By JOHN JAMES MARSHALL, Journal Sports
Jeremy Wilburn has been on the job for four months and in that time, it has reinforced what he has always known – his job title doesn’t exactly apply.
Oh sure, he’s the new head football coach at Captain Shreve. At least that’s what it says on the office door.
If he could get into his office.
That’s just one reason why it would be a lot more accurate if he had another title: Problem Solver.
“That’s really all we do; every day I’m solving a problem,” he says. “As a coach, you want to hire guys who have a great work ethic and can solve problems. I can teach football. But if you can’t solve problems, that’s going to be a challenge.”
It’s not as if Wilburn didn’t know that going in, but you got to admit he’s taken on more than his share since taking over.
Shreve’s record-setting junior running back from a year ago moved to Arizona. Meanwhile, one of the top offensive tackle recruits in the country left to go to another school at mid semester.
But to be honest, Wilburn is far less concerned about RB and OT than he is HVAC.
Captain Shreve is currently undergoing a building renovation of its central air system and the entire campus is off limits. Access to the locker room? Forget it. Coaches office? Not going to happen. Weight room? Off limits.
“None of our stuff is available,” Wilburn says. “We’ve just been dealt so many challenges with the normal transition between coaches. I was just trying to get to June so that we could get to work. So we are just having to manage as best we can.”
The Gators are having to do their summer workouts off-site. That isn’t ideal, but it’s yet another problem that’s been solved.
“At the end of the day, there’s always an answer,” he says. “You may not like the answer, but there is one. You just have to figure out what it is.”
With all that’s been going on, it should come as no surprise that Wilburn hasn’t been spending his time trying to figure the best blocking scheme for an off-tackle play. “I don’t even think about things like that right now,” he says.
A 2004 graduate of Byrd, Wilburn went on to play at Northwestern State before taking a corporate job in Houston. He had friends there, met his wife there and was planning to stay in Houston as long as possible.
But then white-collar work got to be a grind – “Everyone was leaving at 4:30 to go home and I kept right on working,” he says – and that’s when the coaching bug took over.
He moved back home and was an assistant at Airline (two years) and Huntington (four years).
“There are certain problems you have as a coach,” he says. “It’s like drinking out of a fire hose. You have certain problems at the college level, you have certain problems at one high school when you are trying to light a fire under a kid who has it made and certain problems at another high school where a kid comes from nothing and you’ve got to get him to practice because he doesn’t have a ride.”
Wilburn is hesitant to use the (overused) term “culture change” when describing the coaching transition at Captain Shreve. He prefers the term “Identity.”
“Kids are going to take on the identity of whoever is guiding their process, whether that’s in sports or in the classroom” he says. “It’s easy to talk the game, but do you go out there on a daily basis and hold them to that? But the identity is what I’m really trying to get across to them from the coaching staff on down. Everything matters. How do they approach their daily routine? How much pride do they have in what they are doing?
“It’s been a neat experience to come back to Shreveport,” the 37-year-old Wilburn says. “People from my generation all wanted to find out what was out there beyond Shreveport. I never thought I’d move back. But this has been an enjoying, nostalgic moment.”
Another nostalgic moment will come when Wilburn begins his head coaching career on Sept. 6 when the Gators play host to Ouachita at Lee Hedges Stadium. But it probably won’t last long.
“I’ll probably be more worried about whether we have 11 on the field than anything else,” he says.
If so, problem solved.
Contact JJ at johnjamesmarshall@yahoo.com
For more visit shreveportbossierjournal.com