John Perry took over a Nixa program that had gone roughly 35-35 over six years, in a town where he knew nobody. Six years later it has lost three games in three seasons. The change that made it possible isn’t on a call sheet. It’s in what a Nixa player does the morning after he gets beat.
Somewhere around Perry’s third or fourth year at Nixa, someone asked one of the assistants he’d kept from the previous staff a simple question. What’s the biggest difference between Nixa football now and Nixa football before Coach Perry got here? Perry happened to be in the room, not in the conversation, just close enough to hear.
“He didn’t even think about it,” Perry said. “He said, ‘Man, the kids aren’t scared to fail.'”
That is a strange answer if you think about what the assistant could have said instead. He’d watched the program go from a five- or six-year stretch at .500 to a team that has lost ten or eleven games total in six seasons, three in the last three years, that hasn’t lost a home game since October 2022, and that has played in the last two Missouri state championship games. He could have pointed to the offense, the weight room, the coaching staff, the schedule, the tempo. He pointed to a feeling in the players.
I think it’s the most useful thing in the whole conversation, because of what it implies about the program Perry inherited. What his examples suggest changed is what failure felt like inside the program. Perry talks about players getting “hung up with negative thoughts” and having their minds “hijacked in the middle of a game,” and about coaches who respond to a bad night by making excuses and blaming somebody. Those are the habits of people who are protecting themselves from a miss, and my read of everything Perry describes is that they grow in a specific place: the gap between what a program says it wants and what actually happens to a kid when he falls short.
Perry’s rebuild at Nixa reads as a case study in closing that gap on purpose. He calls the whole thing “the great experiment,” because the question he was testing was whether the culture he’d built at Pearl High School in Mississippi could be built somewhere with none of his relationships and none of his leverage. “In Pearl, Mississippi, me and the superintendent were best friends. I coached the mayor,” he said. “Could we take everything we had learned in athletics and go do the same thing somewhere where we knew absolutely nobody?”
The experiment worked. What follows is the mechanism, and it comes down to one standard that Perry never states as a rule but enforces more consistently than any rule in his program. At Nixa, the standard isn’t that you don’t get beat on Monday. It’s what you do by Tuesday.
Belief has to be carried alone first
Start where Perry starts, which is before any of the players are in the room.
His two mentors are Bobby Hall and Marcus Bowles, who he’ll tell you are two of the greatest high school coaches ever to walk a sideline in Mississippi, each with 350 wins. When people ask him what made them special, his answer has nothing to do with what they ran.
“The special trait was they had belief power times two,” Perry said. “They believed they were going to win every single game they ever coached in. When they walked into a program, the other people didn’t believe, but they believed exponentially more than everybody else. And belief is transferable.”
So on his first day at Nixa, in the library, in front of the returning staff, the first slide Perry put up was the vision: be the best program in the state of Missouri and intentionally build leaders. He could see what the room thought of it.
“I could see the coaches that I kept kicking each other under the table, giggling. Like, yeah, right,” he said. “They didn’t believe. But they didn’t have to believe. At first, you just gotta believe. The only thing they need to know is that you sincerely believe that. And then you just go to work.”
That’s an important distinction for anyone taking over a program. The temptation is to chase buy-in on day one and spend the first month selling. Perry didn’t ask for agreement. He asked for nothing except that the room understand he meant it, and then he let the work do the convincing.
It also connects directly to the assistant’s answer, which is why it belongs at the front of this piece. A player can tell when a coach’s belief is contingent on results. When the head coach only believes after a win, the players learn that belief is something you earn by not failing, and a kid who thinks he has to earn his coach’s belief is a kid who is scared to fail. Perry’s belief wasn’t contingent on anything. It was there before the first practice, and it stayed there through two state championship losses. Players who grow up inside that kind of belief don’t have to protect themselves from it.
Don’t assume they know what the standard is
The second thing Perry did was refuse to leave the standard implied.
“I think more people lose games than win games,” he said. “So we’re more concerned about the behavior skills with which they play football games.”
Nixa has a mission statement that fits in a sentence: play football to be a source of pride for their family, their community, and their school. Underneath it are five core values, one per weekday. Monday is family. Tuesday is hard work, “because there’s no makeup for that.” Wednesday is commitment, Thursday is positive attitude, Friday is tough. That part isn’t unusual. Plenty of programs have five words on a wall.
What matters is that Nixa doesn’t leave those words on the wall. It teaches each one, every week, as a lesson. What does family look like in your personal life? What does it look like in this program? Perry’s reasoning is blunt.
“We can’t leave things to chance. Okay, we gotta be a family. Well, what’s that mean? What’s that look like? How are they supposed to know? What if they don’t have a great family?”
Read that last question again, because it’s the one that separates a coach who teaches a standard from a coach who assumes one. A player who has never been shown what “family” or “tough” or “commitment” looks like in practice can’t meet the standard, and worse, he can’t tell whether he’s meeting it. He’s guessing, and guessing at an invisible standard with a coach watching is exactly the kind of uncertainty Perry is trying to eliminate.
So Perry makes the standards visible and keeps them short. “I’m not a rule guy,” he said. “I don’t really believe in all that crap.” Standard number one is show up, with a rule of thumb attached that every player in the program can repeat: if your head lays down in Nixa, Missouri to go to bed, you’re at Nixa football the next morning. Out of town on a family trip or a church commitment, fine. That’s not the standard. Be an encourager. Be a team-first guy. That’s most of the list.
“What’s it gonna take to be a successful husband one day, to be a successful father, to be a successful human?” he said. “And guess what? It takes the same thing it takes to be a great Nixa Eagle. You gotta be family-oriented, hardworking, tough, you gotta be able to commit to something and show up. And having an attitude is always our choice.”
