By Daniel Johnson, Sports Editor
Derek Hood remembers his first day of work.
With a cluttered new office and older brother Don Hood down the hall, he unpacked his things and couldn’t enjoy the view. The team he had never met was to report in one week, he had three meets to plan and a new cross country course to lay out.
His schedule was more than filled.
“It was hectic,” said Derek Hood, ACU’s head cross country coach. “But once again, having that pressure is kind of what I thrive on.”
He wasn’t the only one last year dealing with the pressures of a first season coaching at ACU.
Four ACU head coaches faced different challenges during their first year and are ready for their second time after driving through the mistakes and successes of their freshman year in the Athletic Department.
For Derek Hood and his brother Don, ACU felt just like home. After growing up watching their father Don H. Hood help build the ACU track and field program into the dynasty it is today and graduating from the halls of the Hill, ACU was filled with memories for the brothers. But this time, the pressure of more than 30 national championships and the expectations of the ACU community to continue that tradition rested on their shoulders.
Both Derek and Don Hood accepted the pressures and expectations that came with leading the dynastic ACU cross country and track and field teams with open arms and let it drive them to do their jobs right the first time.
“This is the first time I’ve come into a place where they’ve expected to win,” Don Hood said. “I thought the pressure was tremendous last year.”
After the Hoods’ championship caliber team was unable to secure ACU’s eight consecutive Indoor Track and Field National Championships, the pressure increased and doubt showed its ugly head.
“I was tremendously embarrassed,” Don Hood said. “Then I starting having those doubts if we messed up or if there was something we could have done better, but we got past that, and if you dwell on the past, you will never be good enough.”
Don and Derek Hood were good enough the second time around at the Outdoor Track and Field National Championships, in which the men won their fifth straight national title and the women fell inches behind first place Lincoln.
“Those seniors had never lost a national championship meet before the indoor meet,” said Don Hood. “They did some things that made it just enough to get it done at the outdoors.”
Now in their second year, with one national championship of their own to add to the banner in Moody, the Hoods know what to expect from their team.
“It was a challenge to go up to our star athletes like Nicodemus [Naimudu] and saying we really need you to come through for us,” said Derek Hood. “And now looking back, it’s kind of comforting that they are the kind of athletes who will come through no matter what in those kind of situations.”
But not every coach wins a national championship in a first year with a program.
Head football coach Chris Thomsen and head basketball coach Jason Copeland spent their first season at ACU building their respective programs.
ACU football and basketball were struggling programs before Thomsen and Copeland took control, both hadn’t made the playoffs in almost a decade. And turning around the drought wasn’t something that would happen overnight, as both teams’ first season resulted in losing records.
For Thomsen, his biggest challenge was learning how to get his staff and team on the same page.
“The first thing was just learning how to focus a football team,” Thomsen said. “More than anything I had to let my team know what want and what I expect.”
Thomsen, who had never been a head coach in college prior to ACU, had help in the form of all-American and now NFL rookie Danieal Manning. Manning played his last year of college football under Thomsen and helped lead the team.
“It was great having a guy like that,” Thomsen said. “First of all to be around a player with that kind of talent was awesome, and he really led our team because he worked his hardest everyday.
Copeland’s first-year battle was recruiting. He was unable to put his best foot forward at the beginning of the season because he was behind after being hired in May 2005.
“I felt like there was a lot to get done recruiting-wise,” Copeland said. “Most of the other teams in our conference had pretty much signed.”
Copeland made the best with the players he had and relied on his players’ never-say-die work ethic to carry them through the season.
“We may have been short on talent level, but I never thought that effort was lacking,” Copeland said. “That team played as hard as they could every game.”
Looking back, Copeland is unwilling to take his first year as anything but a learning experience.
“There were some challenges,” Copeland said. “It was not necessarily something I want to go through again, but we went through some thins that I though helped me learn to be better coach.”
Derek Hood laughs and takes pride in the fact that he never completely finished moving into his office until one year after his first day. But after the last box was unpacked, another year full of new challenges and pressures was just around the corner.
