By Tom Nader

Publisher and Editor

Wins are not the only measurement of success for Mike Devies.

Waterloo senior Austin Hurst
Shannon Eldreth/Portage Sports

Entering his 10th season, the Waterloo football coach has focused his development of young men first.

His competitive spirit has always been strong and remains passionately alive, but his career record falls low on his priority scale.

He is OK with that.

He always has been.

“My No. 1 job is to help make good kids, and I hope that they leave our program better than when they arrived,” Devies said. “It is a process, and we work hard to make sure everyone understands that. We work hard, we push ourselves to get better every single day and inside of that, we try to make our time together at practice or games the best 2 hours of the day. For us and for the players.”

It fits into the priority that Devies has set for himself and his staff to embrace the opportunity to use their platform to impact as many lives as possible.

Devies comes from a family of selfless servants. His father was the captain of a fire department for 30 years, one brother was also a fire captain, another brother was a police chief and another brother was a psychologist. The family lineage has encompassed the idea of placing others before themselves.

“My career has put in a position to try to change people’s lives. How can you not love that,” Devies said. “I consider myself lucky to have that opportunity, and I look back on my career and feel blessed that I was able to help people see something bigger than themselves.”

The perspective instantly shrinks the pressures that may be felt underneath the Friday Night Lights.

There is a sense of maturity required to understand it and Devies said he communicates to his team daily about how to blend the ideas of being a competitive football team while also maintaining a hold on what is important.

“We want to win. We all want that, and we will prepare ourselves, but a lot of the work that we need to focus on is how we will respond to the adversity that we know we are going to have. Every team faces adversity. The teams that handle and respond to it are the teams that are learning the most. We place a lot of trust in our kids to take ownership of how we respond, and we are lucky because we have great kids in our program.”

The kind of measurement of success that Devies enjoys the most.