A short, taught, visible standard is the second piece of the fear equation. Belief tells the kid the coach is on his side. The standard tells him exactly what’s expected. Neither one, by itself, tells him what happens when he misses. That’s the third piece, and it’s the one that matters most.
Screaming teaches screaming
Perry is direct about the coach he used to be. “I was an idiot,” he said. “I’m a reformed idiot.”
The reform has a date on it. Five years ago, after COVID, he started getting phone calls from parents asking him to talk to their sons, and he didn’t feel equipped to help. So he went and got certified in mental performance coaching through Brian Cain. Since then Nixa has taught mental performance lessons to its players and, deliberately, to its parents, on the theory that nobody influences a kid more than the people he goes home to. The program is now in its third year with its own performance coach on staff. “How many high schools have that?” Perry asked. “Well, we have that.”
The through-line of all of it is what happens to a Nixa kid in the moment after he fails, and Perry’s view on that has hardened into something close to a law.
“I heard Urban Meyer say one time, and it might have been on your podcast, that the louder you scream, the more you tell everybody you have no idea what you’re doing,” he said. “We’re not a screaming program. I’m not a screaming person. I’m trying to change lives. You know how you change lives screaming at somebody? All you’re doing is telling them you don’t know what you’re doing. That goes for being a father. If all you’re gonna do is sit around and yell at your kids, what are you teaching them? To be a screamer.”
Strip the emotion out and it’s a coaching argument, not a soft one. Perry’s point is practical. Once a player goes into what he describes as “fight, flight, or freeze,” the correction itself can get lost. Instead of learning from the mistake, the player may start learning to avoid the response that comes with making one. That’s the opposite of what the assistant coach noticed in Nixa’s players, and Perry’s line about parenting makes the same point from the other side: yell at your kids and all you teach them is to be a screamer.
Which is why the thing Nixa actually praises is so specific.
The next-day standard
Two things happened in the same week of summer practice this year, and together they show the standard more clearly than anything Perry could put on a slide.
Missouri gives teams twenty practice days in the summer. On a Monday, the Nixa offense got its butt kicked. An hour after practice, Perry’s quarterback sent him a text.
“He said, ‘Coach, my bad today. That’s on me. We weren’t very good as an offense. I can promise you tomorrow we’re gonna be better,'” Perry said. “He wasn’t the problem. He wasn’t the problem. But what he is, is a level five leader.”
On Tuesday, Perry read the text to the team. “Praise what you want repeated,” he said. “I’m like, dude, this is it. This is what we’re about.” The offense had one of its best practices of the summer that afternoon.
Same Monday, a different player. It was hot, hotter than Missouri usually gets, and a kid went down and took himself out of practice. Perry was furious, and he says so. He also says what he didn’t do: “I didn’t embarrass him too bad.” The next day, the same player asked if he could address the team.
“He says, ‘Man, look, I let y’all down. I let my mind get the best of me. It’s not gonna happen again. I’m going to show up for you guys, because I was selfish,'” Perry said. “He addressed it himself. He didn’t even have to have anybody call it out.”
Look at what those two stories have in common and you’ll see the real standard at Nixa. Nobody got praised for a good Monday. The bad one drew a furious head coach who, by his own account, held back. The quarterback owned a failure that wasn’t even his. The other player stood up the next day and named his mistake before anyone could name it for him. And what Perry chose to amplify, loudly and in front of everybody, was the response. “Praise what you want repeated.”
That’s the next-day standard, and it’s the mechanism behind the assistant coach’s answer. A Nixa player isn’t scared to fail because failing on Monday isn’t the thing that gets judged. What gets judged is what he does by Tuesday. The program has taken the one moment a scared player dreads, the moment after the mistake, and turned it into the moment where he gets to show who he is.
It works because of the three pieces underneath it. Belief that doesn’t move with the scoreboard, so the player knows the coach is with him before and after the miss. A standard short enough and taught clearly enough that he knows exactly what he missed. And a response to the miss that keeps his brain out of fight-or-flight long enough for him to own it, so that the next day, owning it is something he can be proud of instead of something he’s hiding from.
Perry puts it in the language he borrowed from Brian Kight, which every Nixa player learns: E plus R equals O. The event plus the response equals the outcome. “I understand what I do control, what I don’t control,” he said. A bad Monday is an event. Nixa spends its time on the R.
“We are a leadership training program that just so happens to play football,” Perry said. “We’re gonna try to play football as best we can. But we understand there’s a bigger picture.”
Teach them how to call it out
There’s one more piece, and it’s the one most coaches skip. A next-day standard only works if the players will hold it for each other, and Perry’s experience is that players won’t do that well unless they’re taught how.
He starts with the juniors and seniors in a team room and an open whiteboard. What are the results we want? A coach writes down whatever they say. Then, back one step: what are the behaviors it takes to get those results? Back one more: what are the behaviors that will keep us from getting there? Selfishness, if the goal is to be a team-first program. Now the group has agreed, in its own words, on what has to get addressed.
“Then we go as far as teach them how to call it out,” Perry said. “They don’t know. If you tell a good kid, ‘Man, be a leader and call it out,’ what are they gonna do? They’re gonna cuss him out, demean him, embarrass him. Now, if you do that to me, my brain’s fixing to go fight, flight, or freeze.”
So Nixa runs scenarios, on paper. A teammate pulls out a phone in the film room. What do you do? The answer the team practices: you handle it yourself, either right then, quietly, or after the meeting. “‘Hey man, we don’t do that here. We’re trying to get better, we’re trying to watch this film, so next time let’s just leave it up.’ Be as nice as you can be. Don’t call him out, don’t embarrass him. That’s not the way anybody learns in 2026.”
