Hal Mumme and Me
By Tony Holler
In the summer of 2016, I read two amazing books written by S.C. Gwynne, “Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History” and “Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson”. Three months months later, I discovered that the same guy, S.C. Gwynne, had written a book about football, “The Perfect Pass: American Genius and the Reinvention of Football”. I devoured it. I’ve read over a thousand books in my life and those three books written by S.C. Gwynne would all rank in my top 25
I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with football. My father coached football for 16 years but was better known as a head basketball coach at the high school and college level (47 years, 44 as a head coach). My mom had three brothers, Larry, Kelly, and Kevin Kane, who all played college football. Larry Kane and Kelly Kane were highly successful head football coaches. I played quarterback until a shoulder injury ended my career. I coached high school football for 25 years, but never as a head coach.
“The Perfect Pass” was written about a football coach who was different. Buckminster Fuller said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, BUILD A NEW MODEL THAT MAKES THE EXISTING MODEL OBSOLETE.” Hal Mumme was a football coach who built a new model.
I’ve never met Hal Mumme and probably never will. But, as I read “The Perfect Pass”, I felt as though I’d met a kindred spirit.
Early in his career, Hal Mumme didn’t have much success. “On paper Hal was beginning to look like one of those career losers, of whom there are thousands in the coaching world, well-meaning, somewhat sad men with a bit of wistfulness in their voices who lack whatever it takes to make his team win.” The same could have been said about me when I was fired at the age of 31 after an eight year stint as a head basketball coach, going 79-128. With four kids and tons of debt, I was a washed up basketball coach, joining the group of somewhat sad men who didn’t have what it takes to be a winner.
In 1989, Hal Mumme took the football job at tiny Iowa Wesleyan and hired a guy named Mike Leach as his offensive line coach. Before he got around to recruiting, he had to convince a talented wide receiver, Dana Holgorsen (now HC at University of Houston), not to transfer to another school. The revolution, now referred to as “Air Raid”, had commenced. Ten years after Hal Mumme arrived at Iowa Wesleyan, I reinvented myself in 1999 with the genesis of “Feed the Cats”. Hal Mumme and I may have been coaching different sports, but we both had the same approach to our task.
One of Hal Mumme’s influences was Tiger Ellison. Ellison was the inventor of the “Run and Shoot” offense and formations like the “Lonesome Polecat”. Ellison pioneered a new way of thinking about football “that transcended the mud and mayhem, snot and slobber of the game on the field. It was, in fact, a way of thinking about life.”
In “Run and Shoot Football” (1984), Ellison wrote, “We forgot about work: we began to play. We quit being serious; we commenced having fun. We stopped our blood and thunder pep talks; we started telling funny stories.”
In 1994, Hal Mumme was coaching 9-0 Valdosta State (averaging 508 yards per game with a 75.6% completion rate). Sports Illustrated asked Mumme how his program differed from rival North Alabama. “We don’t stretch, we don’t run sprints, and we don’t practice on Mondays and Fridays. And when we do practice we never go longer than an hour and forty-five minutes. We don’t waste the player’s time.”
No wind sprints? Blasphemy!
S.C. Gwynn gives us the historical view of wind sprints: “Sprints had been part of football since its origins. They were the stripped down essence of the game, meant to increase endurance, toughness, and to weed out the mentally weak and spiritually suspect. There were variations that involved squat thrusts, burpees, sit-ups, and push-ups between runs, but in the simplest version the coaches marked off 40-yards on the field, and then the team, already exhausted from practice, ran 40-yard sprints with one minute rest between them, preferably until they vomited, which many of them did. Some passed out from heat exhaustion. Kids hated it. Coaches, especially sadistic ones, loved it, particularly in high summer temperatures.”
Besides not stretching, not running wind sprints, and not practicing on Mondays and Fridays, Hal Mumme’s practices would only involve “light hitting”. By all accounts, Hal Mumme was, and is, a football renegade. S.C. Gwynne explains, “Most coaches considered hard, physical contact to be a part of the Darwinian selection process thay lay at the core of the game. Hitting and taking hits all week long hardened players for games and allowed coaches to see who their meanest and toughest players were. A spectacular hit in practice that resulted in a teammate temporarily forgetting his name and country of residence might guarantee a player’s place in the starting lineup.”
Hal Mumme kept things simple so that practices didn’t last more than an hour and forty-five minutes. Old school was being introduced to new school. Hal Mumme could have written the football version of Essentialism, 30 years prior to Greg McKeown’s masterpiece. Simple and effective was antithetical to the legendary complexifiers that ruled the football establishment since the sport’s inception.
Old school coaches still see the benefits of outworking opponents as an unquestionable, essential truth when it comes to winning football games. “Wasn’t practicing till you dropped the way to build great football teams?” (Never forget, there’s comfort in tradition.)
“Hall Mumme sometimes thought he was the only one in all of college football talking about the joy of playing the game.”
I think Hal Mumme would like the mission statement of Feed the Cats.
