First-year Lansing Eastern football coach Troy Matlock works with players during practice in Lansing Tuesday. Eastern is 3-33 the last four seasons.
LANSING — Along a fence behind Eastern High School, several teenagers sat watching the Quakers’ football practice Monday, curious onlookers who might soon be teammates.
New Lansing Eastern football coach Troy Matlock, center, talks with quarterback Anthony Reynolds, left, and assistant coach Robert Hollis, right, during practice in Lansing Tuesday.
“They’ll be out here,” first-year Eastern coach Troy Matlock said. “They’re trickling in, one by one.”
Matlock has about 45 players now. Not yet enough to also field a junior varsity team, but roughly 20 more than when practice began a couple weeks ago.
This isn’t a program that can demand early commitment yet. Too much losing. Too much doubt. Curiosity can’t be chased away. It’s part of the process.
Eastern finished 3-33 over the last four seasons under former coach Robert McBride. So none of the players on the Quakers’ current roster have ever won more than one varsity game in a calendar year. The program is 27-126 since its last winning season in 1997 — about the time the oldest of Matlock’s players were born.
“The past is the past,” said Matlock, 47, whose team opens this Friday at Williamston. “I actually don’t know much about what went on here, and I don’t care.”
From a historical perspective, Matlock is actually well equipped for this seismic challenge. He played at Everett in the mid-1980s, the last time all three Lansing high schools had competitive programs at the same time.
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He was an assistant at his alma mater during Marcelle Carruthers’ first two seasons as coach, when the Vikings’ program resembled the dire condition of Eastern’s program today. And then he spent 13 seasons at Sexton, coaching and winning under Dan Boggan — pounding the rival Quakers annually — all in a district facing enrollment and demographic challenges far different than when these three contemporaries were high school stars 30 years ago.
“The biggest thing is just changing the culture and the mindset of those kids and that community over there,” Boggan said. “Because I do believe they have the kids in the building to have a good football program.”
That, however, is a valid question in a shrinking district, and at a school that’s struggled to get it right in football. Last spring, Eastern tried to hire 81-year-old Howard Weyers, who coached at Michigan State under Denny Stolz in the mid-’70s. After Weyers decided he didn’t have the energy, the school settled on William Young, and then realized its background check on Young wasn’t thorough enough.
And so Matlock gets the opportunity. He doesn’t work in the building, so that’ll be another part of the daily struggle Boggan and Carruthers don’t have to endure.
“I have eyes and ears. I’ll be accessible,” he said.
In a schools-of-choice era, in a district where the best players in a given sport tend to migrate to the best schools in that sport, Matlock will have to show enough progress to convince kids they can compete without going across town.
“They’ll come around,” Matlock said. “They’ll see the changes over here.”
“That’s the battle right there,” added athletic director Joe Mendez, who hired Matlock. “That’s the battle we have to fight. We have to get kids interested again.”
The kids in Matlock’s program now are mostly true blue or intrigued beginners.
“I always have been committed to this program,” senior running back La’Tone Smith said. “Even if somebody else wanted me to come out for their team, I would deny it and say no.”
“This is my school,” added junior running back Andwele Pulliam.
“We wanted to do better, but we never put in the work,” Pulliam continued. “This year, we’re showing it. We definitely had talent last year.”
Players say the tone from the coaches is stricter than a year ago, that they’re being pushed. Matlock says he likes how they’re responding. He thinks he has several talented running backs — Smith and Pulliam included — built to survive an offense based on power football.
“I believed in these kids right off the jump,” Matlock said.
Optimism in August is easy.
Matlock knows what’s ahead. So do the kids. Maybe not the ones on the fence.
“Take some pride. And get aggressive,” Matlock said about his constant message. “And I have to keep saying that because I want them to know, in this conference, if you’re not aggressive, you will get …”
They know.
Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.
