Coach Biladeau In His Own Words
Gary Stibolt
Wednesday March 26, 2008
This year, coach Biladeau is the head coach and it is the first time in his af2-tenured coaching career he holds claim to that title. So instead of writing what has already been stated, I wanted to dig into a little philosophy and have him tell us in his own words about what being a head coach means to him.
“Getting my first head coaching job in the af2 with Quad Cities is special to me,” stated Biladeau. “This was my first taste of Arena Football. We won a championship here and the fans are fantastic. That experience became really special to me and to be able to come back here and be asked to lead this team is something I’ve wanted for a long time. I would have been happy being a head coach most anywhere in the af2 but the fact that it happened here with that history really makes it special to me.”
Being an assistant coach for the past eight years in the Deuce, Biladeau has seen quite a bit but his roots in the af2 were seeded long before he even heard of Arena Football. In our conversation, I asked him what type of mentors did he have and who did he look up to and learn from.
“I think the first coach is Bruce Cowdrey, the head coach in Peoria,” said Biladeau. He was actually the line coach in Fort Hays, Kansas when I played out there and then in my last year, when I was a student/assistant coach, it was just watching him every day. You know, I was younger and you try to emulate the other coaches and one thing that always stuck out to me about Cowdrey was how hard he recruited and how much he was on the phone and how his recruits would come in for the weekend and how he was around the players and stuff and how he enjoyed that. I just learned from him early on that I wanted to be a good recruiter. That’s one thing I take a lot of pride in and this is the first time I’ve really had a chance to do it because that’s how you build your team. You know, we can coach all we want but at the end of the day you have got to have good players. That is something I learned when I was twenty-one, twenty-two years old was just watching him and how he attacked recruiting and that was something I always told myself that if I was ever in that position that is exactly how I wanted to do it. I have a tremendous amount of respect for him. He’s done more for my career than anybody. When I was in college, how he helped me, he got me into the IFL (Indoor Football League bought out by af2 in 2002) which subsequently got me into the af2 and he’s always been a good friend of mine. He’s someone I look up to with a tremendous amount of respect for. I’ve learned a lot from him.
It’s going to be kind of interesting coaching against him now a couple of games. So he (Bruce Cowdrey) has had a big influence on me, definately. Chris Siegfried who is the head coach at Arkansas now is someone I was with for four years. I got more of the on-field coaching from him. He let me be the defensive coordinator and allowed me to call my own defense and didn’t step on my toes. He made me grow as a coach just giving me that opportunity to be a defensive coordinator. I learned some little things from him too. He’s a very successful coach. I was around Frank Haege and I learned a lot from him early on. I learned more about the ‘Arena’ (Football) game. And if you look at all three of those coaches, all three won a championship. They all have something on their finger as a head coach that I really want. I have a tremendous amount of respect for all three of those guys. I just learned a heck of a lot from all three of them,” Biladeau concluded.
So here he is now, a head coach in the af2 and he understands the role well. “I’m awfully excited to be a head coach. It’s a lot of work. I’m one of those guys who likes football. I like being around players. I like recruiting a lot. I think for myself and my staff, we work very hard in the off-season to do the recruiting because it is, it’s hard work.
I think being a head coach is a lot more stress and a lot more pressure. There are just a lot of little things that go on during the day. Everyone see’s the coach on TV, reads his name in the paper and think ‘man that would be a lot of fun and that looks really cool’ but the reality is when you’re away from that and you’re in the office or every time at night when the phone rings, you get kind of worried or see or hear your players name and think ‘oh my, what’s going on or what’s he done now,’ there’s just a lot of little things. It’s like putting out fires, constantly.
I remember when Bill Parcells said ‘even after you win a game, you can’t relax, you can’t enjoy it because someone got hurt and you’ve got to get ready for the next practice, there’s always something else.’ We may have a good day of practice and then you find out someone forgot to leave their tip at the restaurant and I get a call about that or maybe the D-line had a great practice but the O-line didn’t. The other day in the scrimmage, if I was just a defensive coordinator, I would have been the happiest man alive because the defense really dominated. But as a head coach, I stressed out about it. You’ve got to look at everything.”
Being a new head coach, especially for the first time, you might think that things will change for Biladeau. However, while the role he has had before is different than the role he has now and he’s the one who’ll get all the nuisance type phone calls, nothing has changed for Troy Biladeau. The way he sees it, he now gets to be that coach he’s always been.
“You know, I grew up in a small town and I was fortunate to have some great parents (Russ and Lana Biladeau) that just had those small hometown values. They taught me discipline, they taught me hard work, they taught me about integrity to the point where these three things became part of my core value system. That’s the personal side of things, I learned a lot of those virtues’ from my parents. That carried over into my playing days and my coaching as well. Those three coaches I mentioned earlier (Cowdrey, Siegfried, & Haege) also taught me a lot too.
I think a coach is a leader and that’s how I want to be thought of or remembered as, a leader. You know, I try to live my life like I want my players too. The same rules I have for them are the same rules I live by. I think a miss conception of the way I am is because of what happened last year which is not true…at all! If we were an expansion team, I would be coaching the same way. Twenty years from now I will be coaching with the same principles. I believe that if there is discipline on the field then there is correlation to off the field. So it is about being a leader but too, these guys, at some point in their life, are going to be done playing football and if I let them be late to practice, for example, and he is late in real life to his job, he’s going to get fired. If he comes back and says, ‘well coach Biladeau let me,’ his boss isn’t going to care. So at the same time, everyone wants to win but as a coach, I just feel like there are some other things I need to teach guys and I do that as their leader.”
