COFFEETOWN HS SPORTS

The Sled took up an entire corner of our weight room at Collins Hill High School. It was Coach Jim Tiller’s pride and joy.

And it was about to be the bane of all of our strength and conditioning existences.

We worked and sweated in a dark room with no windows and fluorescent bulbs that probably hummed up above our heads. We never heard ’em.

On top of the rusty clanks of our iron, Coach kept the speaker system rattling with The Eagle 106.7‘s classic country hits.

Maybe Alabama and George Strait got Coach Tiller’s heart pumpin’ before a lift, but that was not the case for most of the 2004-2007 Collins Hill football Eagles.

We wanted the stuff that got kids jacked up and locked in back then. Crime Mob’s smash hit, Knuck If You Buck, for example. An underground Georgia rapper named Young Jeezy.

At least a handful of players would’ve preferred to lift with some amp-busting Red Hot Chilli Peppers or Godsmack* on 96 Rock.

(*As one of my redder-necked teammates asked a grungier bus-mate on our route one day while grilling him for listening to the band on his Walkman:

“Godsmack? Why the hell would you want to smack God? Sounds pretty freakin’ dumb.”

Makes ya think.)

Even then, Creed and Nickelback would’ve given us all the ironic wind in our sails necessary to eek out an extra rep or two

But instead, we got Reba and Randy and Willie and Alan and Brooks & Dunn. And that’s all we were going to get, whether we hit that squat max or not.

On the rare occasion that Johnny Cash’s A Boy Named Sue hit the radio playlist, we had permission orders to stop lifting and admire the artist’s handiwork.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love all the country hits that the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s have to offer.

I keep my car radio on My Country 99.3 when my daughter isn’t listening to her hand-picked crop of Disney classics or when I’m not locked in to a podcast of interest.

Poetically, Don’t Rock the Jukebox is flowing out of my air pods as I write this. I, too, wanna hear some Jones.

And every single note makes me grateful that I’m not in that room, looking at that dang sled.

You know about the standard high school football sled on a practice field

Maybe it has a stack of weights on it.

Maybe it has a loud and/or large coach standing on the back puffing whistle spit and profanities in your face.

It’s just one of those things you expect to see on your average practice field.

In 2004 in Suwanee, Georgia, Coach Tiller wanted to put one inside of our weight room, by God.

This was a factory for 7-AAAAA football players, and sled-pushin’ wasn’t going to wait for football practices or for the weather to be right.

So one day The Sled – an Austin Leg Drive Machine to be exact – showed up and took the place of a rickety old iron squat rack.

Now the thing about The Sled was, all linemen had to do it, no questions asked.

That included all six feet and 175 pounds of the person writing these words – ‘Blankenship,’ as Coach called me.

In the fall of 2004, I was on the freshman roster as a tight end.

That’s a position that mostly blocks and occasionally catches passes in a traditional football offense.

In our offense, the tight end exclusively blocked.

As a result, in the spring of 2005, I wanted to try receiver instead. I had good hands. I just couldn’t put on enough weight to be the tight end I wanted to be.

I also couldn’t cut enough time off of my 40-yard dash.

So according to Coach – who also happened to be the offensive coordinator and offensive line coach – that meant I stayed on sled duty.

The only football-related accomplishment I have on @Taylor_Heinicke: I showed up for @CHHSEaglesFB picture day in 2007, and he didn’t.

Best of luck to QB1 in Charlotte. A great day to be an Eagle. pic.twitter.com/dPKKsPWdv3

— Wes Blankenship (@Wes_nship) December 23, 2018

‘Nice try, Blankenship. Now get over here and push this dang sled you turd.’

The contraption had 45-pound plates stacked on the end of it.

You pushed a padded dummy the length of the track, and if you kept the proper technique, position and leverage, it wouldn’t run you over as you backed up for the next rep.

Look, I wasn’t a sled expert.

But when Tim McGraw’s Don’t Take the Girl twanged through those speakers, I could usually bust through some slumps and give the dummy a couple good pops.

If the doctors can’t save the girl’s life, then I will give it my all for Tim. And that’s a fact to this day.

It was hard work pushing that sled.

It was dangerous, too. It’s a miracle no one lost a finger or pinched a butt cheek in the large, steel arms and chains and pulleys that made it all work.

Remember how I said that it wasn’t just the bane of our existence, but the bane of Coach Tiller’s, too?

And remember how I said that only proper technique and sheer will would keep The Sled from running you over on the way back down?

Well, I didn’t mention the wall-length, floor-to-ceiling-height mirror that was about a foot behind our heels whenever we pushed it.

