By Kiara Doyal, The Seattle Medium
As he enters his third season as head coach of the Cleveland High School football program, Leonard Hicks is eager to continue building his program from the ground up. Starting his coaching career fresh out of high school in 1995 due to an injury that ended his career, Hicks took that setback and turned it into a rewarding career as a coach.
“I got two scholarships to go to Oregon State University, and I was a full scholarship recipient for track and field,” says Hicks. “Although, that year I walked on to the football team and then the summer of my freshmen year I came back to Seattle and played on a semi-pro football team and got injured pretty bad.”
“The injury kind of ended my career and I decided well since I love football so much, that I decided it was time for me to step into a different role around football and start coaching,” he continued.
Prior to becoming the head coach at Cleveland, Hicks was coach with the West Seattle Wildcats Little League, and had initially applied to be the defensive coordinator at West Seattle High School in 2013, but God would have different plans for him.
“That same year Bishop Blanchet had reached out to me and offered me a position with them,” says Hicks. “And, since I am a spiritual guy, a deacon now, and grew up in church and around faith, I felt that was God’s calling for me to do work for them rather than somewhere else.”
“I then ended up being the JV defensive coordinator and freshmen head coach for three years, and then moved up to varsity and was the defensive coordinator for 5 years,” he continued.
During his eighth year at Bishop Blanchet, Hicks was practically being summoned to Cleveland due to their football program going down in flames at the time.
“The coach before me had quit on the team two games prior to the end of the season, so their senior quarterback, Gabe, at the time was running practices so they could finish out their season, and John Hughes who was the athletic director was supervising,” says Hicks.
“The following year I had parents practically begging me to go over and coach at Cleveland, and I went into it with the mindset of saving and a hero mentality,” he continued.
According to Hicks, the task of salvaging the program was difficult, especially since his biggest hurdle was trying to have a full roster.
“I looked at the job and knew I had a job to do. I needed to build a culture, get involved in the community, find out how the community can support us, and build up a team based on culture building rather than winning,” says Hicks. “Two years before me they didn’t win a single game or score more than 18 points.”
“There was so much turmoil between the previous staff and the athletes themselves, that [the players] didn’t want anything to do with football, so I had to start from scratch,” added Hicks. “My first season there I had 15 out of 18 roster players eligible the whole year. We never gave up, we fought to the very end, we got beat up pretty bad but our players always persevered.”
Hicks knows that his team are true underdogs, sandlot kids as he described, and that he has a job to do within the program. However, being a faith-based coach he believes that being selfless is extremely important and that kids need to understand what it looks like to be selfless.
“We have a team full of believers, whether they are believers in Christ, Allah, or Buddha, whatever it was we all knew we had a commonality and that was faith,” says Hicks. “We really are involved with doing for others, more than we do for ourselves. And because I am a youth pastor, and deacon of a church, I embody that and I want our kids to embody that, which makes us a richer program whether we win or lose on the scoreboard.”
Despite the challenges including building up a full-sized roster, Hicks says that he wouldn’t take another team if his life depended on it, because his players have remained optimistic through it all and they try hard every on every single play both during practice and in the games, which brings joy and happiness to Hicks’ heart.
“I have coached so many other players, like at Bishop Blanchet with 100 players, and coming to a school like Cleveland I am grateful for the 15 players I have because they never give up,” says Hicks. “They play so hard, and they don’t look at the challenge that they’re faced with. They just look at the moment, play in the moment, and they just want to have fun.”
“One of our mottos is that if you have fun, then you won,” continued Hicks. “We never looked at the winning on the scoreboard, we are not about that. Of course, we would love to win, but I teach these guys that at the end of the day, we do everything we’re supposed to do. We show up to practice, we have good practices, and we stay sound in our techniques and our discipline in what we’re supposed to do in our job assignments. We’ll win. It might not be now, but we will eventually win, and that’s the nature of what we have at Cleveland.”
