Winning in Fourth Grade Football and at Induron

By Davies Hood, Induron President

What’s the best way for a dad like me who has two young daughters to meet the boys in their class who will likely be showing up on my front doorstep in a few years?

My answer is to coach these boys’ football team. For the past two years, I’ve had daughters in 4^th grade, so for those years I’ve been one of the coaches for the Mountain Brook Raiders 4^th grade football team. It’s amazing how much working with these young boys is like coaching my team at Induron.

It’s really all about teamwork. When we all work together as a group, we find success and have fun.

While this is my main coaching philosophy, we also spent a lot of time working on blocking and tackling. In football, those two things are the basis for all success.  No matter what your plays are or how good your athletes are, if you can block and tackle better than the other guys, you’ll win 90% of the time.  So we spent a lot of time working on those basics.

This is also true at Induron. We focus on doing the basic, little things right and doing them consistently. That’s true for the sales team, for R&D, for office personnel, and it’s especially true in production.  To me, this is how we win as a paint manufacturer.

I love to educate my team here at Induron and help us all be successful, and I love doing that with kids too. In a crazy, small way, I feel like I am having a positive influence in these little boys’ lives.  I always stress to them that winning and scoring the most points is important, but it’s more important to do things the right way.

All that being said, the Raiders did win the Superbowl this year! We even beat the team that everyone thought would win by a landslide 27-6 score.  The best part about our win was that four different Raiders scored four touchdowns. We had some fantastic players who stood out, but everyone worked together for our win.

Now I’m faced with a dilemma. I know I want to keep coaching, but next year my daughters will be in 5^th and 6^thgrades. Which grade should I move up to? I’m thinking the best plan in to move on up to 6^th grade and stick there for a couple of years as both girls come through so that I meet and spend time with as many boys as possible from their classes!