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By
Jim Cnockaert
Sports Editor / Bristol Herald Courier
Published: June 11, 2009
BRISTOL, Va. – Before he coached a down in high school football, Chris Thurman ran his father’s construction business in Altavista, Va.
What Thurman learned from that experience – and from his subsequent seven seasons as an assistant and head coach at Gretna High School – is that a winning football program is built the same way as a house: from the ground up.
It worked at Gretna, where in four seasons as head coach he was 47-4 and won a pair of Group A Division 2 state championships.
It is a lesson he keeps firmly in mind as he begins to put his stamp on the Virginia High football program.
“I spent a lot of time in construction, and it is like building a house,” Thurman said Thursday before leading a weight-training session at the high school.
“Right now, we’re digging the footings. You can’t start putting up the roof first. You have to start at the bottom and work up. That’s where we are right now.”
Thurman still lives in Gretna – he hopes to move his family to Bristol by the end of the month – so twice a week, he makes the three-plus-hour drive down I-81 to put his new players through conditioning and weight workouts.
It is his way of demonstrating to his players that he is willing to do whatever it takes to turn the Bearcats, who finished 3-7 last season, into the winners he believes they can be.
And, because he demands that kind of commitment from himself, he expects no less from his players.
“It’s like anything, you have to put in the work,” he said. “Things aren’t going to change because people hope they will change. I don’t care if you’re building houses or trying to get a football team headed in the right direction. You have to get up in the morning and go to work. That is my mindset.
“My thing is, let’s get everyone here and let’s go to work. There has been a mindset here that you show up in August and all of a sudden you win football games. That’s not how it works. Those kids [at other schools] are lifting and running in the offseason and putting in the time to get better. That’s how I want our kids to be.”
That Thurman, 39, lives and breathes football isn’t surprising. He’s always had a passion for the game. He first starred at Altavista High School as an offensive and defensive tackle.
He played a season at a prep school in New Jersey and a year at the U.S. Military Academy before transferring to James Madison University.
He never anticipated that he’d wind up as a coach. An offensive guard in college, he fully expected he’d get a shot to play professionally. But after he broke his neck his junior season in a game against Georgia Southern and tried with little success to play through pain his senior year, he altered his dream to fit his circumstances.
He spent a year at Brown University as a graduate assistant before joining the coaching staff at James Madison for a year as an assistant. He returned to Altavista to take over the family construction business after his father developed prostate cancer. He did that for seven years before he returned to coaching, this time as the defensive coordinator at Gretna.
When Rob Senseney became head coach at William Fleming in Roanoke, Thurman took over at Gretna as head coach.
Thurman plans to run the same schemes and formations at Virginia High that he did at Gretna.
On defense, the Bearcats will operate out of a 33 base, moving players around into different looks and blitzing often.
On offense, they will run the spread. Gretna won two state titles under Senseney with record-setting Vic Hall at quarterback. Hall now starts at cornerback for the University of Virginia. Thurman never had the same caliber of quarterback as Hall in his four seasons, but his offenses still averaged 40 points a game.
“You can get into a lot of long handoffs with short passes,” Thurman said. “Those will put you into a lot of second-and-four [situations].”
Thurman, who teaches special education, said he decided to accept the Virginia High position, in part, because he believed he’d accomplished all that he could at Gretna. He wanted to come to a place where he could put his own stamp on the program, not simply continue a winning tradition.
“You can win here,” Thurman said. “I might be the only one at this point, but I think there is honest-to-goodness talent to win here. I think here at Virginia High … this is a place where you can win a lot of football games and state championships and regional championships.”
Thurman said that his Gretna players got to the point where they never worried about winning district championships. It was expected, he said, so they prepared to compete for region and state titles.
“They would hand us the district trophy, and the kids wouldn’t even hold it up,” he said. “They didn’t want it. The first 10 games are the prelude to get into the four-game tournament, and then anything can happen. That’s the way we thought there, and it’s the way I want us to think here.”
But, Thurman admitted, that mindset doesn’t just happen. The foundation is laid with dedication and hard work in the offseason, but the project is completed using the confidence that only comes from winning.
“You hope that the work you put in now and in August will translate into wins,” he said. “You can talk about that until you’re blue in the face, but if you’re getting beat 30-0, talking isn’t helping.
“The bottom line is: You have to win. Winning cures everything. If you don’t win, [the program] doesn’t get fixed. They brought me here to win.”
