains on high school athletic teams are pretty uniform.
They are the team leaders, the ones who counsel younger squad members on expectations as well as serving as the liaison between the coaching staff and the entire squad.
They offer encouragement, advice and are the role models for behavior.
There is much less similarity on how the captains are chosen, not just from school to school, but also within different programs at the same school.
Incoming Mahomet-Seymour varsity football coach Jon Adkins uses the selection of captains as a learning experience for the teen-agers interested in those roles.
Adkins has followed the same formula at his various coaching stops.
It starts, he said, with players deciding if they are interested in becoming a captain.
Those who are, he said, “submit a resume, letter of interest for the position, and then references.”
From there, they get a real-world experience which – for many – is a first.
“I put each candidate through an interview process with our interview panel,” Adkins said. “Each candidate will be asked the same 10 questions and then the panel will provide them feedback on their interview.”
Those helping to conduct the interviews are not just members of the football coaching staff.
“My interview panel is comprised of a different makeup of people,” Adkins said. “I’ve had other sports coaches, teachers, community business people and administrators sit in and be a part of my interview panel.”
The coach doesn’t have a specified quota he needs to fill.
“I have had anywhere from one captain to eight captains, a lot just depends on all the criteria,” Adkins said.
Regardless of the selections, Adkins believes everyone comes out ahead.
“At the end of the day, it is my job to help prepare these kids for their future and real life,” he said. “Some of them have never been through an interview process, so this is always a great learning experience for them.”
The M-S football captains will be selected at the end of July.
The interview panel makes recommendations, but Adkins has the final say-so.
The choices, he said, are “based on score criteria from the interview process, as well as offseason attendance, commitment and leadership.”
The qualities that he is seeking will go beyond football.
“I expect them to be leaders,” Adkins added. “I have a saying that goes, ‘anyone can be a captain, I want you to be a leader in the school, in the community, in the classroom and on the field.”
The football captains are making more of a commitment than attending the weekly captain meetings.
“I also put them through my leadership academy,” Adkins said. “It’s a nine-week course to enhance their leadership skills.
“I open this academy up to anyone, but I require the captains to attend.”
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When Neal Garrison took over the boys’ cross-country program at M-S 18 years ago, he maintained the tradition already in place for selecting captains.
“I continued to do what was done before me of letting the athletes vote for a captain at the end of the previous season,” Garrison said.
After a few years, however, Garrison switched the method prior to the 2006 season.
“I didn’t think it was the best system for our program,” Garrison said. “I think a popular vote sometimes missed picking some of the strongest leaders.
“I also have found that leaders can come from more grades than just the seniors, and the popular vote tended to miss some of the younger leaders.”
The captains are still picked by the runners in the program, but no longer by vote. It’s strictly based on the documented number of miles run during the offseason.
“One of the main criteria I use is work ethic,” Garrison said. “I feel the hardest workers are the ones leading the team by example. It isn’t based off speed or age or popularity.
“While work ethic is hard to measure, we use the amount of summer miles a runner runs as the standard. Over the years, we have raised the standard of miles needed to be run. This standard was set by myself and my past runners over the years and it has been adjusted over the years by the advice of my past runners.”
Currently, the standard is set at 750 summer miles, which is about the equivalent of 250 miles per month, or approximately 8 ½ miles per day.
Garrison places no limits on the numbers of captains.
“Some have suggested this could water the honor of captain down if we had too many,” Garrison said. “My thought is that if we have more runners on our team that were willing to put in the work, then our team would be stronger and ultimately each of them did their job to help lead the team to being better.”
His lone restriction is that all captains must be a returning cross-country runner.
“I think that to lead in the program, you at least had to have been in the program for one year so you know what the expectations of the program are,” he said.
The Bulldogs have had as many as eight captains (in 2012) to as few as zero (2018).
Garrison sees a direct correlation to the off-season training and the in-season success.
“The first year we had a runner meet our current standard for being a captain (2011) was the first year our team qualified for state as a Class AA team,” Garrison said. “The first year (in his tenure) that we didn’t have a runner that ran enough to be captain was the first year we didn’t qualify for AA state, which was last year.”
M-S produced back-to-back state championship teams in 2016 and 2017.
“Our strongest years as a team both in terms of winning, but even more so in terms of depth of our team was when we had the most captains or runners willing to put in the work to be very strong,” Garrison said. “The year we made it to Nationals was the year we had a significant portion of our team with runners that put in the miles, which both drove our team and themselves to being great.
“I very much appreciate their commitment to each other and the team so they all very much earned the honor of being captain. They did exactly what the team needed to be great.”
The 750 miles is a basic measuring stick for earning the title of captain, but the coach added, “we want them to run most of the miles with their teammates so that it motivates their teammates to run more to get stronger as well.”
He allows the summer miles to accumulate through Aug. 31, so Garrison said, “as of now, who is going to be our captain is still in the hands of the runners.”
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M-S boys’ soccer coach Jeremy Davis lets his athletes have input on which squad members will serve as captains.
“After the squads are finalized, I will have the kids fill out a form to rate each other,” Davis said. “Then I will interview those that wish to be a captain.”
From there, the captains will be finalized.
Davis said there are certain traits that the candidates must exhibit: “respect of peers and coaches; good role model and a good leader,” he said.
The captains will have an assortment of responsibilities, most importantly, “be an example for which the other kids in the program should aspire,” Davis said.
Other duties for the team captains, he said, include “talking with refs on the field, and they also do some miscellaneous organization, such as what the team will wear to school.”
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St. Joseph-Ogden football coach Shawn Skinner implemented a new system for selecting captains for the upcoming season.
It’s sort of an on-the-job training program.
“We have ‘summer captains (selected by coaches) who have been working as team leaders in the summer for a variety of competitions and workouts,” Skinner said. “There are eight summer captains, two per team.”
Those individuals are Blake Primmer, Brayden Weaver, Jarrett Stevenson, Jaden Miller, Creighton Burnett, Conner Hodge, Max Shonkwiler and Blake Dable.
“From there, the team will vote on three full-time season captains,” Skinner said.
The week of each game, the Spartans’ football coaches will select a fourth captain.
“Basically, it’s a way to allow a player to earn their way into that role,” Skinner said. “It could be a new player weekly or the same individual.
“This is our first year of doing it this way, so we will see how that goes.”
The three full-time SJ-O football captains will be voted on by squad members the last week of July.
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Of course, there is no requirement that a team needs captains.
Among those that do not pick captains are M-S girls’ cross-country and St. Joseph-Ogden cheerleading.