Perry has a phrase for the whole approach, and it’s a correction to one of the most overused phrases in coaching.
“Everybody says they want to be a player-led team,” he said. “How about being a coach-fed, player-led team? A team that the coach feeds the players into how to be it. We just want them to be a player-led team without any instruction. That don’t make no sense.”
The accountability piece is the same next-day standard applied sideways. A player who knows his teammate will pull him aside privately, and give him a chance to fix it, has no reason to fear being called out. A player who expects to be embarrassed in front of the room will hide his mistakes from his teammates the same way he’d hide them from a screaming coach. Perry’s comparison is to the one relationship where most men already accept it. “Your wife has the right to hold you accountable. You may not always like it, but you respect it. We want our teammates to be the same way.”
Nixa now delivers all of this as an eight-week summer curriculum. Perry took Brian Kight’s material, fed it through an AI tool, and built eight lessons that walk from how a leader creates culture, to how culture drives behavior, to how behavior produces results, to how results reinforce the cycle, ending with what chasing excellence looks like as a lifestyle rather than a scoreboard. Over the twenty summer days, one day teaches a core value and the next teaches a leadership or mental performance lesson. “We’re trying to put kids out there that can make great decisions and play freely,” Perry said, “and not get hung up with negative thoughts. We’re not gonna have their mind hijacked in the middle of a game.”
Where Perry learned it
Perry didn’t invent this at a clinic. He learned the principle underneath it at nineteen, with his dorm key already turned in.
Two weeks into his freshman season at Hinds Community College in Mississippi, in 1989 or 1990, he wanted out. Three-a-days, a coach he thought was nuts, a girlfriend who’d just broken up with him, and a best friend and roommate who had called his own dad, been told to come on home, and gone. Perry lasted another day or two, then walked into Coach Murphy’s office, turned in his key, and called his father to say he was coming home.
“He said, ‘Son, you can quit if you want to, but you’re not welcome here. Find you somewhere else to live.’ And he hung up,” Perry said. “If you knew my dad, you’d know he wasn’t joking.”
So Perry sat in a dorm room with no key and nowhere to go, and then walked right back over to the coach’s office. “I said, ‘Coach, I had a brain fart. I don’t really want to quit. Can I have my key back, please?'” He got it back. He became an all-state player at Hinds, transferred to Harding University, and met his wife there. “None of that happens if my dad says, ‘Come on home.'”
There was no next day in that story. The whole thing turned around inside of an hour. But the shape is the same one Nixa is built on. The failure was real: he quit. His father refused to make it comfortable and refused to make it final, and Perry walked back in and owned it himself, before anyone came looking for him. The rest of his life ran through that office door. He’s told the story a thousand times in Dr. Rob Gilbert’s classes at Montclair State, and it’s the spine of the book he finally wrote, Never Stop Getting Better, twenty-one chapters, each one a story, mostly about something he got wrong, the lesson, and a challenge for the reader. The lesson from this one is the same one he’s built Nixa around.
“If you don’t quit, you can’t fail. It’s impossible,” he said. “In Kobe Bryant’s language, failure’s not even a word. The only way you fail is to quit.”
What this changes about your program
If you take over a program that’s been living at .500, the tempting read is that you need better players or a better scheme. Perry’s experiment suggests a different first question: what does a mistake cost a kid in your program right now? If the honest answer is that it costs him getting screamed at, or being called out in front of a room that was never taught the standard in the first place, then you may have found part of what’s keeping your players tight, and it isn’t on the depth chart.
Changing that doesn’t take a mental performance coach, although Nixa has one. It takes three things you control completely. Believe before anyone else does, and don’t let the belief move with the scoreboard. Teach the standard instead of assuming it, and keep it short enough that a fifteen-year-old can recite it. And move the moment of judgment from the mistake to the morning after. Praise the recovery louder than you punish the miss, and then teach your players to do the same thing for each other, privately, with a script, so that accountability feels like family instead of fight-or-flight.
Do that consistently and, somewhere down the road, an assistant will get asked what changed. He won’t say the offense.
Perry has one more challenge, and he gives it to every room he speaks to. One percent of a twenty-four-hour day is fourteen minutes and twenty-four seconds. When he asks how many coaches in an audience of five hundred are readers, he might get ten hands, and the reason the other 490 give is that they don’t have time.
“Bullcrap,” he said. “You don’t have fourteen minutes and twenty-four seconds? What time do you normally set your alarm for? Six o’clock. Set it for 5:45. Wake up, read for fourteen minutes and twenty-four seconds, and then do it the next day. And then do it the next day.”
He’s been doing it himself for eighteen years, up at five every morning, an hour of reading before anything else, thousands of books. It’s the next-day standard applied to a coach instead of a player. Nobody is judging today. The only question is whether you show up tomorrow.
Connect on X:
Keith Grabowski: @CoachKGrabowski
John Perry: @jperry_nixa
Signature Championship Rings: @signaturerings
Presented by Signature Championship Rings
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Keith Grabowski (00:01.557)
Welcome to another episode of Champions on the Coaching Coordinator Network. And we’re we’re back with a guest we had on in 2018, a state champion at that time from Mississippi, Pearl High School in Mississippi. He is now the head coach at Nixa High School in Missouri. Have always had great conversations with him, really aligned, I think, in how we think about culture and leadership and all those things. And that’s John Perry, head coach at Nixa. John, great to have you back on the podcast.
John Perry (00:29.9)
Thank you, Keith. And I would say this before we get started, man, I appreciate what you do for coaches. I don’t know that there’s anybody, you know, in recent time that’s done as much to promote, you know, our our sport, high school football more than you. And I, you know, I really appreciate that.
