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'I just wanted to coach': Moore finds his own place guiding Massillon
Nov 22, 2017 2:26 PM
Massillon Nate Moore's career started like that of so many other coaches.
The low-man-on-totem-pole assistant coach is generally tasked with the menial jobs which can often seem insignificant. For Moore, a fresh-out-of-college assistant for head coach Jim Place at Chaminade-Julienne High School in 2004, that meant making sure his watch was set precisely in accord to what the game clock said each Friday night.
"I'm a fanatic about that stuff," said Place, a Massillon native and Central Catholic High School grad who is now the head coach at Dayton Ponitz Tech. "I like to be to the second, and if that clock guy screws up, look out. I'm a little bit of a crazy man on game night. If he's off two seconds, it's not a good place to be."
No doubt at some point during that first year coaching, Moore found himself not in a good place. Spring forward 13 years, however, and the place he finds himself in is significantly different.
Moore is no longer the low man on any totem pole. In fact, he presides over arguably one of the most famous high-school football programs in the nation at Massillon.
Even as the third-year head coach of the Tigers is preparing his team for Friday's Division II state semifinal against Cincinnati Winton Woods, though, he hasn't forgotten the time which has passed. He especially can't forget the importance of what each second means, particularly when it comes to keeping everything pointed forward with regards to Massillon's football program.
"There's nothing that makes me more uncomfortable or anxious than when I feel like we're doing something that is not organized to the 'T,'" Moore said in advance of Friday's game in Columbus. "That's of primary importance."
To understand the head coach - and, as much, the man - who Moore has become, it all starts around that laser-like focus. It starts with a path taken by someone who was, by his own admission, a late-bloomer as a player but who quickly got on the fast-track as a head coach.
Fast-track to success
Ten years after Moore was synchronizing his watch in Dayton, he was holding up a state-championship trophy after having led Cincinnati La Salle - which had zero playoff wins prior to his 2013 arrival - to the Division II crown in year No. 2 at the school. Less than two months after that, he was making yet another career-defining move, taking on the challenges - on- and off-the-field - which come with being the head coach at Massillon.
There's no set way to get from point A to point B in life. However, there's no doubting Moore did it, as Frank Sinatra would say, in his own way.
That's because that's the only way the son of Jerry and Debbie Moore knows how to go.
"We were raised to be independent thinkers and to explore and to take chances," Moore said. "If we screwed up, my parents didn't run in to save us. I think that's where the confidence to do what you believe is right comes from. I was allowed to do what I believe is right growing up."
That includes Moore's involvement in the sport of football. While always a fan of the sport, he didn't start playing it until he was in the seventh grade.
The late-bloomer wouldn't become a full-time varsity player at Mason High School until his senior season in 1998, eventually starting on both the offensive and defensive lines. He would make the University of Dayton's travel squad starting his freshman year, and blossomed into an NCAA Division I-AA All-American offensive tackle by his senior season.
Focused on coaching
Despite a month spent trying to extend his playing career with a local semi-pro football team, Moore gave up that stage of his life in 2004 when he joined Place at Chaminade-Julienne. Even from those early stages as a young assistant, he maintained the same approach to the game as he had as a player.
"I just wanted to coach," Moore said. "I always played hard and I coached hard. I never cared what anybody thought about that."
That attitude, to an extent, has never departed. What some may view as a stand-offish attitude was actually a demeanor of extreme focus.
Even his own family members admit it can be tough to get through to him when his mind is focused on something.
"He does not talk a lot," said Moore's wife Becca, whom he met while both were at Chaminade-Julienne in 2004. "I tell him this all the time. I say, 'Sometimes I think you're approachable. You're kind of scary.' Actually, intimidating is more the word. I think, with anybody that is an outsider who comes into any program, no matter where we've been, people are always a little bit skeptical at first. It takes a couple years."
It took Moore a couple of years to truly find his lane as a coach. However, when he found it, he attacked it with vigor.
Following the mentor
Place remembers when that moment occurred in his young apprentice. It was shortly after he took over as the head coach at Hamilton High School in 2006, having brought Moore along as an assistant.
"He came in one day and he said, 'I want to learn how to be a great head coach," Place said. "'Can I do everything with you?' And he did everything. He picked my brain every night. Everything I did, he asked me why. It was like a guy on a mission."
The pupil, though, would basically mimic his mentor when it came time to set out on his own. In 2010, Minster High School gave Moore his head-coaching breakthrough, asking him to take over a once-proud program which had fallen to 1-9 the previous season.
Four games into Moore's tenure, that turnaround seemed far-fetched with the Wildcats at 0-4. However, the first win of the season for Minster - and of Moore's career - in Week 5 against New Bremen would turn everything around.
Minster would finish the season winning seven of its last eight, reaching the Division VI regional finals in the process. Thus began the catapult journey to the top for Moore, who would lead the Wildcats to three consecutive playoff appearances before leaving for La Salle in 2013.
