Saint Thomas Academy: Being thankful, being humble
The Saint Thomas Academy football team has been one of the most consistent programs in Minnesota high school football. They completed an undefeated season in 2020 and were runners up in Class AAAAA the last two years. Since 2005, the Cadets have been in the section championship game twelve times, been to the state tournament nine times, the state semi-finals eight times, and the Prep Bowl five times. The only thing missing from the Cadets’ resume is a state title. Although winning football games is synonymous with Cadets’ football, winning is rarely discussed within the program.
“We don’t talk about winning,” head coach Dan O’Brien said. “We talk about being thankful, being humble, being on-time, and about out working people.”
O’Brien – who became the Cadets’ head coach three years ago – had a humble beginning.
“I am from a small farming town in Southwestern, Minnesota. If you were going to have sports at all, you played everything. Football was the big fall sport where I grew up. In the winter, I played basketball, and in the spring, I played baseball and ran track. Football became my passion. I come from a family of nine, so there was always a game going on in the backyard.”
Despite humble beginnings, there is nothing humble about the list of coaches O’Brien played or coached under.
He played college football under future University of Minnesota athletic director Mark Dienhart, coached under Minnesota Coaches’ Hall of Fame member Larry Thompson at Lakeville, and worked under Tim Brewster, Jerry Kill, and Trace Claeys with the Gophers. His many stops on the way to the STA head coaching position also included an assistant job at Benilde-St. Margaret’s, and head coaching jobs at Bemidji, Concordia-St. Paul and Hamline.
“Each guy I played or coached under I took something from,” O’Brien – who played quarterback and defensive back for Winthrop High School and defensive back at the University of St. Thomas – said. “They mentored me, helped me grow, and gave me skills I still use today. They inspired me to figure out a way to do this the rest of my life.”
Someone planted the coaching seed in O’Brien in high school.
“My high school football coach taught me a lot of life lessons and made me want to have the same type of impact on kids. I have been fortunate enough to have that opportunity.”
When the former Tommie’s defensive back joined St. Thomas Academy, he knew he was joining a program that had been very successful. He quickly went to work, finding out why.
“When I got to Saint Thomas Academy, I studied the history of Saint Thomas Academy football. They have had some phenomenal coaches. Jerry Brown, Dave Ziebarth, Bob Slater all averaged seven, eight, nine, or even ten wins a year. I went back and studied what they did. Our mantra, the first year was old school football. We were going to go back to being physical and playing physical. That fit my mantra.”
His mantra was borne out of his time with former Gophers.
“My defensive philosophy has stayed basically the same. We ran a 3-4 defense at the University of St. Thomas (under Coach Dienhart), and I have basically stuck to that. Offensively it changes based on the kids but, a lot of what we do comes from Coach Kill. What Coach Kill hung his hat on was a power run and an isolation run with variations off those. If you force defenses to stop the run or if you are not as talented if you can shorten the game with the run, you have a good chance to be successful.”
Looking at STA’s success, O’Brien noticed another reason for the Cadets’ success.
“One of the reasons they have been successful is they are an all-male, Catholic, military school,” O’Brien said. “If you take the catholic part out of it – there are a number of catholic schools in the metro area – when you think about all-male and military, that screams toughness to me. The school has leadership classes that teach discipline and some of those types of things. We should be hard-nosed and physically tough – I think that is what that military piece stands for.”
Once O’Brien – who has always been more involved on the defensive side of the ball – and his staff took over, blocking and tackling were not the focus on the practice field.
“The majority of my focus on the practice field is the kids’ attitude and effort. Sometimes you can’t control other people. If I am a corner on one side of the field and they throw the ball to the other side of the field, you don’t have any control over that. The two controllable things that I talk to our kids about is attitude and effort. When your attitude and effort are great, good things are going to happen.”
Attitude and effort translate from the football field to real life.
“We want to build better men and better leaders,” O’Brien said. “One of the things I have learned from the men I coached under or played under is that it is not about making great football players. It is about making great young men. I think to do that through sports is special.”
Getting those kids on the team to build them into better men is more complicated in most private schools.
“One of the challenges of being at a private school is you don’t have a feeder program,” O’Brien told prepredzonemn.com. “You get what you get with the freshmen. We try to make kids aware of the program; invite them to games and things like that. I don’t get the opportunity to get involved in feeder programs.”
New Cadets’ football players aren’t exposed to the coaches until summer camp.
“Their freshman year – the freshmen practice with the varsity at camp in the summertime, and we install the offense and defense for everybody.”
With such a limited time for the new players to grasp the offensive and defensive concepts, one part of the coaching staff is put under extra pressure.
“People ask me all the time, ‘who are your most important coaches?’ I always say the offensive line coach, the defensive back coach and the freshmen coaches,” O’Brien said. “You try to get as many freshmen as you can playing football, and they have to have a positive experience, or they are not going to come back. I will put an extra coach with the freshmen team rather than have him at the varsity level because those kids have to be taught well on technique, so they are ready to play as sophomores. We are going to have to play some of those sophomores. We are fortunate to have freshman coaches who have twenty-some years of experience.”
O’Brien’s staff has recently had success adding to the roster late in an athlete’s career.
“We had four or five guys who came out for the first time – or the first time since they were young – their senior year. We tell them whatever your second or third sport is, it is going to make your primary sport better.”
The football coaching staff and coaches from all the other sports play a critical role in getting those kids involved in their own – and other – STA programs.
“It is important to have coaches in the school,” O’Brien – who is the interim Director of Athletics and Activities at STA. “We have classes of 110 kids, and we are playing AAAAA football, so you have to have multi-sport kids. We need to get every kid we can. I will talk to anyone who shows even a small interest in playing football. I am after all the winter sports athletes – we will take them all. All our coaches buy into having two and three-sport athletes. We all know, for us to survive, we need to share athletes.”
Outside of the head coach, the coaching staff that works with the athletes has a lot of continuity.
“My offensive coordinator is Chad Abbott; he is an STA graduate and has coached at STA for over twenty years. Over those years, he has coached it all. Our defensive coordinator is John Springer. He was the defensive coordinator at Eagan for eight or nine years. Both of them are incredibly committed. That is one thing I look for. Dave Ziebarth is the former head coach. Sometimes, as a former head coach, it can be hard to – after being the guy running the show – to come back, and even though you might disagree with it, you have to figure out a way to support an idea even if it is a different way than I would do it. He has been fantastic for us.”
An experienced staff was critical in 2020.
“This season was hard,” O’Brien admitted. “The uncertainty of who was going was going to be at practice and who wasn’t. We had a lot of kids out because of contact tracing. That was hard on the kids. We never knew if we were going to be healthy each week. I think all those kids were just thankful they could play. I think it ended up as well as it could have ended up. The kids were resilient; they played hard; we improved during the season. We had great leadership from the seniors. I look back, and it was a good season, but it was a stressful season.”
The senior leadership in 2020 was spread over many kids – kids they will have to replace next season.
“Next year, we will have a lot of kids to replace,” O’Brien said. “We will only have one starter back on the offensive line. We lose our entire backfield. We will have to replace most of our defensive line too. We will have a lot of holes to fill, but that is the fun thing about high school sports – there are always kids that surprise you.”
There will be a lot of new starters for the coaching staff to work with in 2021. History says the STA coaching staff will coach them up, and the Cadets will be impressive on the football field again. More importantly, being humble and thankful, they will be impressive off the field as well.