New coach Davis wants to make Winamac football ‘better than when he found it’

First non-Winamac grad to coach Warriors since 1980

BY VAL TSOUTSOURIS

Sports Editor, RTC

There is one thing that you cannot help but notice about new Winamac football coach Eric Davis.

He is not from Winamac, making him the first outsider to coach Winamac since Rex Bowser. Bowser left Winamac in 1980.

Winamac’s last four coaches – Tim Roth, Craig Barr, John Hendryx and Josh Burgess – were all from Winamac, and the entire coaching staffs were typically from Winamac as well.

When Davis got hired, he said he visited for a day with Roth, who coached Winamac from 1981 until his retirement in 2016.

Roth won six sectional and two regional titles during his tenure, and Winamac had undefeated regular seasons in 2000, 2013 and 2014 under Roth and another undefeated regular season in 2021 under Hendryx.

Davis said he understands and appreciates what Winamac football has accomplished. 

“I’ve known coach Roth for a long, long time, so when I took the job, one of my first priorities was to sit down with him and just pick his brain about the state of the program, the challenges, the strengths and what we needed to do moving forward,” Davis said. “It was good. Tim has a lot of passion for Winamac football. He cares about Winamac. … He had a lot to offer. It was a very positive conversation. I would advise any young coach who was getting into a new program to reach out to the different factions within the community and to make sure you touch base with the face of the program.

“Coach Roth will always be the face of Winamac football. And so it was real important for me to reach out to him.”

But having said that, his experiences are more varied than his predecessors. He spent the last two years as an assistant coach at Calumet College of St. Joseph in Whiting as that program transitions to the NAIA level. Calumet College played sprint football, where no player on the team weighed more than 190 pounds.

Before his time at Calumet College of St. Joseph, he was an assistant coach on Ron Shaffer’s staff at Rochester. Before that, he had head coaching experience at Blackford, Greencastle, Taylor, Tri-County, Frankfort, Bellmont and then back to Tri-County.

One might say that Davis has coached at schools with little to no history of football success. For example, Davis guided Blackford to a 6-4 record in 2008. He left in 2009. Blackford has had only one winning season since he left.

His career record over 12 years is 27-94, but Davis said the schools where he has coached are the schools where a coach can have the most impact.

“I’ve taken over programs that have had struggles, either recently or enduring, and just tried to build it,” Davis said. “I think you can make a big bang for your investment. … If you want to make an impact and you want to open people's eyes and you want to really start to build your brand, that’s where you do it. That’s always been, I guess, something I’ve been compelled to embrace.”

This is first head coaching job since he was at Tri-County in 2021.

“I had been out of the head coaching realm for a few years, and the Winamac job opened up, and from the outside looking in, any time I’ve looked at a job, I want to know whether there are good people there, and has the program been in good hands, and can we make it better,” Davis said. “And I thought those were all big pluses to the job. I think I’ve known coach Burgess since we were in college, and he’s a great man. So I know the kids have been treated the right way.

“The next part of it is there were some things that just from the outside looking in, I thought we could improve and make better. That’s all you’re trying to do as a coach is can I make this better than when I found it. And I guess that was an opportunity that I think exists at Winamac.”

Davis’ football background

Davis grew up in Mulberry – current population 1,200 – in Clinton County, and he graduated from Clinton Prairie High School in 1996, where he played football, basketball and track.

“I was very fortunate in that at a small school in the mid-’90s, you could play three sports pretty easily,” Davis said. “I was able to do that.”

He added that he does not want to do anything that would limit a player’s ability to play a winter or spring sport.

He attended Purdue, eventually receiving a degree in elementary education, and got his first assistant coaching position at Clinton Prairie in 1997 on Dan Hilgediek’s and later Ted Davis’ staffs. At that point, he knew he wanted to get into teaching and coaching.

Eventually, he realized he needed to leave Clinton Prairie. Bob Blaydes was the athletic director at Delphi at the time, but he had been Davis’ basketball coach at Clinton Prairie prior to that. Davis also played for former North Judson basketball coach Kent Chezem. Chezem was good friends with Delphi coach Vince Burpo, and he told Burpo about Davis.

After that, he had 11 years of experience as a high school assistant. In addition to Burpo, he also worked for Brett Colby at Frankfort and Elmer Britton at Logansport. Burpo, Colby and Britton are all in the Indiana Football Hall of Fame.

