Midgets perfect wing T offense with state championship coach

HURLEY - People who run the wing T offense stick together.

Zeeland West coach John Shillito, who has won three Michigan High School Athletic Association state championships, came 9.5 hours to help Hurley fine tune its wing T offense.

Hurley's version of the deceptive power offense has been doing pretty well on its own in recent years, but the Midgets' coaching staff saw an opportunity to get even better.

"We asked him up here to let us have a chance to fine tune some things," Hurley coach Scott Erickson said. "Not that the plays are different, just fine-tuning some steps and some techniques and some ideas. It's a camp for our kids and it's a clinic for our coaches, too. We're very, very happy he was willing to come up.

"That's a big commitment from him, 18 hours of driving to help a small school in northern Wisconsin. That says a lot about what he thinks of our program as well."

Shillito said he wasn't here because Hurley's offense that averaged 368.3 yards per game last season needed any drastic changes.

"They've done a nice job for a lot of years, so it's not like we're coming here trying to reinvent the wheel in any way," he said. "It's one of those things where for them, we're just trying to give them a couple different looks than they can add."

Erickson thought Shillito helped Hurley solve some of its problems that kept its offense from being even better.

"They knew we were good with what we did," Erickson said. "Our biggest thing is to get a hat on a hat in the off tackle and sweep game. That was the big thing for us because we had too many guards running for touchdowns (instead of hitting a defensive player). I think we have some of that solved."

The Midgets' offense would have been a terror to stop this upcoming season with a strong group of players returning, but Hurley wanted better. The Midgets play a tough regular season schedule and playoff games are almost always difficult.

"We're not satisfied," Erickson said. "We want to be as good as we can be. Having him here, I think that's going to help us. This is a great day for our kids, our program, for him to come, the best of the best, to answer our questions. He's the best T coach in Michigan, period. We're very lucky to have him talk to our kids for two days. He's just fantastic."

Shillito was impressed with the Midgets' mindset.

"I give him a lot of credit for the idea that he said, 'We don't want to leave any stones unturned,'" Shillito said. "He feels like he has a great group of kids and so if there's something that we can give them, we hope we can give them a couple things that can make them better."

The wing T has many advantages. The deception fools defenses. There is much less risk of fumbling than Hurley's former offense, the option. And in some ways, it's simpler to execute.

The most recognizable part of the wing T offense is the backfield fakes where any of the four backs, including the quarterback, can carry the ball. Wing T teams, including Hurley and Zeeland West, rack up a boatload of rushing yards, a handful at a time with 15-play drives common, with big plays also mixed in. They also sneak in a few passes.

Deception is important, but so is a solid offensive line.

"It's a big part," Shillito said of deception. "It is, to me, first and foremost, a power offense, that we've got to block people. But then it's a deceptive power offense, so the deceptive part of it is important. It is the part that gets a lot of attention from media and fans and so on, because I think people look and say, I can't find the ball, so the defense can't find the ball. There's some of that in it, but as teams play against it more and more, it becomes a little more about we've got to get man-on-man blocking and we've got to do the job there."

Another team in Zeeland's West conference runs the same offense and it's more common in downstate Michigan than Wisconsin, where Hurley doesn't run into it. Zeeland is southwest of Grand Rapids and Zeeland West is a bigger school that has been in Divisions 3 and 4 in the Michigan playoffs. Hurley is in Division 6 in Wisconsin.

Hurley started using the offense in 2005 when it ran out of quarterbacks to run the option. Former Wakefield coach Jim Engel showed Erickson the wing T, which was developed by Jim's father Elmer at downstate Bay City.

Erickson went from dreading rain on game days because of the potential for so many fumbles with the option to almost wishing for rain because the wing T offense works so well in the mud while most others don't.

Hurley has gone to the state semifinal twice with this offense, in 2009 and in 2013. Hurley upset Flambeau in the mud in 2009, scoring 40 second-quarter points.

Shillito started running the offense in 1994 after getting beat with it the year before in the regional championship while at Muskegon Orchard View. His 1999 team at Orchard View remains the highest scoring team in state history with 774 points in 14 games.

It's a simple offense in a way.

"It is but it's not," Shillito said. "It is in terms of, the schemes back here are fairly simple. But again, there's so many opportunities with 11 guys that close to the ball in terms of how you can block things. There's a lot of moving pieces, so coordinating the moving pieces is really the key in terms of coaching it."

Going hard on every play is also vital.

"It's mostly about attention to detail and we have to play fast and hard," Shillito said.

Only a few Midget players couldn't attend this week's camp due to prior commitments. The camp continues today and Erickson expects it to be even better as the Midgets build on concepts taught Monday.

"We're two months away almost from the start of practice," Erickson said. "We'll see how much we retain by the time we get to that. Now the coaches have different drills we can use to pound home some of the ideas."

Shillito has an Ironwood connection. Two of his college roommates at Central Michigan University were from Ironwood, former Ironwood football coach Dave Davis and Tim Kennedy. He came up to ski here while in college and hadn't been back until this week.