Photo by Ryan Almanza
AURORA — The Denver Christian football team is off to a perfect start, opening the season with an impressive 6-0 record. With momentum on their side, the Thunder are focused on finishing the regular season strong and making a deep run in the playoffs.
Today, coach Bret McGatlin is being recognized as the Broncos High School Tackle Coach of the Week. The Denver Broncos and CHSAA will continue to honor one flag football coach and one tackle football coach each week throughout the season.
Throughout the year, all Coach of the Week honorees will be recognized on the field during a pregame ceremony at Broncos home games.
Q&A with Bret McGatlin:
What was your football background before becoming the head coach at Denver Christian and how did you end up at Denver Christian?
I started my career at Columbine High School as assistant coach, with Coach (Andy) Lowry, who's one of the greatest Colorado high school coaches. He was so good for me as a young 22-year-old coach coming out of college. I was then the head coach at Chatfield High School from 2006 through 2021 and won a state championship in 2021. I left to be the head coach at Valor Christian High School from 2022 through 2024. I stepped away from there looking for a smaller opportunity for a smaller school, since I'd been coaching the big schools my entire career. Denver Christian was looking for a new coach, and it's a small school with a lot of history, especially kind of back in early 2000s, '90s, and '80s. I was interested in that, and wanted to hopefully help rebuild it. I took the job, and we're now in year two, so this is year 21 as a head coach.
With your prior head coaching experience mainly being with 5A schools, was it any different coming into a 1A program?
I think the biggest difference is the number of kids in your program. At Chatfield, I would say, probably an average 140-150 kids, Valor it was probably similar. Here, we're sitting around 42 kids in our entire program, and so there's a lot of opportunity to connect with the kids at a higher level, because there's not as many of them. I enjoy that piece because I feel like it's hard when you have so many kids at the big school, some kids get lost in the shuffle. It's also nice because our freshman through varsity all practice together, so our young kids are getting coached by varsity coaches.
How would you describe your coaching style or philosophy? Has it changed depending on the program you're working with?
Chatfield, Valor, and now at Denver Christian, it's been the same philosophy. We're trying to build up young men that eventually will head off to be amazing fathers and husbands and lead in this challenging world. We talk about three dimensions of an athlete. The first dimension is the actual fundamentals, the things that you have to be good at. The second dimension is the mind of the athlete. You want to build confidence and make sure they have a purpose and self-worth in our program. The third dimension is to capture the hearts of our players, so they play as a team. That's just kind of a philosophy I followed for a long time now and it feels like it's been successful.
With a 6-0 start to the season so far, how does that feel as a team and a coach?
Honestly, we love being 6-0. I think last year, I would say we were young. We only had three seniors, and we were trying to get them to understand our culture, as well as the offense and defense we run. We didn't do the little things well last year. This year, with an amazing offseason, you've got kids who are now bigger, faster, and smarter. They understand the game better, and they do the fundamentals a lot better. We've played some good teams, and we know it's going to get tougher, but for us in this program, we're pretty excited to be 6-0.
Now that you're here with that 6-0 start to the season, have your expectations for the rest of the season changed?
Well, now we believe we're a playoff team. We also know that there's some juggernaut teams out there, in our classification, some teams you see in the mix every year. I'm trying to mentally prepare our kids who have not been in a playoff game, ever, to know, we're going to see some tough challenges in the playoffs. It's not easy to get to that championship game, and it's not easy to win a playoff game because everyone's giving them their best effort. I've been upset before early in the rounds, and I've upset other teams early in rounds, because it's just tough. Mentally and physically preparing them is what we're trying to do now, so if we can get ourselves a playoff win, we can get something going after that.
You guys have a 13-day break between your last game and the next, how do you keep your team staying sharp? Do you prefer to have a week off like this or would you rather keep playing?
As I matured in my coaching philosophy, I believe rest is such a big deal for kids. The timing of this one is good, we're six games in, and if you go all the way, you play seven more games. It's a long grind. (Monday), we watched film, and we came out and did a heavy conditioning day. We (had) an intense practice (Tuesday) and did a fun activity with our team. Then, I'm going to give our kids Thursday through Sunday off, and I want them to refresh their mind and hopefully their bodies, too. It's hard to hold this level of intensity, week in and week out, without some kind of break. I watch the NFL and listen to some of the philosophies of those guys when they take a bye week. A lot of times in 5A or 4A, we would have a bye if you're in the top eight, but we don't have that in the lower classification. Once our last game's done, we're right into it, so I feel like this works out well for our kids.
Is there anything that I missed or anybody you want to give a shout out to that we didn't get a chance to speak about already?
The only thing I would probably mention is just our coaching staff. One of the things that is cool about where I'm at is we have three assistant coaches that have been head football coaches here in the state of Colorado. My dad, Don McGatlin, being one of those guys, he won two state championships at Green Mountain High School. Ric Cash, also one of our assistant coaches, was the head coach of Mountain Vista for 19 years, now he's our defense coordinator. Gary Anderson is another one of our coaches. He was head coach at D'Evelyn, and the head basketball coach. We also have a couple of young coaches, Kevin Taft and Grantham Jones. This award is really cool, but I want to give a shout out to our coaching staff, because they have embraced coming to this small school and putting in high-level coaching. I really do think that we're where we're at right now because our kids are getting coached up at such a high level.