Finding his own way
That's also about the time Moore also broke away from the mold of his mentor and into being his own head coach.
"As you go through it year by year, you develop your own philosophies and things that you like and believe in," said Moore, who has gone 64-33 as a head coach, with six playoff appearances. "Now, I'm Nate Moore, with elements of guys that I've worked with and worked for. When I first started, I was doing a Jim Place impersonation. It was probably my third year at Minster that I really started to get comfortable with doing things my way and not Jim's way."
Eight years after Moore last shared the same sidelines as Place, the two stood together again when the mentor joined his former pupil at Massillon's 16-15 win over McKinley in Week 10 this season. This time, Place's place was in the background, watching as Moore led the Tigers to the win in arguably the most famous rivalry in high school football.
As Place observed, though, he couldn't help but notice the evolution which had taken the man who was "doing a Jim Place impersonation" in 2010 into the man who was leading the Massillon Tigers.
"I watched him at work in that Canton McKinley week, and he delegates stuff," Place said with a chuckle. "He didn't learn that from me. I'm one of those guys, that's a weakness for me; I don't delegate well. He does a great job delegating."
Be the head coach
That delegation was all part of the evolution of Moore. At Minster, Moore coached the defense while working with a staff of "great guys that were Minster guys and loved Minster football," but not necessarily the most experienced or seasoned staff.
Now, having moved up the chain from Minster to La Salle to Massillon, he's in a different spot. With the Tigers, Moore feels he's surrounded by what he would consider great coaches, which allows him to be what he always wanted to be from the start.
"I want to be the head coach," Moore said. "I don't want to be the offensive coordinator; I don't want to be the defensive coordinator. I think that's how it works best, at least for me. That has been my vision and I've been able to see that through because I've been able to hire great coaches. If you don't have great coaches with you, then you have to do those things, because someone's got to do it. If you have guys who can do it, you empower your people to be great."
Empowering people to be great is something Moore believes is part of his mission as a head football coach. Talking shortly after his team's regional-championship win over New Albany, he said the measure of this year's Massillon team wouldn't come necessarily by what they ultimately accomplished in the playoffs, but what the players themselves would accomplish over the course of their lives.
Football focus
For Moore, that's always been what has driven him as a coach. It's why, even as he's immersed in watching his children - be it son Eli or daughter Ella - in an activity, he can't necessarily separate himself from his other family. His football family.
"I think everybody's different, but for me, I don't ever get away from it," said Moore, who added to their family by taking legal guardianship of Thayer Munford in spring of 2016. "I think, if it was just about football, I think that would be really, really bad. But for me, it's about my guys; it's about my coaches and it's about my players. Those things are constantly on my mind."
There is a time, though, where family does find a way to come first and foremost for Moore. It comes in the solitude of their house, in the waking hours of the day.
At that time, as the sun just starts to peak over the horizon, it's the Moore family and only the Moore family.
"One of the things that we try is every morning, about 6:30, he makes breakfast for the whole family," said Becca, who is the Parent Involvement Coordinator for the Massillon City Schools. "That's like our time together. We ask the kids how is school; what's going on. Tell me about your grades; how's basketball going? How's dance going? That's really his getaway time. We don't talk about football or our jobs. We just focus on the kids for that little bit of precious time."
Family focus
In some ways, it's like Moore's own childhood. Just a family - caring parents and their children - eating together before going out onto their own separate daily journeys.
Just like when Moore was younger, when it wasn't about football but about everything else.
"I'd go home for dinner and no one would ask me how practice was," Moore recalled of his own youth. "They didn't really care; they wanted to know that I wasn't getting into trouble and how I was doing in the classroom. They didn't really care about (football)."
Now, with his own family and his own football team, Moore has tried to mesh both together. His son Eli serves as one of Massillon's ball boys every game, while Ella is regularly in attendance on Friday nights.
Becca, meanwhile, is a fixture on the sidelines and even rides with her husband to the games on the team bus. On one such bus ride, the former Chaminade-Julienne cheerleading coach couldn't help but notice with a bit of amusement the former C-J assistant football coach looking over a detailed agenda, checking off the benchmarks as they were passed.
For Moore, that family is just the right kind of counter-balance he needs to all of the outside noise which can swirl around any head coach, especially one at Massillon.
"Becca provides humility to me," he said. "I don't have a chance to get a big head that needs to be knocked down because there's a lot of preventative maintenance there that goes along with that. My kids, if there is those moments where you do forget about things, it is watching them and being around them. I like to keep them around practice and everything as much as I can, just because it is so time-consuming and I think it's really important to spend as much time with them as possible."
And time, as Moore learned in his very first coaching job, is a very important commodity.
Reach Chris at 330-775-1128 or
chris.easterling@indeonline.com.
On Twitter: @ceasterlingINDE