If The Sled was Coach’s new toy, that mirror was his baby.

If you got caught popping zits in it, he’d verbally wreck you for it.

And if he verbally wrecked you for it enough, the whole class would pay for it with parking lot wind sprints.

You did not mess with The Mirror.

And The Mirror did not lie.

It showed you how good your form was.

How hideous your face looked when you strained under the weight of a power clean.

How deceptively swollen your biceps were after a few reps of curls.

And one day, The Sled showed that pristine pressed glass who the top dawg in Coach Tiller’s domain really was.

A lineman who shall remain nameless (mainly because I do not recall who did it) failed to keep his technique proper on the way back down from a sled rep.

As the dummy barreled back to its starting point, the big fella lost control and bid his footing adieu.

I can only imagine the unique brand of horror that this individual felt during the few seconds in which both of these things were true:

– Knowing you had lost proper pad-level and leverage on The Sled while Coach Tiller evaluated your performance

– Knowing that your rear end was about to shatter The Mirror

So yeah. Some big, unfortunate soul shattered The Mirror with his butt and everybody had to suck air in the parking lot as punishment.

We didn’t have any radio the rest of that day.

Not even Strawberry Wine.

We’d take it all on loop if it meant that big dumb mirror hadn’t broken.

Bittersweet, indeed.

Some days I feel like I’m back up against that sled in that weight room

I lost my full-time job in the spring of 2023.

Instead of settling in to a slippery slope of devoting my full-time work for their part-time pay, I started this site with a wave of energy, ready to take the humor of Coffeetown football to the next level.

After going part-time with that employer and working to supplement my financial hit through other freelance projects, I lost that job completely in the fall.

The sports publishing start-up world is cold and strange.

People get excited and make promises they can’t deliver on for one reason or another.

If you thought The Mirror had it bad, sports media in general is an absolute wreck at the moment, if you haven’t been paying attention.

In the immediate aftermath of that gradual unemployment, working on this site and a show became more of an obligation than a fulfillment of the spirit I’d tapped into with Donnie and Ronnie Chuggs.

I was running more Coffeetown social media accounts than anyone ever cares to check on. Doing a bunch of things decently, but none of them great.

Once again, I found myself squared up with a sled I didn’t choose to push.

My wife and I had two kids under four. I took some time to re-evaluate who I was as a professional, what I hoped to be, and to be the husband and father I wanted to be.

I knew I owed the subscribers of this site content, even outside of football season.

And I knew that I wanted to continue building this site for the long-haul.

I just didn’t want to force anything that wouldn’t be doing right by any of us in the short-term.

The more I thought about GoCoffeetown.com in 2024, the more I knew I had to get back to what I knew – not just what I thought people would want to laugh at in a video clip.

I thought about the high school stories I covered as a young journalist. The joy and passion I had for those coaches and players.

I thought about that rusted weight room and that sled and those practices that made us puke and how I’d give anything to re-live any of those days with all of those friends and teammates.

And all of those memories told me to get back to work on all the high school football stories we love.

I haven’t even had to puke once.

It took some time to re-calibrate my vision and re-tool the infrastructure for this website, but both are up and running.

Thank you for your dedication to that idea and for being here as a subscriber.

If you’d like a refund because I took some time to clear my head, I get it.

E-mail me at support@gocoffeetown.com and I’ll pay you pack whatever you paid to subscribe here.

Hopefully, you’re sticking around. I appreciate your willingness to hang tight with me and with Coffeetown football.

If you aren’t a subscriber already and appreciate some good, old-fashioned high school football stories, then you’ll have to subscribe if you want to read more than three stories here.

Look forward to adding you to the fold for at least a couple stories here each week.

Here’s what you can expect as a subscriber moving forward:

This is still the home of Coffeetown football stories.

It’s also the home of real stories – yours and mine.

I would greatly appreciate if you considered submitting story tips here so I can write feature high school football stories about deserving coaches, players and communities that too many local news outlets no longer have the resources to cover the right way.

And if you’re reading this and don’t have a story to share, then pass it along to any of the high school coached you happen to know. I’m sure they have plenty.

I’ll also write more than a few think pieces on all things high school football movies and television shows.

For example – it’s about to be the 20-year anniversary of Friday Night Lights and the 20-year anniversary of the first time I touched a barbell in Coach Tiller’s weight room.

So I’ll be re-watching that a dozen times or so and re-living all of Tim McGraw’s quotes with you. Full-circle stuff.

The winter’s thawed.

Coffeetown high school football is back for spring practice.

And I’m ready to get pushing on that sled again.