By Keith Grabowski | National Coach of the Week Series
Presented by Modern Football Technology
When Chris Greisen took over as head coach at West De Pere High School, he wasn’t looking for a clever slogan to plaster on locker room walls. He wanted a living standard — something his players could carry with them through every practice, classroom, and game.
That standard became four simple words: Grind. Responsibility. Intensity. Trust.
Together, they form the acronym G.R.I.T., and in West De Pere’s undefeated run this season, those letters have become the heartbeat of the Phantoms’ program.
“If I ask a kid in the hallway, ‘Got grit?’ he’d better know all four — or he’s doing pushups,” Greisen laughs. “But it’s not about memorization. It’s about living those values every day.”
Defining G.R.I.T.
Greisen and his leadership council created the acronym in 2021 after discussing what kind of players — and people — they wanted to become.
“I saw that word grit and thought, it’s kind of ambiguous,” Greisen recalls. “It can mean a lot of different things. So we sat down and defined it our way.”
They landed on a framework that drives everything the program does:
- Grind – Doing the ordinary things in an extraordinary way.
- Responsibility – Do your job. Do it right. Do it every time.
- Intensity – Flip the switch and compete with purpose.
- Trust – Play for each other, not just with each other.
Each pillar connects daily behavior to something bigger than football. “We’re not doing special drills that nobody else does,” Greisen says. “We’re just doing them better — because the small things matter.”
Culture in Action
It’s one thing to write a philosophy. It’s another to make 16-year-olds live it.
At West De Pere, G.R.I.T. shows up in small details: linemen grunting off the ball to remind themselves to fire with power, players holding each other accountable for knowing team standards, and coaches celebrating effort as much as execution.
Even service has become part of the culture. One of the team’s most valued staff members is a 68-year-old volunteer equipment manager who joined after retirement simply to give back.
“He’s the most petite guy out there, but he’s got the biggest heart,” Greisen says. “He’s a role model for our kids. He embodies service — that’s part of G.R.I.T., too.”
That combination of discipline, joy, and humility has become contagious. Players know what’s expected and what they’re part of. “Everyone’s all in,” Greisen says. “When your staff and your kids pull together like one fist, it changes everything.”
The Coaching Connection
Greisen’s football journey — from small-town Wisconsin quarterback to Northwest Missouri State national champion to NFL player — gave him plenty of technical knowledge. But his leadership roots come from watching great coaches build programs centered on people first.
He credits mentors like Mel Tjeerdsma and Jim Svoboda for shaping his understanding that systems are important, but culture wins first.
“Anytime a head coach gets honored, it’s really the collective body of work from the staff,” Greisen says. “Our guys put in countless hours. They’ve bought into the culture, and that’s why we’re where we are.”
What G.R.I.T. Looks Like on the Field
This fall, West De Pere’s results speak loudly: an undefeated regular season, playoff dominance, and a balanced offense that reflects their mindset. The Phantoms stretch better, drill harder, and finish every rep with intent.
Greisen believes that attention to detail — the “grind” part — shows up late in games and long seasons. “We tell our kids, the other team’s doing the same drills,” he says. “So we’d better do them better.”
Accountability runs deep. Every player knows the expectations, and every coach models them. “It’s Bill Belichick simple: do your job,” Greisen says. “That’s responsibility.”
Intensity, meanwhile, is practiced as a skill. “We teach our guys how to flip the switch,” he explains. “You can’t expect high school kids to just know how to do that — you have to train it.”
And trust, the final pillar, ties it all together. “When you play for your brothers, not just with them,” Greisen says, “you stop worrying about stats and start focusing on winning moments.”
A Model for Every Coach
For Greisen, G.R.I.T. isn’t just a catchy acronym. It’s a framework any coach can adapt.
“Culture can’t live on a poster,” he says. “It has to live in your people. Once everyone speaks the same language, you can build something lasting.”
That shared language — built on four simple, actionable ideas — has propelled West De Pere to one of the best seasons in school history. More importantly, it’s teaching young men how to handle challenges beyond the field.
Whether it’s a tough game or a tough day, they know the answer: Grind. Responsibility. Intensity. Trust.
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When Coach Greisen asks, “Got grit?” — they don’t hesitate.
They live it.
