The Book: A Place Where Leaders Are Built: What Small-Town Football Still Gets Right
I coached football for 20 years in Gilpin County, and before that I spent over two decades running a business in Colorado's regulated casino industry. Two very different worlds. But somewhere along the way I noticed the same three things separating the young men who became leaders from the ones who did not, and it did not matter whether I was standing on a practice field in August or sitting across a boardroom table. That is the book I wrote. It is called A Place Where Leaders Are Built: What Small-Town Football Still Gets Right, and it is free to read on our website.
The book is built on three pillars I have carried through every locker room and every business decision I have made. Responsibility. Real rewards and real consequences. And adults who neither rescue nor abandon. Take any one of those away and leadership formation breaks down. You cannot hand a young man a role he has not earned and expect him to grow into it. You cannot protect him from the consequences of his own effort, or lack of it, and expect him to develop judgment. And you cannot walk away from him either. The adults who show up, year after year, are the ones who actually build something that lasts.
That is why small-town football still works when a lot of people assume it should not. Fewer resources. Older equipment. Longer bus rides. From the outside it looks like a program that should be falling behind. From the inside, it is one of the last places left where nothing stays hidden. Everybody in town knows who you are. Your effort shows. Your mistakes get remembered, and so does your growth. There is no anonymity to hide behind, so accountability becomes real, and it gets enforced from the inside, by the kid himself.
The book walks through why that works, and then it walks through the Foundation's work. The Foundation build a All-State Game and for a week every year when roughly fifty of Colorado's best 8-man players come together and get treated like the leaders they are becoming. I have watched what one concentrated week like that can do to a young man's confidence and his sense of what he is capable of. It is not a reward for a good season. It is a leadership multiplier.
I also wrote about where this is going, because Colorado is the proof of concept, not the finish line. There are nearly 2,000 high schools across 30 states fielding football teams with fewer than 11 players, and small-town programs are not fading. Enrollment in 6, 8, and 9-man football has grown 12 percent in recent years. Nebraska and Kansas are next for us. From there, Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas, New Mexico, Utah, and eventually into the bigger football states. The mission does not change. Find where leadership is already being built, and reinforce it at the moment it matters most.
The last section of the book, the part I hope stays with people longest, is about the coaches. The ones who teach history or shop or PE during the day and then walk across the parking lot to run practice until dark. The ones who drive the bus because nobody else will. The volunteer assistants who are farmers and linemen and grain elevator operators twenty years removed from their own playing days, standing in the mud in October because a program of 23 kids needs them there.
Nobody is paying them enough to justify the hours. They do it because those are their kids, and because in a town of 1,500 people, the football field might be the one place left where a young man learns what it costs to be part of something bigger than himself.
If you want to understand what the All-State Foundation is actually building, and why helmet grants, scholarships, and coaching education matter as much as the game itself, this book is the clearest explanation I know how to give.
It is free to read here: A Place Where Leaders are Built
If it means something to you, share it with someone who coaches, teaches, or grew up in a town like the ones this book is about.
— Coach Craig Ball Executive Director, The All-State Foundation
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