On a recent afternoon, as his Kamiak High School football team was stretching before practice, coach Dan Mack asked: “How many of you guys have taken guitar class?”
More than 30 players stood up.
A few days later, the team met in Mack’s classroom to watch game film. As the first several players filed in, a visitor asked each one: “You play guitar?”
The standard reply: “A little bit.”
“All football players play a little bit,” running back Justin Glenn said.
As the visitor was getting into his car a few minutes later, a kid who looked like a football player was getting out of his.
“You play football?” he was asked.
Yes, the kid said, he did.
“You play guitar?”
Ditto.
Not every Fightin’ Knight plays guitar.
It just seems that way.
“A lot of kids on our football team play guitar,” Mack said. “We call them ‘Guitar Recruits.’ “
Some coaches recruit players walking through the hallways.
Mack recruits some of his in the classroom. He teaches guitar.
What’s cooler than being able to strum a tune? A man they call “The King” did all right by it.So did four lads from England.
“You can express how you feel with it,” Michael Knapp said. “And it relieves the stress.”
Knapp is one of the “Guitar Recruits.”
He started out learning how to play the instrument as a freshman and gravitated to football.
He has succeeded at both pursuits. A two-year starter on the defensive line, the 5-foot-11, 230-pound junior is a “good player with a great motor,” Mack said. “And he’s an excellent guitar player.”
Knapp is one of a number of kids who went from guitar to football during Mack’s years – he’s now in his ninth season – as the Kamiak head coach. It’s Mack’s firm belief that music gives a needed balance to the soul.
“The whole person is important,” he said. “My biggest joy is watching kids accomplish goals and learn.”
Mack grew up in a home where music was food to the soul. “My mother was an exceptional musician,” he said. “She was a violin and piano player and played in two orchestras in Tacoma.
“She would sing at church. The fine arts were always appreciated in our house.”
Hence, Dan took up the guitar and the piano. And, of course, he also played football.
Balance doesn’t just mean making music. It can also mean making tackles. “My passion for both is equal,” said the former linebacker.
That’s why, when he went off to college, he had a double major: music and physical education.
As a student at Central Washington University, where Dan had his football career cut short by an injury, he earned money playing gigs. “I didn’t make a substantial amount, but it helped out.”
His first job out of college was at a small school in Eastern Washington. He discovered then and there that versatility has its advantages and disadvantages. “My first day of school, they said ‘you’re the band director and the assistant football coach (he also coached girls volleyball),’” he recalled. “It was hard being a band teacher and a football coach, but I enjoyed the balance of music and athletics.”
When he and his wife Donna had children, music became a staple of the family, just as it had when Dan was a boy. Their oldest son, Lucas, now 25, and his brother John, 22, started playing piano at a young age. “I loved the piano,” Lucas said. “For John, it was a little more like ‘duty piano.’ But when he got into guitar, he fell in love with it.”
Lucas not only played instruments, but he sang and wrote music. “My very first song, I wrote when I was seven years old,” he said.
He estimates he’s written hundreds of songs, some of which he recorded on a CD that he produced a couple of years ago. He had 1,000 copies made and all but about 100 have sold.
A graduate of the University of Washington, Lucas has his own band – the “Acoustic Soul” – and recently played for a wedding at the Space Needle.
Finding time to play engagements is the problem. He’s a news reporter for a TV station in Kennewick and he has the early morning shift, which means getting up at 2 a.m. and reporting for work at 3:30.
“I do what I love,” he said. “I love reporting and I love music.”
His ultimate goal: to host a show along the lines of “Evening Magazine.”
When he gets over to this side of the mountains, there’s always a stop at his parents’ home in Marysville and usually a jam session with mom, dad and John, who is living at home while he does his student teaching at Olympic View Middle School in Mukilteo.
“Those are the best nights, especially when I come home after driving four or five hours,” Lucas said. “It brings us together as a family.”
And the neighbors? “I know they can hear it,” he laughed. “We have one neighbor who walks back and forth outside when we play.”
“Music is a common thread in our family,” John said. “Some families gather around the TV. We gather around music.”
“Music,” said Donna, who plays the piano and sings, “keeps things balanced a little bit.”
When Dan came to Kamiak in 1997, only two guitar classes were offered. Now there are seven, and he teaches five of them, with 33 students in each class. “He calls himself a hack,” son John said. “However, he is a great guitarist, though his dexterity is not as good as it once was, being an ex linebacker.
“I like to say he makes the guitar sing. He gives it a life of its own.”
To maintain that balance in life the family encourages, both boys were athletes as well as musicians. Lucas played on the varsity basketball team at Marysville-Pilchuck High School his senior year and John was the starting quarterback on the Kamiak High football team that went 9-2 and won the South Division of the Western Conference in 2000.
At the time, John said he enjoyed football more than music. Now, however, the guitar is his “release. It helps me calm down.
“After a stressful day, music definitely soothes the soul. When you can make your own music, it makes it that much better.”
Over the years, the coach who teaches music has performed in public on numerous occasions – in rock bands in high school, at churches, for weddings, for bar mitzvahs.
Now he plays in a band calling itself the “Hall Monitors.”
“We don’t take ourselves seriously by any stretch of the imagination,” he chortled.
That informal poll he conducted at practice the other day seems to indicate that there’s a serious interest in guitar among teenage male athletes and why not?
“It’s portable, it’s not that expensive to get one that sounds good, and you can become adequate at it if you put the time in,” Mack said.
Which Mike Knapp does. The owner of five guitars, he tries to play 1 1/2 to 2 hours a day – his musical preference: classic rock.
Come to think of it, he might belong to the rockingest football team in the county, if not the state and maybe the country.
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