Keith Grabowski (00:46.933)
Thank you, John. I appreciate you saying that. So I I wanna get everybody caught up. Eight years is a long time. I mean, it’s really flown. I I s I I couldn’t believe when I looked at it, I’m like, wow, this is the tenth year of the podcast. Like, makes you feel old. I was saying, you know, you and I have a lot more white on on our faces than we did before, but
John Perry (01:00.578)
Yeah, for sure.
John Perry (01:05.548)
No doubt.
Keith Grabowski (01:07.017)
You know, let let’s catch up. I mean, you went from Pearl where you won a state championship and had an opportunity in Missouri and you guys are I mean, didn’t get one there yet, but you’re knocking on the door quite a bit.
John Perry (01:17.666)
You know, it it was six years ago we we took a trip up here to
check out the school, had never really been to Missouri, but a friend of mine, Jamie Mitchell, who’s won several state championships and had gotten twenty five years in in Mississippi. Then he went to Arkansas, got in five years at Little Rock, in Little Rock, and then he was looking to make a third state, a third retirement check, and he had interviewed for the job, wasn’t gonna take it on his second interview, and we were friends. He called and said, I think it would be good for you, which I had no intentions of leaving Mississippi. I was coaching at
at you know my high school, Pearl High School. And but me and my wife took a trip. We really liked it. They were building a nineteen million dollar theater at the time. My son was gonna be a eighth grader moving into ninth grade theater star and it was just kind of weird and we prayed about it and we made the move. And you know, I will say this like it has been phenomenal. Like it has been, you know, just from the in in my book I title it, you know, The Great Experiment because, you know, like
what the question was, could we do what we did at Pearl?
somewhere else without knowing anybody. You know, in Pearl, Mississippi, man, like me and the superintendent was best friends. I coached the mayor. You know, like there were things you could manipulate in that city that was for my benefit. But could we take everything that we had learned in athletics and go do the same thing somewhere where we knew absolutely nobody, you know, and they had just come out of a five or six year run where they were, you know
John Perry (02:53.407)
fifty percent at best. I mean, you know, somewhere around thirty-five and thirty-five, and you know, we have in six years. I think we’ve lost a grand total of ten or eleven games. You know, we’ve lost three in the last three years. Haven’t lost a home game since October of twenty twenty-two. And we have played for the last two state championships and we have lost the last two state championships. But, you know, like we have an outstanding community, an outstanding school
And you know what a blessing it has been, man, to be able to come into a place, play a small part in changing the entire identity and culture of the place. You know, our vision has been the same thing it’s always been, and that’s to be the best program in the state of Missouri and intentionally build leaders. And we are, you know, every single day of our life trying to do that. So it’s been a lot of fun. We haven’t completed the objective yet, but we are headed that direction.
Keith Grabowski (03:54.537)
Yeah, well let’s let’s dig into that experiment a little bit because I think that’s that’s something a a lot of coaches do. You have a success at one place and and then taking it to another and especially if that place maybe isn’t like you said, you took over a five hundred club and and have brought to the state championship two years. Have have won a lot of football games.
what are some of the keys, I guess, to translating that from one place to another? Because this still is a very dynamic process. I think foundationally there’s things that fed. Was talking er earlier today to John Harbaugh, head coach of the New York Giants, about kind of a similar thing. Like how do you move it from a place where you were a long time with the Baltimore Ravens and had a ton of success to moving it over to the New York Giants? so whether it’s at the NFL level or the
high school level. We have to be able to do that. So what were the keys for you? What made that experiment work that when you were able to take what you did at one place and translate it to another place?
John Perry (05:00.749)
I think there’s a little bit of
relationship to leadership just in general, right? Like level one leadership is you have to lead yourself first. So I think number one, you have to have this belief that’s exponentially greater than other people. So you know two of my mentors are Bobby Hall and Marcus Bowles. They’re two of the greatest high school football coaches to ever walk the sidelines in Mississippi. They’ve both won 350 games and when people ask me what was special about them, the special trait was they
had belief power times two. Like they believed they were gonna win every single game they ever coached in. Like their belief was so strong that when they walked into a program, the other people didn’t believe, but they believed exponentially more than everybody else, and belief is transferable. So number one, you know, when you walk into Nixon, Missouri and you walk into the library for the introduction, you know, the first slide you put up there is the vision of the program here.
Because you just learned there’s a process. The vision is we’re going to be the greatest program in the state of Missouri and we’re going to intentionally build leaders. And I could see, I could see the coaches, you know, that were at Nixa, that I kept at Nixa, I could see them kicking each other under the table, like giggling, like, yeah, right. You know what I mean? Like they didn’t believe. But they didn’t have to believe. Right. At first, you just gotta believe. So the only thing that they need to know is that you sincerely believe that.
They don’t have to believe. And then you just go to work. And for us, it is creating a mission statement that, you know, like we’re going to play football in Nixon, Missouri to be a source of pride for our family, our community, and our school. Period. That’s why we’re going to collectively play as a unit. And then everything we’re going to do is gonna build off of that. We’re gonna have core values and we’re gonna have five. There’s one per day. And we’re going to teach them everything that they need to know to go out there and play the game the right way.
John Perry (07:02.863)
Right. We’re not going to take for granted that they know how to play. You know, like I think more people lose games than win games. So like we’re more concerned about the behavior skills of which they play football games. So if a core value is for Monday, is family, what does it mean? Like we’re going have a lesson every week about what does that look like in our personal life? What does it look like in our program? Tuesday’s going to be hard work because there’s no makeup for that, right?