Related:
A Better Definition of Game Planning
Live the Standard: The Coach’s Role in Player Mindset
Podcast transcript
Keith Grabowski (00:01)
We’re back for another episode of National Coach of the Week and joining me this week is the head coach at West, Deep here, Chris, Greisen, Chris, congratulations on the honor and a great season thus far.
Chris Greisen (00:23)
Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it
Keith Grabowski (00:26)
So you guys have done a great job. Got through the regular season undefeated into the playoffs right now. ⁓ Before we got going, we mentioned before we have had Keegan Wurzger, defensive coordinator on the podcast before sharing his unique story about how his wife ⁓ is assisting him on game day with in-game analytics. I’ll link that one in the show notes for our listeners in case they missed it. you know.
Before we get going, do want to give you the opportunity. Obviously, this is a collective effort ⁓ to recognize the guys on your staff and your team.
Chris Greisen (01:00)
Well, you know, and you just mentioned it. mean, any time a head coach gets honored for coach of the year, that’s nothing but, you know, a collective, you know, body of work by your staff and support staff. And, you know, I think of all our coaches, I mean, you mentioned Keegan, our defense coordinator. He’s been with me since I took over here and has done a tremendous job. You know, we have a
guy by name of Matt Hanson who started as our freshman coach now he’s my right hand man on offense and our offensive line coach and helps me out a ton. ⁓ And then all the other guys that put in countless hours in preparing our kids. You know they jumped on board with the culture. You know I know we’ll talk about that a little bit later but everyone’s all in.
And then we have people too that, people that have come forward and asked to volunteer. You know, we have one guy on our staff. He’s our equipment manager. And the funny thing about that is he came to me and said, coach, I just retired. I’m 65 years old and I’d like to give back to the community through the football team. I said, well, I got a perfect job for you. And he’s been with us for three years now. So he’s, you know, 68 years old. He’s the Energizer bunny.
And he’s the most petite man, but he has the biggest heart. And he’s just all about service. And so, I mean, he’s one of the biggest role models for our kids as far as we always talk about like the four things in our program, the pillars, is we call it grit. And I’ll be honest, ⁓ the Detroit Lions stole it from us. We had it first. You know, Dan Campbell, okay? But no, we…
Keith Grabowski (02:52)
Ha
Chris Greisen (02:55)
I saw it a long time ago, it back in the spring of 2021. I saw that word and I was like, man, it’s kind of ambiguous. There’s a lot of different meanings behind it. And so we sat down at a leadership council and we ended up using it as an acronym. And what our kids came up with was grind, responsibility, intensity, and trust. So grind, responsibility, intensity, trust.
So we came up with that. All the kids had to memorize that. They have to know it. So if I say, got grit, if I ask them that question in the hallway, they better say those four things. Otherwise, they have pushups. so it just that accountability part of it. And then we defined each one of those because some people would argue that grinding the kids into the ground isn’t the best of things. And I would agree.
But that’s not grind to us. Grind is doing the ordinary things in an extraordinary way. Plain and simple simple. We’re not going to do any special drills, right? ⁓ I mean, everyone’s doing the same drills. And so I tell our kids, we got to stretch better than the other team this week. We got to do this drill, our ball security drill, because I know the other team’s doing it too. We have to do it better than they are.
Keith Grabowski (03:58)
Yeah, I love it.
Chris Greisen (04:20)
And so we just that’s our mindset every day of practice. I try to remind them, of course, they’re 15, 16, 17 year old kids, you know. But that’s, you know, that’s our grind responsibility. Do your job. That’s, you know, Bill Belichick simple. Just do your job. Everyone has a job. And then intensity, trying to teach them how to flip that switch. You know, playing in the NFL for a little bit and professional football and being around a college football like
You see guys able to flip the switch, but high school, they had to kind of have to talk to them about that. You got to train them a little bit. You got to be able to do that in the weight room. You know, teach them how to grunt. We had to teach our kids like literally how to grunt. And now when we hear our offensive line, get off the ball, that’s what they grunt, you know, and that’s part of our success. And then the last one is trust. And that for us define, we defined it as playing for each other, not with each other. Because if you play for a brother,
you’re playing for them, it’s a whole different ball game. And so, so that’s, those are the things for us that we do. And again, we’re mentioning my staff, all of them are on board and we’re just kind of like one fist together coaching these kids and the kids have bought in and it’s been a tremendous year so far.
