I’ve had the great pleasure of getting to know Trent Taylor over the last five years, and if I had a son, I would want him to play for a coach like Taylor.

 

Aside from being a tremendous football coach, Taylor is a great man. He takes young kids and molds them in to upstanding men. The success of his players, off the football field, is more important to him than what they accomplish on it.

 

On the field, I’ve never seen kids play as hard for a coach as I’ve witnessed them doing for Taylor. That is what great coaches do. They instill a winning mindset that drives players to give every ounce of effort they have in them.

 

Andalusia has had good coaches recently, but something was missing. If the mindset of Andalusia High School can change, Taylor is the man to do it. The talent is there in Andalusia to produce playoff caliber teams year in and year out, but the winning mindset hasn’t been prevalent on the Andalusia sideline in quite some time.

 

I’ve been around the Andalusia football program for a long time as a player, a fan, and over the past several years as a reporter. I know when I was there that there wasn’t much of a winning attitude. We went through the motions, but we never really believed any kind of playoff run was possible. We went to the playoffs twice in my four years, but lost in the first rounds. We had some great players on those teams, but we couldn’t get over that hump. There was a brief time, after I graduated that the program began taking steps in the right direction. When Tom Causey was hired in 2004 there was a drastic change in atmosphere on the sideline. While that 2004 team didn’t win many games, you knew that the kids in the program had the desire to win. After Causey left, so did that desire. It’s time to bring that winning mindset back to the Andalusia football program.

 

To the kids on the football team: Have an open mind and an open heart when you start fresh in January. It’s a new era in Andalusia football history, and it is your chapter to write. Stay focused on the task at hand, and don’t let off the field actions hurt your team (i.e. stealing from locker rooms at away games). In the future, such actions will bring more punishment than the laughable game suspension that was imposed this year. I could be wrong, but I don’t see Taylor giving a simple slap on the wrist for such blatant disrespect of authority. Either way, it’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new era for Andalusia High School football, and it’s ultimately up to you, the players, as to how this chapter is written.