AURORA – In its second season, Golden is off to a 3-0 start for coach Jon Warga.
Warga’s work is recognized today as he has been named the Broncos Coach of the Week.
Throughout the season, there will be a Broncos Coach of the Week named each week for flag football and for tackle football.
Then, at every Broncos home game this season, during a pregame, on-field recognition ceremony, the Denver Broncos will celebrate a group of the Coach of the Week honorees.
Q&A with Jon Warga:
Q: How did you become a flag football coach, and how did you become the head coach at Golden?
My son wanted to play, and we had success initially. So we decided to take the most competitive route that flag offered, and created a tournament team, a traveling tournament team. We created a reputation for a successful team, and other kids wanted to be part of that. … The Golden athletic director approached me, and offered me the opportunity to coach at the high school level. … The opportunity to not only be part of the high school environment, but to also be able to start a program was very alluring for me.
Q: Do you have a particular coaching style or philosophy?
Competitive excellence is a motto we like to use. We want to be great on the field. We want to be great off the field. We want to be great in our preparation. We want to be elite at every aspect of the game. Everybody judges you by the product you put on the field, but the preparation that you put into it and the quality of preparation, we want to set the standard high, and then we want to shoot for competitive excellence across the board. Whether it’s our warm up, our training, our film review, our walkthrough before a game, we want all of it to be top notch.
Q: In your program’s first season last year, you started 0-3 and this year you’ve started 3-0. How big has the difference been from year one to year two?
A: You know, 3-0 feels a lot better than 0-3, I can tell you that. But that doesn’t come without dangers. It’s my responsibility to have us play every game, like we’re 3-0 and to complete every practice like we’re 0-3. That can be challenging. You can get ahead of yourself. You can start feeling overconfident, and it’s my responsibility to make sure that we stay humble, stay grounded, and approach every practice like we’re 0-3.
Q: After that 0-3 start last year, you finished with 10 wins. How have you carried that momentum into this season?
A: We had a high quality of athlete last year. It was year one, but I think a lot of kids didn’t know what to make of it. A lot of kids weren’t even aware that they had that opportunity. … But this year, the best athletes in the school came out, and that comes with pressure as well. You know, our expectation, whatever expectation we had coming into the season, we raised that level when the best athletes came out, because these kids came with tremendous success. Our lacrosse team finished second in the state, were a second away from winning state, and we have several lacrosse kids. Basketball had a fantastic season, and we have the entire starting five on our team. So we carry the expectations of these coaches and these kids and these parents that were part of these great runs for us to have that same success. And we take that seriously.
Q: What’s it like coaching this team from day to day?
A: The context for me comes in the off season. One of my goals was to talk to as many successful coaches as I could find. … One question among many that I asked is what’s your biggest concern heading into the next season? And it surprised me how many of them said, ‘We’ve got the talent, but I’ve got problematic kids, I’ve got kids that don’t get along each other, I’ve got parents that don’t get along with each other.’ They would list off this litany of things that were outside of football. And I thought to myself, ‘I don’t have a single one of those issues.’ I don’t have a problematic kid. I have high character kids. Every single kid that was eligible for honor roll last year, made honor roll. … I’m the head coach and the offensive coordinator, and that’s challenging at times. I’ve let the offense know that we need to collaborate. This isn’t me always telling you what to do … I require your collaboration and your feedback — and I get that from them. And I’ve got a tremendous senior group that has been amazing leaders. They set the tone. Instead of me running everything — weight training, drills, warm up — we have seniors that have put themselves into place to do that. I empowered them to do it, and they’ve done a great job.