Right? I don’t care what you do. Like, if you don’t work hard, you’re gonna get your butt kicked. You know, number three is commitment Wednesday. Number four is positive attitude, Thursday, number five is tough. Right? And so like we intentionally teach those core values. And then, you know, we go to work on what are the standards? And we don’t have a lot. Like, man, I’m a very simple, I scored an 18 on ACT, right? So I’m not that smart. But what I have learned to do is.
Wake up and be the best I can be today, right? That’s it. I’m not worried about tomorrow. I’m not worried. Like, how can we be great today? Well, being great today just means that I’m gonna try to push myself to be, you know, 1% better. And so our standards are very simple. Show up. That’s standard number one. Just be here, right? And our rule of thumb is this: if
Your head lays down in Nixon, Missouri to go to bed, then you are to be at football the next morning. Simple. Now, if you’re out of town on a vacation or you’re out of town on a church, okay. That’s not the standard. The standard is you go to bed in Nixon, you wake up at Nixon football. You know what I mean? Like, be an encourager, be a team first guy. Like, we just have a few. We don’t have a whole lot, right? We don’t have a lot of rules. Like, I’m not a rule guy. Like, don’t I don’t really believe in all that crap, man. Like, what I want them to do is live to a certain
Standard and the standard for me is simple. What’s it gonna take to be a successful husband one day, to be a successful father, to be a successful human? And guess what? It takes the same thing it takes to be a great Nixon Eagle. You got to be family oriented, you got to be hardworking, you gotta be tough, you got to be able to commit to something and freaking show up. You know what I’m saying? And then having an attitude is always our choice, right? So we’re gonna we’re gonna teach them, like we’re gonna teach them, we’re have
John Perry (09:21.163)
A mental performance coach. I got mental performance certified five years ago because I didn’t feel good enough about helping the kids post COVID when I got the phone calls from parents about can you talk to my kid, man? Like he’s depressed. He’s he’s sad. He’s so I went and got certified through Brian Kane. And since that time, we’ve taught our parents mental performance lessons because who influences your kids more than you? Your parents. We’ve taught our kids. Now we’re into year three of having our own performance.
Performance coach, how many high schools have that? Well, we have that, and we are intentionally teaching our kids how to run this system in their head. So you fast forward to one of the guys, one of the coaches I kept, you know, this was a couple years ago. Somebody asked him, and I just happened to be in the room. I wasn’t in the conversation, but I heard it. Somebody asked him, What’s the biggest difference between Nix of football today and Nix of football today?
You know, before Coach got here. And he didn’t even think about it. He said, Man, the kids aren’t scared to fail.
Period. Right? They’re not scared to fail. Like we’re we we’re gonna try to teach them the little micro lessons that they need to know again to be successful in life, and changing your relationship with failure is a must. Changing the way you coach kids is a must. You know, I heard Urban Meyer say one time, and it might have been on your podcast to be honest with you, that the louder you scream, the more you tell everybody you have no idea what you’re doing. Like we’re not a screaming pro. I’m not a screaming.
Keith Grabowski (10:52.531)
Mm-hmm.
John Perry (10:54.425)
Person. Man, I’m trying to change lives, right? You know how you change lives screaming at somebody? All you’re doing is telling them you don’t know what the crap you’re doing. That goes for being a father. If all you’re gonna do is sit around and yell at your kids, you’re not teaching them nothing. What are you teaching them? To be a screamer, right? Like you’re not now. Okay, fast forward, like I’ve become this. I was not this. Like I was an idiot. I’m a reformed idiot. You know what I’m saying? But when I come into Nixon, Missouri, that’s where we started, man. We started with the basics. What are we gonna stand for? And then what we’re
Not gonna do, and this is the Brian Kite in me because thank God I run across him and his dad. You know what? I ran across him and his dad at a USA football clinic ten or twelve years ago. Well, thank God, because now I know, man, we can’t leave things to chance. You know, like we can’t, okay, like we gotta be a family. Well
Keith Grabowski (11:33.684)
Yeah.
John Perry (11:45.058)
What’s that mean? What’s that look like? Like how are they supposed to know? What if they don’t have a great family? You know, like how are we supposed to, you know, and I’ve sat around and listened to coaches complain. And I don’t I’m not saying you would do this, but I’m saying this is this is pretty, pretty general in that you can be the offensive coordinator and you can go out there and the game don’t go your way. And I still say nine out of ten coaches are gonna go make up an excuse as to why it didn’t happen.
They’re gonna go blame somebody. What they’re not gonna do is walk back in the office and have a level five leadership mentality. Man, I jacked that up. I’m gonna be better. You know, and to me,
That’s where it all starts, right? That’s the way we’re gonna walk in our program. And, you know, to fast forward this week, we get 20 days in the summertime to practice in Missouri. Monday, we got our butts kicked on offense. My quarterback, one hour later, text me. He said, Coach, my bad today. He said, That’s on me. We weren’t very good as an offense. I can promise you tomorrow we’re gonna be better. He wasn’t the problem.
He wasn’t the problem. But what he is, is a level five leader. Because you go back to what’s our vision? We’re gonna be the best program in the state of Missouri and we’re gonna intentionally build leaders. He’s a level five leader. You know what I’m saying? Like he took responsibility and then Tuesday we roll up. I use him as an example, right? Praise what you want repeated. And I’m like, dude, this is it. You know what I mean? Like this is what we’re about, you know? And then we go out there Tuesday and offense kicks that butt. You know, but that to me is what our program is, man. Like we are a
Keith Grabowski (12:55.455)
Yes.
John Perry (13:15.733)
leadership training program that just so happens to play football. You know, and we’re gonna try to play football as best we can, but you know, like we understand there’s a bigger you know, and I would say this, Keith, I and I this is just me and this is where I’ve come to in my life. I’m a hundred percent sure that when I get to the Pearlie Gates, God’s not gonna ask me what my record is. That’s not gonna be a topic of conversation. So if you’re out there, you know, trying to win every single game to boost your record and your ego and your status, you know, there might be a day where you’re gonna be disappointed.