“I think you pull from everybody,” Davis said. “Everybody has a little bit of an influence on you, right? Elmer had a tremendous influence on me, but so did Vince, and so did Brett. Each of them, you see little things, and you say, ‘I like the way that works. I like the way that feels.’”

In 2008, he got his first head coaching job at Blackford.

“Then you become the head coach, and you’ve got this master plan, and you realize no two places are exactly alike, and no two problems are solved the same way at different places,” Davis said. “You’re always bouncing off people. You’re always watching and learning.”

He talked about an experience while he was an assistant coach at Rochester as an example of how a coach is always trying to get better and trying to meet the innovations of the game.

“We went out to Bellflower, Calif., to St. John Bosco to learn defense from them,” Davis said. “And you sit back and you watch Chris King, the d.c. (defensive coordinator) there do his thing, and you like what he’s doing, so you bring it back, and you incorporate some of those things. There’s something to be gleaned from everybody you encounter and from everyone you’ve learned from and worked with. … I’m not the same coach I was five years ago. Not even close. So you’re always evolving.”

‘The challenges of competing’

Davis has talked about playing through adversity to the kids since his hiring.

“Ours is a change of how we look at football, how our kids embrace the challenges of competing, the challenges of working hard, the challenges of overcoming adversity,” Davis said. “I think those are things that we’ve really honed in on and then we really have targeted for this summer.”

He said programs need to be what “they inherently are” and that any changes he is making are not a “total overhaul” or a “philosophical 180.”

But having said that, Davis has thought as to how Winamac can stand out within the Hoosier North. Pioneer is the defending Class 1A semistate champion, North Miami has won back-to-back sectionals, North Judson made the state finals as recently as 2024, and Triton has had four straight winning seasons.

“It’s not that at all,” Davis said. “But it is different. We are not a wing-T team, but you will see wing-T concepts in what we do. … When you design an offense – or at least this is how I think about it – if you want to be able to compete against the best teams in your league, you’ve got to do something different or you’ve got to do it better than everyone else does it.

“Obviously, you want to always be the best you can be, but I do think we need to play to our strengths, and I think we need to be able to put ourselves in situations to have success, and when you find yourself in those challenging down-and-distance situations, you’ve got to find a way to get yourself out of it. I’ve been in situations where we ran the ball 90 percent of the time. I don’t see us being like that moving forward at Winamac, but likewise, we do want to run the football.”

Davis also said they will play a multiple defense.

“Really it comes down to how are you going to apply pressure to offenses,” Davis said. “This is a running league, so sitting there in two-high (safeties) with seven guys in the box isn’t always advantageous. So you’ve got to be able to line up to different things your opponents do. The best teams in our league traditionally run the football, so you better find ways to get eight, nine guys in the box.”

How Davis defines culture

Winamac has won just 11 games over the last four years. He was asked how he defines culture and what culture he wants to bring to Winamac.

He speaks of a competitor series and different “hierarchies” within that series. There are “survivors,” guys that just want to wear the jerseys on Friday night; “competitors,” guys that just want to be better than the guy next to him; “warrior competitors,” guys that really push themselves all the time to be the very best players they can be; and “ultimate competitors,” guys that bring people with him. If you’ve got one or two of those, you’re in really good shape because not only are they pushing themselves to be the best they can be, but people gravitate to them naturally, according to Davis.

“Culture is obviously wherever everyone’s going with it,” Davis said. “That’s the big buzz right now. Thirty years ago, it was ‘weight room.’ Now it’s ‘culture.’ I don’t know what the next phase is, where sports or athletics go, but culture is a big deal. Just look around. There’s a reason why Pioneer traditionally who they are, and North Judson, they are who they are. Culture is a big part of it.”

He said that coaching football is a balance between teaching the X’s and O’s as well as aspects that have nothing to do with football. He said that Jay Novak, the coach at Calumet College of St. Joseph’s, excelled at getting players from all over the country to buy into “one vision and one mission and one team.”

But he also knows Southwood coach Bud Wright well. He said Wright will methodically watch each play 11 times in a row on film, once for each player on the field just to see what they are doing. He called Wright, a nine-time state champion, a “tactician.” 

Davis talked about Winamac’s current status.

“To me, that’s what culture looks like,” Davis said. “That’s what I’m trying to do with my culture is try to make our overall team competitiveness just a little bit better. And as we just work and chip away at it, the hope is that the bulk of our roster eventually will be at that warrior competitor field, and then maybe we find that ultimate competitor along the way.”

Davis said Mark Hendryx, Guy Rugg and Jerin Allen will be on his staff.

Davis will teach health and world history.