Mom Camp a hit at Trinity

By TIM GAYLE

A summer football camp for the players’ mothers?

It’s not your traditional approach to high school football, but Trinity coach Granger Shook always considered a mom’s camp as a fun way to reach the entire family.

Susan Windham, who has sent three children to Trinity over the past 29 years and currently has a fourth, Jackson, as a wide receiver for the Wildcats, thought it was a brilliant suggestion.

“This is the beauty of this camp,” Windham said. “I told Granger, ‘you’ve got it right’ because the household kind of runs around the mom. So when mom gets involved, everybody is pushed to get involved. He was very smart to do this.”

Shook had heard of the idea when he was an assistant coach at Colquitt County (Ga.) High from a fellow assistant who had seen the concept in Georgia. Shook figured he would start a mom’s summer camp whenever he became a head coach, but like so many things this year, the coronavirus pandemic threatened to derail the idea before it ever got off the ground. 

He finally got approval from school administrators and hastily put the idea into reality, holding the one-day camp on July 10. 

“First off, this camp was held to form relationships with these parents,” Shook said. “These parents are entrusting us with the care of their young men, of their sons, so I wanted them to meet myself and the staff so they know that we are the men we say we are. They’re able to see our coaching styles and what we put their sons through on a daily basis.”

Forty-eight moms signed up for the camp, but Shook knows future camps will include more participants as people as word of the camp spreads.

“With all that has gone on this summer, the timing of that was so good,” Windham said. “It did the moms good and gave the coaches an opportunity to meet the moms. I can’t say enough about it.”

The camp included a scaled-back model of what the players do on a given day – workouts, meetings and drills on the field. The mom’s introduction to the camp was their son’s jersey to wear to workouts.

“The moms loved it,” Shook said. “They took pictures and selfies of themselves in their son’s jersey. Then we let them see the locker room and we broke them up into grades and let them have an offensive meeting with the offensive staff and a defensive meeting with the defensive staff. They were sworn to secrecy because we did show them a few plays on the board. Then we let them do some drills on the field. They got a kick out of it.”

Windham said the moms weren’t sure what to expect when they showed up on Friday morning. 

“They said bring your water bottle, wear some exercise clothes,” she said. “As it got closer, I was thinking, are we really going to work out? We get there and he said, ‘After our fitness workout, we’ll get refreshed’ and one of the moms said, ‘After our what? Excuse me?’ We did jumping jacks, dead lifts, jump rope, push-ups, then we played our child’s position.

“What’s neat is we have about five new (assistant) coaches, so that gave us an opportunity to meet the new coaches. The dads usually get to know them more than the moms. We don’t always have that opportunity.”

Shook had to carefully balance the notion of a real workout while trying to make the camp an enjoyable experience.

“We didn’t line them up in 11 on 11 formation, we just kept it to position drills and put them through some circuit training,” Shook said. “Coach ‘Sham’ (Jon Shamburger), for instance, had them doing linebacker drills, going through bags and teaching them how to tackle a dummy. That was important for me, letting these moms know we’re teaching the fundamentals of tackling the right way and that we’re teaching the fundamentals of blocking the right way.

“We talk to our players about an attitude and a mindset on the football field, so I talked to the mommas about it. We expect us to be gentlemen and to be followers of Christ because that’s just who we are. But on that football field, it is a battle, it is a war, so we don’t allow walking on the field or standing around, unless you’re listening to a coach. So there were a couple of times where I didn’t call out a momma by name but I did get on them for walking on the game field.”

Windham has a broken left wrist, but that didn’t slow her from participating in the receiver workouts. 

“They told me you don’t have to do it, but I said, ‘yes, I am,”’ she said. “I tried three or four passes. I didn’t catch any of them – I’m really disappointed because I’m so competitive – but I just loved it.”

While the moms were going through fundamental drills on the field, the music blared in the background, just like a normal workout. Well, not quite. Shook had to change the music to fit the participants. 

“It was definitely a mom’s playlist,” he said. “There was some 80s on there, some Michael Jackson, that the moms got a kick out of.”

At the end of the day, a team photo was taken and the moms were awarded a camp T-shirt. Shook said he hoped his participants had fun and learned something from the experience.

“You can always learn something,” Windham said. “I’ll probably listen out more when they’re on the field. I came home and asked Jackson which calls were his role. So now when they make a call, that’ll let me know that Jackson’s going to be in there. You know, moms can talk and get distracted, so this will make us pay more attention.”