Each week, pngfootball.com will interview an assistant coach off the PN-G staff. The assistant coach works very hard week in and week out to prepare the Indians to play on Friday nights. Their hard work and intense preparation are important to PN-G's success. Many times they are the ones who develop close relationships with their football pupils, and their coaching duties put them on the front lines in game preparation.

October 10, 1999

This week's featured assistant coach:

     Richard Bethea, Tight Ends and Special Teams Coach

Coach Bethea's Background

On the Tight Ends

    C. J. Blier is our starting tight end. He's 6' 1", 255. We try to have an offensive lineman type tight end to run our offense. We run a lot of sweeps that requires the tight end to block, and we want to give the defensive end a hard time. We have two junior tight ends that play a lot--Jared Gary and Michael Brignac. They're both bigger kids, not as muscular as C. J., but bigger type kids. We want bigger kids to block on the defensive end.

     We're out there about half the time we're on offense, because we run a three receiver set. We also run a two tight end set, so we have to be attentive on the sideline for when we run a given formation.

     I like coaching the tight ends. I have an offensive line background, and our tight ends are called on to do a lot of blocking.

On Special Teams

     Special Teams are different each week. We're not real exotic on special teams.  We've gotten better in the last couple of weeks.

     Our kickoff teams have been god this year. Joey Price is a good kicker. He kicks soccer style, and can kick it into the end zone. Against West Orange, we did real good. They have great athletes there. We moved Cody Elkins up off the JV, and he kicked two into the endzone and did real good. Two of them they didn't run back, and the other one we tackled him on the 18. We have speed on our kickoff team. We've had our share if inside-the-20 tackles this year.

     Our punters are Dustin Long and Ryan Norton. Last week Dustin kicked two times and Ryan three times. Dustin was leading the district in punting going into the game last week. Michael Brignac is a real good deep snapper. We haven't had a bad snap this year. We coach our kids when punting to get it off as quickly as possible. We've gotten better this year.

     We work real hard at getting as good a personnel on special teams as we can. Our kickoff and punt teams have our best athletes on them. If we can, we put a lot of defensive starters on those two teams. I think some of the coaches sometimes kid about the kicking game, but we all work real hard on it.

On Vidor

     The head coach there is Jeff Mathews. I coached him at Bridge City. I coached his younger brother Jason, who right now is playing professional football with the Tennessee Titans. His sister Becca was a good athlete. He's a real fiery, peppy individual, who the kids like a lot and respond to him. I credit him to a lot of their success. He's got them going over there. They play fired up and enthusiastic. They play real hard and they never quit.