♦ Speed is the Tide that Lifts All Boats
♦ Rest, Recovery, Sleep (Foundation of High Performance)
♦ Record, Rank, Publish (Measure What Matters)
♦ Tired is the Enemy, Not the Goal (Racehorses not Workhorses)
♦ Never Let Today Ruin Tomorrow (Never Burn the Steak)
♦ 100% Healthy, 80% in Shape, Not the Other Way Around
♦ Perform in Practice (Moderate Exercise Never Leads to High Performance)
♦ Let the Game Be the Hardest Thing You Do
♦ Kids Are Good at What They Like, Great at What They Love
♦ Make Practice the Best Part of a Kid’s Day
I believe there are two ways to coach, old school (hard work and high effort) or new school (essential work and high performance). To those of you considering a move to my way of thinking, let me give you a warning: If you move away from the “hard work and high effort model”, you will be considered a heretic. Your masculinity will be questioned. You will be deemed “soft” (football coaches are obsessed with “hard” and soft”). You may be called a “snowflake”.
The problem with hard work for hard work’s sake is that fatigue interferes with performance. If hard work is the destination, your players will be slow. Sore and exhausted football players are capable of high effort, but not high performance. I don’t believe slow kids win games, regardless of their effort. I believe performance wins games. To perform, you must value performance, not hard work.
My good friend and national lacrosse guru, Jamie Munro, has counseled me to stop preaching against hard work. Jamie says that I’m simply REDEFINING HARD WORK. It’s hard work to figure out what is essential and eliminate the rest. It’s hard work to perform at top speeds. It’s hard work to invest in rest, recovery, and sleep. Jamie Munro is right, but when you are fighting against the religious fervor of football in America, you can’t go buffalo hunting with a BB gun. No sport is more traditional, more patriotic, and more religious than football. Football is unique.
Hal Mumme’s ideas came from the fringe, not the center. The center protects the center. The status quo protects the status quo. Ideas that change football don’t come from an assistant working in the SEC. Big time assistants are loyal soldiers baked in loyalty and tradition. Revolutionary football ideas come from places like Iowa Wesleyan, or Plainfield North High School.
LIke Air Raid, Feed the Cats didn’t emerge from an NCAA powerhouse coached by a former Olympian. Feed the Cats came from a fired basketball coach reinventing himself as a track coach and trying to convince the best athletes in a school of 600 kids to run track. Like Hal Mumme recruiting kids to Iowa Wesleyan (700 students in a town of 10,000 people), I had trouble selling a run-your-ass-off track program to elite athletes who would rather not run laps. Track is a step child of the sports world. I often say that I coach orphans, because parents don’t give a sh*t about track. Many parents see track as recreational activity or a way for their kids to stay in shape for other sports. (Two of the worst words in sport: “in shape”.)
My own son, Alec, told me in 1999 that he would play baseball in high school rather than run on my track team because “track sucks”. Alec could dunk a basketball in the 8th grade. If I couldn’t convince Alec to join the track team, I needed to create a new model for track and field. I started to feed the cats, and Alec chose to run track. Alec now coaches football and track at Edwardsville High School.
Starting in 1999, everyone on my team who ran the 100, 200, 400, 4×1, 4×2, 4×4, 110 hurdles, and 300 hurdles, as well as all six field events (14 of the 18 events in Illinois) stopped RUNNING in practice. We sprinted. We jumped. We haven’t run a lap in practice for 22 years. We PERFORM in practice. We measure what matters and record, rank, and publish daily. My teams don’t warm-up, stretch, or cool down. We practice less than an hour and we typically take three days off every week. And, we’ve achieved unusual success. For the athletes on my team, track practice is the best part of their day. I have found in my 37 years of parenting four kids, 38 years of teaching Chemistry, and 41 years of coaching, kids are good at what they like and obsessed with what they love.
Lombardi said, “Fatigue makes cowards of us all.” Football coaches memorized that quote and proceeded to crush their athletes. They believed that by getting players accustomed to fatigue, players would never be tired in the game. My father used to say, “I’m going to make practice so hard, the games will feel easy”. Here’s the problem: fatigued players don’t practice at high levels. Athletes, beaten and battered all week, are diminished performers come game time. High performers are strong, fast, and fresh when it counts. When high-volume old school football programs win it’s probably a case of dumb vs. dumber. When dumb plays dumber, dumb always wins.
It was never my intent, but Feed the Cats has made serious inroads into the football world. Feed the Cats is not an offensive system like Air Raid. Feed the Cats is not a recipe. Feed the Cats is a way of cooking, a way of thinking, and a system of beliefs that fundamentally changes the game.
This article was written for HEADSETS, Volume 2, Issue 1, the online football magazine produced by Kenny Simpson.
Here’s my football content on CoachTube: Feed the Cats Football Bundle
Courses: Tony Holler at CoachTube
Bio: Tony Holler
♦ A coach’s son for 62 years
♦ 41st year of coaching (football, basketball, track)
♦ 38 years of teaching Chemistry
♦ Writer (approaching 300 articles) – book coming in 2022
♦ Co-Owner of Track Football Consortium (along with Chris Korfist)
♦ #1 Best-Selling DVD 2019 and 2020 – Championship Productions
♦ International speaker
♦ Two sons coaching (Alec and Quinn)
♦ Owner of “Feed the Cats”
♦ @pntrack
♦ tony.holler@yahoo.com
♦ 630-849-8294