Keith Grabowski (13:36.82)
Mm-hmm.
John Perry (13:45.647)
disappointed when don’t get to talk about it with nobody because I don’t think nobody’s gonna care.
Keith Grabowski (13:49.663)
No doubt. No doubt. Yeah. It and it was. It was two thousand, I believe it was two thousand eighteen or maybe beginning in nineteen. ‘Cause I mean, going b I was trying to think about how how even did I get Brian on the first time? And it was kinda this all starts with Rick Jones, who’s now at Missouri, assistant assistant to Eli Eli Drinkwitz. And you know
John Perry (14:11.445)
I love him. We’re good friends.
Keith Grabowski (14:18.258)
Even before that, it was it was like a few different guests over the country. Like, you gotta talk to Rick Jones. And like by the third time I heard it from like
Guys who weren’t even in Arkansas. I’m like, I gotta get this Rick Jones guy on So Rick became a friend and it’s like, You gotta get Brian Kite on. And I’m like, I haven’t heard Brian Kite. And so then I got Brian on and then Brian I was just telling him the other day, like went through and counted it. I think I had hit I’ve had him on the podcast forty-eight times. Like we you know, we guest guest hosted a series together, I think four years in a row and and yeah, we partnered with Brian I I after that initial one, I I brought what they do with Tim.
John Perry (14:31.841)
No doubt.
John Perry (14:46.048)
Wow.
Keith Grabowski (14:57.494)
And Brian, we’re doing a Timeless Focus 3 to our leadership team. Like we we need to be involved with this group. And you know, that’s where it grew from there. So certainly what they do really, I think, has had an impact on football and leadership and culture. And just they have good systems for teaching it. And it’s, you know, I’m sitting there listening to you talk about the things you’ve done. And I mean, there’s you could you could hear it we.
through what you do as well. And one of those things that came up and I think it’s such an important thing, like you did talk about belief. It starts with belief. Here’s what we believe.
But those better translate to behaviors. And that’s what you also talked about there too. Was this is about not just guys we’re gonna believe in this, but that there is something tangible, identifiable, something that can be evaluated and be given feedback on that this is how we behave in our program in order to accomplish that. And I think I think that’s maybe where
Things missed for a lot of people as they’re building the culture is that the behaviors aren’t there to support it. They always have to be. Those things better be detailed out. And you know, those behaviors will create the outcome. Or as as Brian said, you know, that those behaviors are your culture. As much as you want to believe something, whatever’s happening within your program, that that’s your culture. That’s what you actually see.
John Perry (16:26.635)
Yeah. For sure. And I would say this, Keith, you know, like where we start now is we’ll take our juniors and seniors up into a team room and we’ll just have an open conversation. And it’s on our board right now. We just leave it up. I ask them, I say, what are the results that you want? What are the results that we want in this program? And I have a coach just start writing. Whatever comes out of their mouth. We just write the results. I say, okay, now, and this is using Brian Kite stuff. Let’s go back one step. What are the behaviors we have to act like to get that?
Keith Grabowski (16:50.229)
Yep.
John Perry (16:54.645)
And we just start listing them out. These are the behaviors. Then we go back one more step. What are the behaviors that will keep us from doing that? And we list those out. And now we say, okay, if that will keep us from doing this, all right, if that behavior, being selfish, will keep us from being a team first guy, then we’ve got to be willing to address that. Right? We gotta be good enough about ourselves, be a functional enough human that if I see it.
I call it out. And then we go as far as teach them how to call it out. They don’t know. Like if you tell a good kid, man, be a leader and call it out, what are they gonna do? They’re gonna cuss them out, they’re gonna demean them, they’re gonna embarrass them. Now, I don’t know about you, but me, if you do that to me, man, my brain’s fixing to go fight, flight, or freeze. Like you’re fixing to like, you know. So we teach them. We have a little document that says, okay, this is what it is. A guy brings out a cell phone in a film room.
Keith Grabowski (17:28.799)
Yes.
John Perry (17:52.034)
What do you do? And we go over, you know, like you address it immediately, or like, you know, like just you and him, you pull him to the side or you wait till the meeting’s over with and you say, hey man, you know, we don’t do that here. Like we we we’re trying to get better, we’re trying to watch this film, we’re trying to so you know, next time let’s just leave it up. Be as nice as you can be, but like don’t call them out, don’t embarrass them. Don’t that’s not the way anybody learns in 2026. So we go through all these different scenarios because if if we know what will keep us from getting what we want.
then we’ve gotta hold the standard. And it can’t be just me, right? That’s ridiculous. Like it can’t be and everybody says they wanna be a player led team. Well that
I mean, how about being a coach fed player-led team? How about being a team that the coach feeds the players into how to be it? Because we just want them to be a player-led team without any freaking instruction. That don’t make no sense, right? Like, don’t make no sense. So we we try to be as elementary as possible, but in a manner that they understand and then they can all hold each other accountable because, you know, go back to core value number one. In your family, my guess is
Keith Grabowski (18:43.232)
Yeah.
John Perry (18:59.939)
Is your wife has the right to hold you accountable, right? Like, and you respect that to some extent. You may not always like it, but you respect it. And so we want our teammates to be the same way. Like, call me out, man, if I’m not getting it right. You know what I mean? Like, on the same day that the offense struggled, we had a young man that it was really hot that day. I don’t know. It normally don’t get that hot in Missouri, but it was hot. And he goes down. Like he goes down, he takes himself out of practice. And man, I was furiated. Now I didn’t.