Keith Grabowski (05:41)
Yeah, I love the acronym and what it stands for and that everybody needs to know it. That’s an important part. mean, know, as coaches can get a little bit crazy with the acronyms, but I think when you find something that everybody is locked in on and the meaning behind it, you go out and live it. Good things are gonna happen.
Chris Greisen (06:00)
Absolutely, absolutely.
Keith Grabowski (06:02)
So coach, you mentioned played in the NFL, offense is near and dear to your heart. We’d love to hear a little bit about your offense. You also came from an outstanding college football program in Northwest Missouri State, did some great things there as well. We’d just love to hear about the evolution and what you’ve brought to the high school level here.
Chris Greisen (06:23)
Yeah, so I’m going go back to college because I came from a high school team up in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin here. We ran the double tight eye, eye average throwing eight times a game. And so I tear my ACL, know, the good Lord bless me with tearing my ACL and I can say that now. But I went down to Northwest Missouri State with a guy by the name of Mel Churchma and Jim Sabota.
and two of the greatest coaches I’ve ever been around. And Jim Sabota was our offensive coordinator, and I learned so much from that man. And I learned about, because we had the number one offense my senior year, we ended up winning the national championship. I was fortunate to play quarterback for him. And what he taught me was that you have first opportunity as the offensive team to dictate to the offense. They always have to react to you.
So whether that’s through tempo, through shifting, motions, cadence, ⁓ all the different things, formations, ⁓ they have to ⁓ look at what you’re doing and then react. So they’re always reactionary. So ⁓ now some people would disagree. I know like a guy like Peyton Manning, he was tremendous. He didn’t want to move those guys. He just wanted to see it. Now there’s a guy that
Keith Grabowski (07:46)
Thank
Chris Greisen (07:50)
I mean, he’s he’s so high level, but if I can, you know, especially at the high school level as a coach, if I can put my player in through a formation or a shift or a motion, get him a wide open receiver. I’m going to do that, you know? And so I got into high school coaching. I was still playing professionally. I was playing arena football at the time. And I just loved coaching. I loved helping kids because I wanted to give back like Jim Sabota and so many other coaches did to me.
And so I started assistant coach. I was a quarterback coach and then I had a little bit of time of calling plays and then I got back into the NFL playing during the fall. But then eventually I retired and I started coaching assistant coach and then ended up becoming offense coordinator and I got to develop my own offense. And I remember we used to huddle. We then I went to wristbands. And because I wanted to.
get more tempo. And finally, I just said, you know what, even with wristbands, it was way too slow. It was restrictive. And so we ended up going to hand signals. Now, the one thing I would recommend to young coaches, if you’re looking to develop your offense, come up with words that actually have meaning. Because I was talking to some of my former athletes that have gone on to play college football, and they said, coach.
These offenses are so confusing. Like they just, they pick random words for the passing concept. And I just kind of chuckle. I’m like, yeah, to me, you need some sort of ⁓ device where like this word, if I use dagger, for instance, it starts with the letter D. Dagger is, well, it has some sort of dig route in
So we have like concepts that are dagger, ⁓ domino, dice, you know, so Dallas, you know, those are things that we have. if we want a, on the backside of things, if we want a double slant, well, we call that kiss because it has SS at the end. I’m going to tell you, you tell a high school kid that one time, they got it. They got it. And of course we do our signals. So,
I’m blowing a kiss. You know, like, ⁓ that makes sense. You know, so one thing I found out is number one, the kids get it quickly. The biggest pushback came from my coaches. When I first as an offensive coordinator, I decided to install this and the coaches like coach, there’s no way our kids would get it. And per coach, like every coach that
said it’s not going to work out came to me after the season. They said, coach, I was wrong. This is awesome. And it’s just simple. And I can call play and I get so many more plays in. Last game, for instance, now I will say sometimes you don’t get as many plays in because you’re so efficient. for instance, and some people would say that’s bad thing. But last game we were playing a team that tried to
ground you out and control the ball and their time of possession was like, I don’t know, in a high school game, 48 minutes, I think we had it for maybe 16. So I mean, was, you know, 28 minutes they had the ball more than we did. They had 74 plays, we had 51. We scored 42 points. You know, because it was just like this. And now that team that’s trying to ground it out,
Go ahead, you know, ⁓ because we’re able to score quickly. so, so my recommendation is, and we went to this, it was an evolution, eventually went to all signals. And then I told one of my assistants who I mentioned before, Matt Hanson, I said, hey, I’d like to go to some one word plays. And I don’t know how to do it. And he came to me, Keith, and said, hey, I think this system would work.
