A few minutes with...Dan Wildfong

The Texas Brahmas head coach talks about his second year as head coach and the progress of the team so far

I sat down with Dan Wildfong last weekend to get a feel for where he thinks he and the team is at this early stage in the season.

Q: You've told me before that at the beginning of last season, you were kind of uptight and loosened up after a while. Comparatively, do you think your coaching style has changed this season?

A: No, I'm pretty uptight (laughing). That's one thing I have to do is just keep taking steps back and saying, you know, "what is going to make this team be successful?" We definitely have a game plan in mind. It's a long season though. You have to reflect on what you're doing wrong and what you're doing right and you have to have a balance between how hard do I push now and how hard do I push later. I've taken a lot of what I learned last year and used it this year but like last year it's a new team, different make up and you have to feel guys out. Some guys, you need to be hard on them all the time. Some guys it takes a little pat on the ass. There's some guys that need a whole boot. Every new team, every team's different so we're just kind of feeling out this team right now. There's still a long way to go.

Q: You're a very competitive individual. You have to take very single game, every sixty minutes out there very seriously. How hard is it to take a loss like the one against Odessa the other night, even though it's so early in the season?

A: I hate losing every game. All these players hate losing. The Odessa game, I never make excuses. We didn't get the bounces that night but I feel that we worked hard. It's when we don't work hard, I have no problems coming in and leaning on our guys. We've got to be better. It's unacceptable.

Q: How do you feel about the progress of the team thus far?

A: There's still a ton of work to do. We're not near where we want to be. There's a lot of new guys, new faces on this team and when you have new faces, there's new systems guys have to learn and they have to learn that to be a Brahma, you're going to have to come to work every night. Last year it took us a little while to get the hang of it. We made some moves early on here and we just have to continue to keep pushing towards winning a championship. That's our ultimate goal. How we get there is you have to get in the playoffs and if you put yourself behind the eight-ball right off the bat, you're going to be in some serious trouble. You can't take any team for granted in this league and I think guys are seeing that. I've been preaching that. Ronnie's been preaching that. It's a different style of game out there too; it's a lot of powerplay/penalty kill. We're going to need our powerplay and penalty kill to win us games this year and we know that and we've been working on it a lot. There is a little bit of time for adjustment but there's never a lack of effort. We demand that.

Q: During the off-season a lot of the fans on the message board were talking about size, size, size. They wanted size, especially on defense. One of the things that's noticeable is that a lot of your forwards are not really big guys. Pete Rouleau, Topher Scott, even Mark Carragher. You look at Colorado and Oklahoma who have some really big players. Do think that size is that important or are you looking at skill and speed?

A: Definitely if you have a guy with size and speed, that's what you're looking for. We lost a little bit of size this year but we've got some pretty big guys as well; big D men. Not to let the cat out of the bag but we're going to be having a couple more guys come in that are going to have some more size as well.

Q: Grant came back. You've got Jordan, who's left Germany. Anders, when I talked with him, certainly would keep open the possibility that when the season ends in Holland, the possibility of coming back. Would you make spots on the roster for these guys if they had the opportunity to come back down and play?

A: Yeah. You know, these guys that are here are doing a great job. So I'd have to evaluate it. But we have to stick with the guys that we have right now. If things don't work out, I'm not afraid to make changes. The guys we have right now, they have the opportunity and I'm going to lean on them to do the job for us this season. These guys can't take it for granted just because they're a veteran or a rookie or a second-year guy, that they've played on this team before that they have a spot. They know that they have to come and compete. Our fans and our fan club and Frank and Sal and Mike and our office staff; they do too much work for us to let these guys off the hook and not work them hard. Once I took this job, my number one thing has been that you will have a team that will compete every night and we'll never give up and we will have that again. I don't care if we have to make four moves or hopefully no more moves but we will have a team that will work hard every night.

Photo credit: Robert Keith