Like I didn’t embarrass him too bad. I didn’t you know, but then the next day, the same man stands up in front of the whole team and says, Coach, can I talk to the team? I’m just help yourself. And he says, you know, like, man, look, I let y’all down. I let my mind get the best of me. Like, it’s not gonna happen again. Like I’m going to show up for you guys because I was selfish. He addressed it himself. He didn’t even have to have anybody call it out. You know what mean? Like, so I think, you know, like if you start with the end in mind, right? Like, what’s that? What’s the book?
The seven habits of highly affected people where you’re like s the first one is start with end and if you start with end in mind, what do you want? Right? What do you gotta act like to get it? What will prevent you from getting it? And let’s call it out, man. Let’s don’t do it. You know what I mean? Like I don’t think it’s overly complicated, but I do think Brian and them and then when I’ve taken it and kind of run with what we have done in the past, like you can halfway systemize it into something that can be beneficial.
Keith Grabowski (20:25.79)
Yeah, you you were showing me before we got going the way you did systematize this that you I mean, through working with Brian’s app, which is now zone one, and you know, on the app store he we talked about this on our AI workshop the other day and showed some examples there, but you built out
an eight-week curriculum of what this is gonna look like, right? And and I think you you point out an important thing. Like I love that idea, coach fed, player led, right? Like we we have to be that scaffolding for them, right? Like we need to be the support. And eventually starts going, you you can, you know, you can take some of that support away. They know how to do it. But we have to bring them there. It’s not just gonna happen on it its own. And that was the idea behind this this eight week program you put together tough
Tell us a little bit about that curriculum.
John Perry (21:20.491)
Well it was you know, it was phenomenal being able to take Brian Kite’s tool because I speak that language anyway, right? Like E plus R equals O is a system that to my eighteen A C T I can figure out, right? I I get it. Like I understand what I do control, what I don’t control.
And then I took all of his, you know, content based around what I wanted to teach, put it into Claude, and created a playbook that, you know, just takes us through eight different lessons about, you know, that pathway about how, you know, the leader is responsible for creating the culture, how the culture is going to be responsible for driving the behaviors, how the behaviors are going to pre reproduce results, and how results, you know, are going to reinforce the entire cycle.
Right? You start having great results and things just you kind of get that flywheel going and then we just, you know, week five or six is how does the whole thing fit together? You know, like how do we take this system and we use it in our place to help all of our grades? And then, you know, I’m big on chasing excellence. So then it went to what does chasing excellence look like? Right? Like that’s not really scoreboard related, that’s lifestyle related. You know what I’m saying? And it was just able to put together a an eight-week program.
We have our kids for eight weeks in the summer. So we take one day and teach a core value. We take one day and teach a leadership lesson or a mental performance lesson. Like we are trying to, you know, put kids out there that can make great decisions and play freely and not get hung up with negative thoughts, not get hung up in these you know, we’re not gonna we’re not gonna try to have their mind hijacked in the middle of a game for sure.
Keith Grabowski (23:02.592)
Definitely. J John, the other thing you’ve done since we last talked, and it’s been recently, you you put a book out there for coaches, and I do want to make sure everybody learns about your book. Never stop getting better. tell us about that. First of all, why write the book? What was it that, you know, was the spark for you that I’m gonna I’m gonna put this on paper?
John Perry (23:26.049)
Due due to Dr. Gilbert and the success hotline, I’m a I’m a goal person, so I write down my goals, five or six, I put in my money clip. I keep with my phone twenty four seven. When I when I use my debit card, I see my goals. And I have had write a book on there for several years because, you know, eighteen years ago I became a fanatical reader. I wake every day, five o’clock, I read for an hour before I do anything. And I’ve done that, you know, so that’s thousands of books over the last eighteen years.
Keith Grabowski (23:55.435)
That’s not bad for an eighteen ACT guy.
John Perry (23:57.498)
No, no. I could probably score a little higher now in some categories, but like I just enjoyed it and then I started seeing.
Keith Grabowski (24:01.908)
Yeah.
John Perry (24:05.267)
It changed my life. So that gave me the thaw. And then we had our first grandkid four years ago. And and you know, in the book, there’s a picture of her, and it under it it just simply says, This is the reason for the book. Like, I want her. Now we have a new grandson that’s eight weeks old. Like, I want them to be able to read the book one day. Like, I honestly don’t care if the book sells three copies or no copies. Like, like I wanted to write it because it was things that helped me and the way
I wrote the book, was this. It’s 21 chapters, but it’s 21 lessons, it’s 21 stories, mostly of things that I jacked up. The 21 lessons I learned from it, and then 21 challenges that you can implement to try to keep from screwing it up. Man, I’ve screwed up a lot of stuff, but you know, I do think this, and if if you were to read as many books as I read, you might pick it up and think, man, that’s pretty elementary, okay? But I do think this, the feedback is that it’s
Simple. Well, think about football. Let’s be honest. How complicated a sport is it really? Okay, like the objective on offense is to simply get three and a half yards three times. That’s it. Like you can overcomplicate it and throw it and all that crap if you want to, okay? But the objective is get three and a half yards. If you don’t, be really good at punting it. And then on defense, go get the ball. That’s it, okay? That’s the objective. Now in life.
What are the little bitty things you can do? Right. Like I like to say, it’s better to do a little a lot than a lot a little. Like, what is the little things you can do every single day that consistently compounded over time can make a huge difference? So to me, that’s what it is. It’s a bunch of little things that if you do, you know, put it into work, even just one of them,
I think you’re gonna be a little bit better off. And everything, man, my whole mindset with our program is never stop getting better. Like I wanna I don’t wanna be that human that wakes up, runs on a hamster wheel, gets off and goes to bed, wakes up and runs on a hamster wheel, gets off. I wanna get better. I wanna be better till the day I die. And there’s evidence out there right now, there’s scientific research that our brains can continue to get better for a long time.