And we talked about it, we tweaked it. now, initially he said, coach, I’ll be honest, I don’t think, I think we might be able to do six, maybe eight. We have 19 one word plays that our kids know. And we practice it. And I will tell you, like, it’s not just being able to create the one word plays, but again, those devices, we have anything that we.
one word plays that are in that’s inside our body frame tells our receivers what to do. Anytime we have a signal outside our body frame, like, you know, I’m doing the Tomahawk shop. If I’m doing that, it’s outside my body frame. They have a different RPO. They have a different route. And it’s like, ⁓ that’s easy, you know. And so if you can find easy ways like that. my goodness, it is.
It has helped our offense, you know, our quarterback and he’s also my son. But our quarterback has thrown more touchdowns and more yards in consecutive years than any quarterback in the state of Wisconsin. It is amazing. He’s had two years of 40 plus touchdowns, over 3,000 yards per season. Last year he ended up at 3,800. Hopefully,
We play a couple more games. We’re in round three. We have round four, round five. So we have three more potential games to go. So who knows how high he can get, but it’s not about stats, obviously. But with this offense, we’ve been able to do a lot of different things. And the great thing too is our run game. Our run game, I mean, we had an all state running back in 2022 when we went to the state championship. Unfortunately we lost, but he was a stud, just an absolute stud.
And our guy this year has less touches, but he’s like within 100 and some yards of this stud, you know? And so we’re able to get a lot of plays, a lot of yards, a lot of points. And of course, offensively, that’s what you’re looking to do, you know? So we’ve been very blessed. We got some great receivers, some guys that have bought in. And of course, when you you’re winging around,
We got a lot of numbers, a of kids that want to catch the football. So that’s been a lot of fun.
Keith Grabowski (14:44)
Well, it’s easy to fall in love with plays. think especially today, know, Twitter X is just overrun with them and they all look great. I mean, it’s awesome to see a play that works well. Of course, nobody’s sharing the plays that don’t work well or how efficient any of those plays were. But all of this really boils down to not those plays, but how well you teach it. And that really goes to, do you understand your learners?
Chris Greisen (14:54)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Keith Grabowski (15:13)
The language you’re creating for them, the ways that they’re able to remember it, that’s what helps execution more than anything. That’s what allows them to play fast because they get it, they understand it, can go out and do it.
Chris Greisen (15:20)
Absolutely.
Well, you know, and you mentioned it you hear it from like Nick Sariani, who who got it from I forget the coach’s name at Mount Union. ⁓ Tremendous. Yeah, yeah. And ⁓ tremendous coach, right. And he used to say it’s it’s not plays, it’s players. Right. And so for us, like the reason why we tweaked our offense the way we did last year was we had we knew we had our quarterback coming in a kid that can process information quickly.
Keith Grabowski (15:34)
Yeah, Larry Karis.
Mm-hmm.
Chris Greisen (15:54)
He’s accurate, strong arm, and we had speed. We didn’t have a tight end. So we ended up taking a guy and making him like ⁓ a wing, a tight end slash H back and stuff like that. our primary ⁓ formation of personnel was 10 personnel. So you’re right, you take that. But again, you just try to make it as complex for the defense, but as simple for you.
And this is what I love doing. I’m a teacher here at Westy Pier and I teach math. And so like I, you know, I’ve found my passion in being able to take very difficult things and making them easy. And I think football is the same thing. You know, you take a difficult thing and you make it easy for the kids and then they see it like, whoa. And then, you know, it’s kind of cool. Also, people like, man, how do you run that offense? You know?
And it’s through the process of teaching and stuff. And certainly we’ve made mistakes, but you learn from those mistakes. And it’s been a tremendous ride so far. so hopefully we can go for another three games this year.
Keith Grabowski (17:07)
Yes, well, I appreciate you taking the time and give us some insight into it. We have to get back together with you in the off season, talk more about this offense and dig into some of these ideas. think just in what you’ve talked about here in the short time, you’re setting it up in a very sound way. So congratulations again on the honor of National Coach of the Week and best of luck to you and the Phantoms the rest of the way.
Chris Greisen (17:30)
Awesome. Thanks, Keith. I appreciate you having me on.