While doing this interview, the focus was purely on coach Biladeau and I didn’t want to revert back to last year but part of the reason why coach Biladeau is our head coach this year is because of his leadership he exerted last year at the moment it was asked of him.
“Those three games (last year) really, gave me good experience. At the time, that team needed someone to come in with discipline. That’s just the way I coach. I didn’t do anything differently last year just because of what happened, that’s just the way I coach. This year, I told the owners and the players that I cannot guarantee that nothing bad is going to happen but I can guarantee that I’m going to do something about it.
All the players know the rules and they know the consequences. I don’t know who told me this but it was a coach that told me one time…don’t have a lot of rules, but the ones you do have, you better have consequences and you better stick to it. Guys know, these are my rules and I’m going to stick to them. Not like last year…if a guy gets fined, he pays it in front of the whole team so the whole team sees that he’s paying me and not like the buddy-buddy system. I’ll suspend anybody, I’ll fine anybody and I don’t like doing that stuff. Maybe I’m not the easiest coach to play for but I don’t yell at my players. I do not cuss at my players. I do not call them names. At the end of the day, I really care about my players and that’s why I have these rules. I don’t want them to get in trouble; I really do care about them. I want them to go to the AFL. I would love for them to be a part of a championship team but at some point in their life, someone is going to tell them they can’t wear a jersey no more and it is just as important to me that ten or fifteen years from now, one of my players calls me up and tells me how successful they are and tell me that maybe we didn’t win a championship but you helped me become a better person.”
Referring back to those three games last year when he took over as interim head coach, Biladeau recalled a couple of special locker room moments.
“I remember after the Green Bay game last year, in the locker room, Lavar Stepter represented the team and presented me with the game ball and he said, ‘You turned us into men.’ That sticks more with me than actually winning the game. I remember Jordan Davis looked at me and he said, ‘You taught us how to be professionals.’ That is something that will stick with me. Winning championships is important, winning games are important, but how the guys respond to me is important too and what they think of me. My relationship with them, it’s not buddy-buddy but I’m their leader and there is some give and take that goes into it. Guys trust you and you can trust them. That’s the bottom line…we’re coaching players, we’re coaching people. That’s why I don’t yell or cuss. I respect them and hopefully they respect me.”
Turning our attention to the season at hand, I asked about his recruiting. Let’s face it, the new season starts as the old one finishes up. If you’ve ever been to ArenaCup you’ve seen the players, coaches, and league VIP’s working their networks’. That process builds and grows and eventually unfolds into a full recruiting season. However, Troy Biladeau was unemployed and not yet offered the position at the time ArenaCup took place and therefore was not present for the league’s prestigious event. So when he did get hired, he had his work cut out for him.
The league allows each team to bring thirty-five guys into camp. They also allow a team to work guys out on what they call ‘waivers.’ However coach Biladeau did not bring a full compliment of players to camp. Instead, he invited twenty-six and then added a few more once the AFL cuts were announced but never grew the roster above thirty. Therefore he never had to make first round cuts. He explains it this way. “You know, we’ve had guys flying in from California, Arizona, and Miami and we don’t pay their travel. I would never pay a player to play (outside the rules), I don’t believe in that. The fact is, after the first week, you have to cut five guys. After your second week, you get down to your twenty-two. So I don’t think it is really fair to ask a guy to buy a plane ticket from Miami and give him three days in pads. I want to make it fair to the players. That’s another thing too; hopefully the guys will have a good experience that play here. I want them to know that anything I say, I truly believe and if you don’t lie to them, hopefully they’ll become friends. They should know that whatever coach Biladeau says, that’s the truth. We’ve got a good coaching staff with coach King and coach Edwards and we have a good chemistry as a coaching staff. That’s something we want to get with the players.
I love recruiting. I really do my homework when I’m looking at a guy. I may have brought twenty-six guys into camp and added a few to get to thirty after the AFL cuts but I have the guys here that I wanted here. They have a chance to work hard, give it everything they have and get to know one another all throughout camp. I think that gives them the best chance to make this team and when camp breaks, I think we are in better shape to open our season than having guys in and out of camp and not being able to try and build that team chemistry.”
I found his insight very interesting and there is an advantage here too. As you introduce the playbook to the team, you do not have to revisit plays already put in just to catch the new guy up to speed. The flow of camp is less interrupted with this ideology of bringing in less than the maximum number of guys allowed. As a result, coach King had his basic offense installed in four days and about two thirds of the defense was installed. That’s not saying everything you have in your arsenal is installed but you don’t use everything in your arsenal on any given game either.
“Hammond Russell told me the other day, ‘dang coach, you sure aren’t the same guy you were on the phone,’” stated Biladeau with a grin. “I told these guys, I’m a nice guy on the phone, I’m a nice guy in person, but the minute we go between the white lines, it’s my show and you’ve got to do things the way I want them done. So I took that as a compliment when he said that.” They laugh about it but Hammond Russell knows as well as his teammate’s do that the discipline coach Biladeau talks about is real. The focus is real, the rules are real and winning and losing is real too.
Under his philosophy, coach Biladeau feels that all of it goes directly towards building team chemistry and character. When everyone is working on the same page, running in the same direction, not only will he instill some of life’s learned lessons but with it may very well come a championship.
Gary Stibolt has covered the Quad City Steamwheelers since their 2000 inaugural season. He also owns, operates and is the Chief Editor/Publisher of SteamwheelerFans.com, a website dedicated to the Steamwheelers and their fans. He coresponds for other media outlets covering arenafootball2. In addition to leading the Steamwheelers Fan Club, Gary serves as Coordinator of the National af2 Fan Club. He is married with two sons and works as an Infrastructure Analyst for Deere & Company in their Corporate Computer Center in Moline, Illinois.
