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Hatfield's recipe for turnaround took time
Greg Hatfield doesn't seem to mind the tribulations of transition.
Just when he finally got it right at Fauquier High, he got out.
After struggling through his first two seasons as Fauquier's head football coach, undertaking the unenviable task of installing a spread offense in a program entrenched in the unbalanced T system, Hatfield led the Falcons to an 8-3 record and their first playoff appearance since 2002 last season. But he then resigned earlier this month to take the head coaching position at Eastern View in Culpeper County, made official Tuesday after a vote by the school board.
Hatfield hopes his transition to Eastern View will be smoother, or at least quicker, than his move in 2005 from Central (Woodstock), where he coached from 2000-04, to Fauquier. Such things are unpredictable, though.
“The thing I learned is you really don’t know what to expect," Hatfield said Monday. "The problems we had at Fauquier were different than the problems we had at Central."
The biggest challenge at Fauquier was the offensive system change — from unbalanced to spread — that came packaged with Hatfield. He was a physics professor dropped into a classroom full of English majors.
As a result, the Falcons' report cards were littered with Cs and Ds during Hatfield's first two seasons. Fauquier went 4-6 in 2005 and 3-7 in 2006 as they struggled to adjust to the pass-focused spread after years of using a run-driven offense.
“It was such an overwhelming change," Hatfield said. “The kids are used to doing things one way and we do them another. It’s so hard for the first class — different terminology, different language, just different."
Having inexperienced receivers unfamiliar with the spread — which often uses four- and five-receiver shotgun sets, — was an immediate issue and the intricacies of route running and timing posed challenges.
But at first, the players' questions had nothing to do with anything as complicated as pass packages that incorporated a post corner route, a button hook and a slant. The initial questions were even more fundamental:
Are we allowed to even have more than one wide receiver on the field?
As a result, Hatfield said his coaching staff initially tried to avoid overwhelming the players with the new system, but that may have actually hurt the transition a bit.
"We probably compromised too much when we first got here," Hatfield said. "Maybe they didn’t understand something in the offense completely, so maybe we changed some things schematically to make it easier and maybe that wasn’t the best idea..."See the Friday print edition of the Fauquier Weekend for the complete story.
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