The Best Locker Room Talk Ever: Coach Danny Farmer

I was a freshman in high school. We were playing in the finals of the Bell City B Team Tournament. For the first time in my life, we were actually the underdog in a basketball game. The coaches had seeded Oran first and our team second. The seeding was right, since they already had a good team coming back, and then our best player had moved to Oran that summer.

Coach Cookson, our boys head coach, who at that point had won 11 state championships, wasn't there that night. He had to go to a meeting, which mean Danny Farmer, the high school girls coach, stepped in to coach us. This wasn't a big deal to us, since Coach Farmer ran most of our Jr. High practices growing up. So we knew him really well.

*** I should stop the story right here and say how lucky I was as a kid growing up. I played for Ronnie Cookson, who is one of the best coaches ever. That meant I got to be around his brother, Carrol Cookson, another coach who won multiple state championships and is in the Hall of Fame. And "oh by the way" our high school girls coach, Danny Farmer, has also won 5-6 state championships as a girls coach at Scott County Central and boys coach at Charleston, and is also in the Hall of Fame. I got to be around A LOT of good coaches.

One more quick side note... I've never ran as much as I did playing for Danny Farmer in Jr. High. You had to run a "sideline" for every point you lost by. A "sideline" was SEVEN down and back sprints on the sideline. So for a 5 point loss, that's 35 down and back on the sideline. At the end of like 6-8 quarters of scrimmaging, that's a lot of running, and then we had to MAKE 5 double killers and 5 sprints. We had to MAKE them, every single player. If one guy missed, it didn't count. We were in PHENOMENAL shape. Coach Farmer was and is a really good coach. ***

So back to the story... We're sitting there, a little nervous, ready to play, waiting for the coach to come in and talk to us. Coach Cookson was never really a big "rah-rah" kind of guy. He just told us to play hard and he kept things simple. That's what we were used to. So none of us knew what to expect when Coach Farmer walked in the room.

Coach Farmer had this "strut" that he used to do. It was just the way he walked. He was a really cool guy, just the way he carried himself, his tone of voice... I don't think I'd ever heard him yell in two years being around him. He was just a laid back coach. Most practices he leaned against the wall, and we either played really really REALLY hard, or we ran A LOT. He didn't have to yell a lot.

With that as the backdrop, Coach Farmer strutted into the room. He had this look in his eye that I'd never seen before. It looked like he was ready to fight. He then said something like "they seeded them over you? Are you serious? Are you going to take that?" I don't remember it verbatim. I just know it fired me up, and even thinking about it now, it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

When he was done talking, we stormed out and beat Oran by 29 points. The game was over when he gave that pep talk. I'll never forget it. I got to know Coach Farmer as I got older, and eventually I even got to coach against him.

I'll never forget a conversation that we had when I was coaching at Caruthersville. This kind of sums up Danny Farmer, the kind of man he is, and why he's had such an amazing coaching career. We were talking about "big school vs. small school thinking." At the time, we had an administrator at Caruthersville who wanted to suspend everybody, kick kids off of the football team, basketball team, etc. Coach and I were talking about this, and then he dropped this gem on me.

He said, "David, that's why Scott Central was so good for so long. If they had a good kid in the halls, they knew they only had one kid that good. They had to make sure that kid made it. In these bigger schools, sometimes I just think they assume some kids are going to fall through the cracks."

I'm paraphrasing, but that's pretty close to what he said. Coach Farmer had this mentality that every kid was worth his time. I remember how every year when I'd see his team play, he'd tell me about a kid, usually a freshman or sophomore, who wasn't on the team yet. Coach would explain how the kid had gotten into trouble or something and he was making the kid earn his way back. Sure enough, the next year, that kid would be out there DOMINATING.

Coach Farmer had taken the time to help another young person find their way. The world would be a better place if there were more people like Danny Farmer in it. Ironically, I was watching Charleston play Saxony Lutheran last night on the internet. Coach Farmer's Charleston Blue Jays came up short, and I am sure he's probably still mourning that loss.

So get out there today and try to help somebody. The world is a better place when we all try to help each other. That's the moral of the story. While Coach Farmer's team might have come up short this year, in the big scoreboard of life he's winning by a million. He's helped so many kids through the years, including me.

And he gave THE BEST locker room talk I've ever heard.

WATER CHALLENGE UPDATE: I had a guy tell me this week he's lost 5 pounds doing our water challenge. Check out the JWT Blog if you don't know what I'm talking about. I know we had several try it. My cousin told me she tried for a day or two and couldn't hack it LOL. It's been a lot of fun interacting with people. I know I feel GREAT after Day 4. I'm going to try to build on it next week. #JWT #JoinTheRevolution