Roger Brodniak once said of his old high school coach Terry Ennis: “He can unpeel you with truth.
“Sometimes you don’t like to hear it. He’ll break down what you’re doing. It can be hard to take when it’s done in front of other people.”
The thing about it was, when Ennis got on a player or a coach, it was usually justified. “It’d be different if he was wrong,” Brodniak said, laughing.
“He makes his point quickly. Sometimes it makes the person feel bad, but it needs to be done quickly. He has a pragmatist’s way that works so well.”
And how.
Ennis unpeeled me with the truth about two weeks ago.
For 20 years, I’ve been friends with the legendary coach who died of cancer early Wednesday morning at the age of 63. I had spent much of an entire season in the 1990s observing his Cascade High School team in practice and in games for a long postseason article. That team had gone unbeaten during the regular season, only to lose in the first game of the playoffs.
In being around the Bruins a lot that season, I learned the do’s and don’ts of a newsman in the Terry Ennis system. You didn’t talk to players before or during the game when walking the sideline. And you waited until all the work was done after the game — that was, until Ennis delivered his postgame speech in the locker room — before approaching a player for comments.
Violate any of those rules and you’d hear about it from The Man himself.
So clearly, I knew how to conduct myself around Ennis-coached teams. And that’s why he and I had gotten along so well over the years. I treated him as a professional, he did likewise for me.
For about the last year and a half, I’ve been involved in a film project on Ennis and his Archbishop Murphy High School football program. The job calls for a lot of interviewing: current and former players, current and former coaches.
Recently, the producer of the project, Derek Klein, and I accompanied the Wildcats team to Las Vegas for a game against a team out of the San Francisco Bay area.
Before the game that evening, Klein wanted to go into the Wildcat locker room and film some players being interviewed. I grimaced, knowing that such a practice was a no-no with Ennis, but went ahead with it anyway. “We’ve got a job to do,” Klein insisted.
The minute you step into an Ennis locker room, the first thing you notice is how quiet it is. How businesslike it is. There is absolutely no horsing around. Players get dressed quietly. And then they sit and if they do say anything, it is in whispers. The concentration is almost palpable.
And the head man? His concentration is on an entirely different level. Intense? That’s an understatement.
Anyway, we do a couple of quiet interviews. And you can tell the players are uncomfortable doing them. They know the rules. You can see it in their eyes: Did coach give the OK? And they know he has seen them talking to us.
Ennis sees everything. Players laugh about that.
There can be 60 players on the field, 22 of them in action and the other 38 on the sidelines, but each feels as if one particular set of eyes is directly focused on him.
Those eyes belong to Ennis.
They are burrowing in on every player. On the lineman who has stepped with the wrong foot and on the third-string tackle who has just goosed his buddy on the sideline.
In that voice that can peel paint as well as unpeel the truth, Ennis quickly lets the player know that he has done wrong.
That goes for newsmen, as well.
We were looking around for someone else to interview, had started to walk one way down the locker room. Ennis was coming from the other direction. His head down. His eyes focused on the floor. As we passed one another, he said in a quiet but firm voice, “You know the rules. We don’t do that here.”
His words cut to the quick.
Yes, I knew the rules. And I had violated them. And I felt bad about it.
But, in a way, I also felt honored.
I had been reprimanded by the best coach I’ve ever known. And one of the best people I’ve ever known.
He was a great teacher. A great humanitarian.
Someone asked Wednesday what it was about Ennis that made him so successful.
He cared deeply about his players, for one thing. He wanted them to succeed on the football field, but more importantly, he wanted them to become good citizens
“He had a special way with kids,” said Paul Lawrence, who played on the same Everett High team with Ennis and later was the Seagull head coach before joining the Archbishop Murphy staff as offensive line coach. “He treated them as students, young adults, young men, and they in turn had a huge respect for him, a tremendous loyalty to him.”
Former Ennis players would show up on the sidelines at Wildcat games. One former Cascade Bruin drove 10 hours from Boulder, Colo., to watch the Wildcats play in Las Vegas. Another ex-Bruin living in Vegas was at practice and then delivered a rousing pep talk after the Wildcat victory.
“Kids that he coached back in Stanwood who are maybe grandfathers still remember when Coach Ennis did this or Coach Ennis said that or Coach Ennis got on me when I wasn’t ready,” Lawrence recalled.
Many are grieving
Tears flowed freely on the high school campus Wednesday.
Some of the players hurt most deeply by his passing, one assistant coach said, were those with troubled pasts. With Ennis’ help and compassion, they had straightened out their lives and are doing well now.
Players weren’t the only ones having a tough time. So were coaches. Defensive coach Jeff Schmidt, a former Marine who was in the first Gulf War, sat sniffling in the weight room as he spoke on a cell phone with former Wildcat star Shiloh Keo, now a starter for the University of Idaho Vandals.
Brodniak, who played for Ennis from 1990-92, was having an especially difficult time dealing with his coach’s death. “I’ve been in constant contact with him since I graduated from high school,” he said.
One day last year, Brodniak, who graduated from law school but spent only one year in practice before becoming a teacher and coach, sat and talked about this man Ennis “who had an incredible impact on me.
“He has shown me how to push my limits, how to work hard to reach my potential with respect to humanity.”
‘Do it right’
Push until you perfect what you are attempting to do.
“That’s his epitaph: ‘Do it right,’” Brodniak said. “We all know what it is to do right.”
That is why Ennis’ Archbishop Murphy teams won 66 of their last 70 games, including two state championships. They did it right.
In practice, they did it over and over and over again until they got it right. Each and every little detail. The “eyes” made sure of it.
When Ennis started the Wildcat program, he and his coaches quickly realized they had a monumental task in front of them. “We were so bad, we all knew what we were in for,” Brodniak said. “We didn’t know how to put gear on, we didn’t have any big guys, no fast running backs.”
One kid got mad because the Wildcats had to give the ball back when they scored. That same kid wore a diving suit under his uniform. “He learned during the first game that you heat up a lot,” Brodniak chuckled.
When Schmidt asked for a center at one of the first practices, nobody stepped forward. He had to explain that the center was the guy who snapped the ball to the quarterback. When he asked for two guards, two players stepped forward and lined up on the right side of the center.
It was then he understood what Ennis was talking about when he said, “We have to start with the basics.”
Two years later, Archbishop Murphy High School won a state championship.
Ennis did a lot of yelling in practice and in games, but he never swore. One of the running jokes was his “creative ways of using certain words,” Brodniak said. One of his former players once said, ‘We love it when Coach says, ‘Sakes.’”
“God bless it,” was another Ennis favorite.
Brodniak once found himself saying in a JV game, “Sakes, God bless it.”
Once in practice Brodniak uttered, “Damn it.”
Ennis sidled over and softly admonished him, “Watch your language.”
Brodniak didn’t have to be told again.
He knew the rules. We don’t do that here.
Larry Henry is a former Herald sports columnist.
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