Story Written By: Damon Cook @ CHSAANow.com
AURORA, Colo. — Head coach Scott Przymus has the Steamboat Springs football team cooking up a hot, 3-0, start in his first year as head coach. The Sailors, coming off of a 40-0 victory over Middle Park, are learning from the former long-tenured chef, who is bringing his experience from the kitchen to the field.
In the wake of the tragic loss of Jesse Hamrick, a Steamboat Springs graduate who passed away this summer, the community continues to stand united as they get through everything together.
Scott Przymus
Overall Record at Steamboat Springs: 3-0
Overall Record as a Head Coach: 3-0
Previous Coaching Positions: Steamboat Springs assistant coach/defensive coordinator (2017-2023)
Do you feel like anything from the kitchen translates to the field?
I have thought quite a bit about this. Being a chef for as long as I was and having staff in high-pressure situations every single day... having to lead through those situations has developed my coaching techniques and coaching philosophies dramatically. You know, a great example of that is our first week against Cole Ridge. We were down at halftime, but I was calm as can be during the game. We have high-intensity practices throughout the week, and then when we get into game-like situations, I'm calm because we did all of our preparation.
As a chef, I call it our 'mise en place', everything's in its place, and then you just have to fall back on your preparation. It's also being able to work with different kids and different people. The diversity of a team mimics the diversity of a kitchen, because kitchens are teams; you have the front of the house, back of the house, the dish station... they're all facets of a football team. It's very similar, so it translates extremely well.
Is there anything that's helped you guys start off undefeated this season?
We're healthy, that's No. 1. No. 2, going into the season — I don't know how familiar you are with our program, but it's bittersweet that I am the head coach. Coach (Jay) Hamrick, who's also our principal, lost his son, Jesse, on the fourth of July in a tragic accident while on vacation.
Coming into the season, after the accident, Coach Hamrick and I talked quite a bit. I asked myself, 'What does he need?' He has his wife and he has a daughter, who is a junior, and he has another son, who is a junior in college... and he needed space for himself to be the principal and for his family to grieve and mourn. The community is also still in the grieving process over the loss of Jesse.
Since I really only had about two weeks before camp started to prepare, we decided to lean into the grieving process very, very hard — as a team, we talked about the hard things. We're talking about vulnerability, we're talking about emotions, talking about 'Are we okay? Are we not okay? And how do we go through that as a team?'
Our motto this year is, "Defend the boat, strength and honor." We took three weeks to define what that really means for us. As a team, the players are doing the right things in the locker room, on the field, in the hallway and in the community... and that's the biggest thing right there -- the community. These wins are not just for the kids and the school, it is a community that's watching us go through this because it is still very raw. Kids could go either way, but we've been able to find a way to pull them closer together. We don't go out every game and win this for Jesse. It's not like that. We're going through this together, and we're taking each week as a challenge, but we're doing it the right way. We live, laugh and love like Jesse. There's a lot of different things happening in this community right now, but it is bigger than just any one person, or just the team; everybody's buying in and everybody's watching, and everybody wants to be involved.
How have you seen encouraging those emotions affect the team?
I think it's a nice refresher. I think it's new to a lot of people, because it's not popular, you know, for men or young men to go out and talk about their emotions. There's still a stigma around mental health. A really cool thing is that, even though I was a chef for 24 years, on July 30, I retired for one day, and on Aug. 1, I started my brand-new career of being a high school counselor. I'm in the hall, I'm in the building, I'm in the hallways, I'm in and around the students every day, so we could have these conversations. I'm working on becoming a licensed school counselor and being able to balance all these things.
Our football practices are intense, they're more intense than they have been in the past, but there's intentionality behind it, and there are life lessons that are folded into every single week. What do we need to focus on? What do we need to do? Two weeks ago it was, 'Can we be physical?' We were able to defeat Moffat County for the first time in 10 years. And that's a big mental block. So I'm folding in a lot of the counseling things and the mental game into our preparation to try to put us in the best possible situation. The kids are doing the rest. They're doing the work, and I couldn't be more proud of them.
How else do you hope to impact the students, and how have those students impacted you?
First, the impact the students have had on me -- I was still a chef for the first six years of coaching, and they are the reason I wanted to make a change in my career. I want to take my life experiences, and I want to be the person who I honestly needed when I was going through some hard stuff. Just like the coaches I grew up with. I can now look back and see how they had an impact on my life. I wanted to do that. They brought that out in me and have led me to want to make this change, not just for the football team, but for every student in the school. I want to be able to come in each and every day and say, 'Yes, I made an impact on a student's life, and they made an impact on mine.' It's been a fun journey, and I love every second of it.
At the end of your journey as a coach, what do you hope to have accomplished?
I hope that I am a great steward of the foundation that Coach Hamrick and I have been putting down, and that it lives on beyond us. Beyond the wins and losses and all the things, I want a program where any kid, any young man or woman, who wanted to be a part of it can be welcomed in and have a safe, caring place for them to thrive and to learn life lessons that will let them succeed.