Keith Grabowski (26:22.196)
Gi give us a taste of this. Give us you know, not a whole story, but maybe a a little capsule of a story and and a a challenge that’s in it.
John Perry (26:31.689)
Okay. a simple one is this. And it’s, you know, one of my favorite stories and it’s the one that I’ve told in Doctor Gilbert’s classes at Montclair State a thousand times, but I go to Heinz Community College and after about two weeks I wanna quit.
Like I wanna c I don’t like it. Like it’s hard. My girlfriend broke up with me. Like I’m miserable. Coach is nuts. We’re practicing three times a day, right? It’s 1989 or 90. My roommate, my best friend, quits and goes home. Calls his dad and says, I’m coming home today. Dad says, Come on home. And so then I go out there to practice one or two more days. And now I’m like, man, my friend’s got it going on, right? I’m out here with this nuts. I’m out here with this nut job, practicing three times a day. Ain’t got no girlfriend. I’m homesick.
and my friends at the house chillin’ so I’m I call my dad. I turn my key in to Coach Murphy. I turned my key in, and I said, I quit. And I go back to the dorm room and I call my dad and I said, Dad, I’m I’m I’m coming home today, I quit. And he said, Son,
You can quit if you want to, but you’re not welcome here. Find you somewhere else to live. And he hung up. Well, if you knew my dad, you would know that he wasn’t joking. So then I s I’m sitting there thinking, I’ve already turned my key in. Where am I going? You know what I mean? Like, where am I where am I I don’t know. I so anyway, I walk back over to coach’s office. I said, Coach, man, like
I had a brain fart. Like, I don’t really want to quit. Like, can I have my key back, please? I get my key back. My perspective shifts. You know, I move on, become an all state player at Heinz, transfer to Harding University, meet my wife. We have our like none of that happens if my dad says, Come on home, right? So like
John Perry (28:14.549)
So the moral of the story is never quit, right? If you don’t quit, you can’t fail. It’s impossible. So the challenge is simply, you know, find something that you don’t really like to do. Like it may be clean out your closet and clean a piece out every single day for 30 days. Just because you don’t like to do it. Because what you’ll what you can learn to do, you can learn to like anything, right? Like, come on, like it’s not and just don’t ever quit, right? Because failure in Kobe Bryant’s language, like
Failure’s not even a word.
Right. The only way you fail is to quit. And sometimes, sometimes we need people around us that know more than we know. Thank God, right? That my dad had enough sense about him to understand I was trying to take the shortcut way out. Right. So thank God I had a dad that, you know, was like that. And that that’s the book, man. It’s 21 stories, similar. The lesson I learned, man, don’t ever quit. And a challenge that someone can, you know, put into practice and try to prevent.
that if they can. And it’s been, you know, like I think it’s been really cool, man. Like I’ve had multiple teams buy it to start working through it. Because it is, it’s not complicated, man. Like, it’s simple. But I think simple things can change your life. And one of the principles is, this is the last one I’ll I’ll say and
And it’s kind of the old and I borrowed it from somewhere, like I’ve borrowed everything from somebody, but you know, the whole one percent thing, one percent of a twenty-four hour day is fourteen minutes and twenty-four seconds. So what can you do for fourteen minutes and twenty-four seconds today and then do it again tomorrow and then the day after that and then compound it by three hundred and sixty-five days. Okay. So like what can you do for one and so I go talk and I get I get asked to speak a decent amount, which is awesome, and I ask how many of you are readers? Man.
John Perry (30:04.719)
And look, if there’s an audience of 500, you might have 10. And then I’ll say, okay, why don’t you read? And the number one reason is I don’t have time. I’m like, bullcrap. Okay, like you don’t have 14 minutes and 24 seconds. Why don’t we do this tomorrow? What time do you normally set your alarm for? Six o’clock. Okay, set it for 545. Wake up, read for 14 minutes and 24 seconds, and then do it the next day. And then do it the next day. And then I’m gonna tell you what you’ll find after about
No, let’s go one year. After one year, you’re gonna be getting up 30 minutes earlier. And then you’re gonna be like me. Now I’m a fruitcake. I get up at like four o’clock on some days just so I can read. If I could show you my chair in the living room, yesterday I get five books in the mail. Five. That’s a normal occurrence for me. Man, I got books everywhere. You know what I’m saying? Like, I just man, one you can’t tell me.
Keith Grabowski (30:48.842)
Yeah.
John Perry (30:54.443)
You ain’t got one percent, fourteen minutes, twenty four seconds to get better. Like I’m not gonna hear that. So we push that with our kids. But, you know, that’s that’s the little the little things in the book that I call simple that can be life changing if, you know, you just start chasing some little bitty things over and over and over.
Keith Grabowski (31:10.836)
Great message. I I love it. I love how you set that up. and I love that we got back on here and and caught up on all these things. I’ve always enjoyed talking with you, John, and and I know you are relentlessly pursuing
Holding that trophy up at the end of the year. And it’s something you’ll always do. And and hey, it starts with your belief. I mean, I love the positivity. I love the message, John. And I know coaches will be better for just having listened to you and in the way that you approach this. So thank you for what you do, John. Thanks for being a part of our champions series. Best of luck to you and the Knicks at Eagles here in 2026.
John Perry (31:28.685)
We’re gonna get it.
John Perry (31:48.471)
Thank you, Keith. I appreciate what you do and and you do a lot of great things for coaches, man. Very appreciative.