By Brant Daughtry
Great Bend Post Sports
The Sterling Black Bears are one of Kansas' best small school teams, in both football and basketball. Many might think that the reason would be an intense, year-round focus on athletics, and while the community is bought in, head coach of Sterling football Brent Schneider say he and his brother Derek, who coaches the basketball team, aren't constantly pressuring the kids to be training. In fact, he believes the trust and communication he gives his players and their families is a major reason for the success the program has had.
"Kids know the expectations. We put the expectations out there and we follow through. Our kids know that they need to be ready to live up to those expectations. I take a lot of pride running the weight room in building kids to be athletes we have kids on the football field that are doing just great things and I think one thing that we do to kind of work with our community is, we try really hard not to burn our kids out over the summer. I think we want to keep our kids fresh, we want to let them enjoy their time off.
"We tell them if you're on vacation don't fret missing weights but if you're here you're expected to be here it's just a load off that our kids know our goal for football is to get to 70%. I know some people look at that and they're like, that's crazy. That's too low of a number, but it's worked for us and our kids know that when it comes to school, we're going to push you really hard because most of our kids are two or three sport athletes In the weight room during the season we don't over-volume them because we know that they're going to be doing practices and they're going to be doing different things.
"We just try to be flexible with our kids and not burn them out. And I think it's appreciated on their end that they understand that we really do care for them in other aspects of their life. I think our parents see that and our admin sees that and I think that helps with a lot of our buy-in."
The Black Bears will put their 23-game winning streak on the line this weekend, as they host Smiths Center in the sectional round Friday night.