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Saturday, November 1, 2008
GRILL
Eastern Oklahoma, OK
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Morris Watts is the offensive coordinator and quarterback coach for the Broken Arrow Tigers. Having coached at every level Watts is the mind behind the offensive success for the Tigers.
How did Coach Lancaster bring up the idea of coming to Broken Arrow to you?
He and I went to college together at Tulsa. I was retired and had coached 43 years in mostly college and some in the USFL and NFL. I was retired and was starting to get bored and I was talking to him on the phone one day. He said, “I think I’m going to go back into coaching. Do you want to run my offense for me?” I was just so dang bored, not that I wouldn’t have done it if I wasn’t; I really needed to do something after all those years of working. I had fished and hunted for 3 years and it just wasn’t making me complete.
What was the initial reaction of your family and friends that you were coming out of retirement?
Well it didn’t surprise anybody. My wife could tell I was starting to get bored. She had been around me and I had worked all those years basically going to work at six o’clock in college and coming home at midnight. I just had been involved in everything and busy all the time. That it didn’t surprise her. I think when I retired she liked it because I had spent so many years doing other things and not having time to do a lot of things with her and family. She was excited about that part of it. But she understood that when you don’t have enough to do it can become very bored to you.
What was it like the first time you met your players at Broken Arrow?
You know what it was just fun to be back around the game and around coaches. I missed the association with players, the association with fellow coaches and when you’ve done something all your life it’s hard to all of a sudden to go cold turkey on something you’ve done all your life. It was exciting for me because I was back around the element that I basically missed so much.
Had you coached at high school before?
I coached high school my first three years and then I went to college.
When was that?
My first job was 1962 at Joplin High School.
How much has it changed?
High School ball has changed a lot from when I coached high school ball in ’62, ’63, and ’64.
You’ve coached at every level, pro, high school, and college, is there a level you enjoy the most?
I enjoy what I’m doing now. But I really enjoyed college. Although I did like the NFL, the guys you work for and the owner. But I like college ball and some of the elements of it. I always enjoyed recruiting until the end. That’s one of the things that probably got me to retire. As I got older that was so hard and so grueling that I really felt that I was going to have a hard time holding up my end of it. I could have withstood the hours of work with coaching itself but the recruiting thing is a grind. If you don’t really accept that grind and do a great job with it you’re not going to have good teams.
What is it like to be at a program that is trying to build a tradition in football like Broken Arrow?
I’ve had jobs in college that faced a lot of the same things that we face here where you try to build some tradition. For example, when I went to Indiana in 1973 they didn’t have a lot of football tradition there. It was really a basketball school so we had a lot of the same things we find here right now. Even though it’s another level there are still some of the same problems that we’re working our way through here. There’s not a whole lot of difference among the levels. A lot of the same problems present themselves at every level in this game.
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