Defensive Coordinator for the Star Valley Braves 2022 State Championship football team, Coach Kelly Merritt was honored earlier this month by being named the assistant coach of the year for the state of Wyoming and stopped by the SVI studio to talk to Aaron and Dahl about his thoughts on the accolade. Coach Merritt is somewhat well known to many especially the media members that cover him for being generally not one to self promote or talk himself up too much and staying within character he made sure to start the interview by mentioning that he firmly believes an award like this feels like a great team award and honor, crediting his players for the effort they put forth on the field all season.

One of the biggest contributing factors to the decision to award this title to Coach Merritt had to be the way the state title game itself went down against a team in the Cody Broncs who’s lowest scoring output of the entire season was 35 points and that too was in a game in the regular season against Star Valley. The Broncs had scored 187 points in their 3 previous games leading up to the championship game (an insane 62.3 points per game) and were held to a mere 7 in the most important game of the year by the Braves defense which gave the Braves the thrilling 14-7 victory and a new banner hung up in the gymnasium.

Coach Merritt also goes into detail about his personal philosophy as a defensive coach centering around the concept of high effort all the time, the Braves often have coaches up in the booth who are in charge of keeping an eye on every player and telling the coaches on the sideline when a player may need a break or some water so that the players on the field don’t need to worry about taking certain plays off to keep their energy high. As stated during the discussion Coach Merritt hinted at the fact that taking plays off usually leads to entire drives being taken off as the players know they will be yanked from the game if their effort level isn’t up to the standard.

This high effort mentality was firmly on display all season long as the Star Valley defense was ranked 1st overall in conference play last season, allowing just 12.6 points per game during conference play this season and having multiple members of the unit named to the all-state team. Coach Merritt also had the unique opportunity to coach his own son on his defense and win a championship with him which he talks about as being one of the coolest experiences of his life to this point but was thankful that unlike the Foreman mother-daughter state win during wrestling that he was NOT tackled by his son following their championship celebration.

The full interview can be found just below: