Western New Mexico University Head Football Coach Frank Tristan
Newly hired as Western New Mexico University’s football coach, Coach Frank Tristan talks about climbing up the coaching ranks and explains why ‘enduring the boring’ leads to greatness.
credit: WNMU athletics
New challenges as a head coach
“For every program there’s a vision you have to have. There’s a whole new set of challenges with [being] a head coach. Probably the biggest challenge is the organization of everything, and then you’re the one to blame. I couldn’t blame anyone else when things weren’t going right. And so when we didn’t have the athletes I thought we needed, we had to go work harder and get them.”
“Great players make you a great coach. I love the organizational part of it and scheduling, and that was the biggest thing we needed to improve on.
Endure the boring to be great
“Be able to endure the boring. I’ve been preaching that to our coaches and players. It’s hard to endure the minutiae of life but in order to be great, you have to. There’s just things daily that you have to do in order to be the best.”
Be a coach and a mentor
“From 18 to 25 you’re going to decide a lot of who you are as a person. I parent my kids a lot like I watched my college coaches parent their kids. When we preach on recruiting we don’t really talk about the NAIA and the NCAA. We talk about…’Hey you’re going to an institution that you can’t really put a price tag on mentorship.’
I tell the players all the time…’Measure twice cut once.’ A lot of guys don’t, they just go after the first offer, especially late in the game.
We really want them to have a great experience at that place and also be mentored, we take that seriously. They’re paying for us to lead them essentially, so that’s a great responsibility.”
Listen to Coach Tristan’s episode here:
In this episode:
0:50 Transition from SAGU to WNMU
5:00 Treating players like family
10:00 Transition from high school to college coaching
12:00 Adjustments as head coach
15:00 Recruiting players to an NAIA school
18:00 Challenges competing in the Lone Star Conference
23:00 Coach Tristan’s mentors
26:15 What not to do as a coach
30:30 How the game has changed
32:15 What’s your motto for life?
