By Renee Hunter
What makes a winning football team – talented players, great coaches, depth?
All of the above, certainly.
But Michael Stout, head coach of the Vilonia Junior High Eagles, believes character is key. In fact, Stout thinks that character – doing what you should when no one is watching – is more important than athletic ability. “If you address the character issue, wins and losses take care of themselves,” he said. “And I like to win as much as anybody.”
The Vilonia coach must have something because last season the team set a school record for the most consecutive wins – eight. “We won a lot of games we weren’t expected to win,” he said.
The season record was 8-2. “We lost a division championship,” Stout said. “Then we lost to a Southern Division team.”
This season, Stout believes the team has an opportunity to do as well or better. Last year’s three eighth-grade starters are now ninth-graders with a year of experience. The ninth-grade class is larger, giving the team additional depth, and this year’s ninth-graders are the first who participated in a split-team program instituted three years ago for seventh-graders.
“We’ve had a great winter and spring in the weight room and working out,” Stout said. 
The junior high staff – Stout, Casey Crawn, Tom Stephens and Jerry Price – builds character by teaching and exemplifying responsibility, self-discipline and a work ethic.
“We try not to have a double standard,” Stout said. “Sometimes coaches are the only male role models some boys have.”
The players are expected always to be on time, to give their best effort, to eschew profanity and to leave any roughness on the field when play ends. They are reminded that whenever they wear the Eagle uniform, they represent their team, their school and their town.
“We want our players to be the best students in the school; our No. 1 goal is that they will be a class act,” Stout said. “We establish our standards pretty high, and we are very, very fair.”
This season will be Stout’s third in Vilonia and his 16th as a coach. Before coming to Vilonia, he was head high school football coach and athletic director at Lafayette County. He accepted the Vilonia position because it allows him more time for his family, which includes a young son and two small daughters.
“I’ve been very pleased since I’ve moved here,” Stout said. “The last class was the best I have coached in my career.”
He is also pleased that his children will have the benefit of being educated in “a quality school district,” he said.
Building character begins in the seventh grade. Crawn, the seventh-grade coach, is in his fourth season with Vilonia, and instituted the fielding of two seventh-grade teams.
“Our numbers are really up because of what’s going on in the seventh grade,” Stout said.
Crawn starts the boys out with fundamentals – blocking and tackling techniques. He emphasizes teamwork and self-discipline.
“We try to make sure they know [playing football] is a privilege,” he said.
Character is a life skill, Stout says. Learning to work as a team to achieve a goal will help the boys throughout their careers, for example. Best effort is not only expected on the football field, but in the classroom. Stout and his staff emphasize family, faith, classroom and football, in that order.
Stout said most who get into coaching do so because they want to teach boys positive principles to live by so that they will become quality men. Crawn added that a love of sports makes football a logical way for him to teach such principles. Boys don’t necessarily join the team to learn life skills. They are influenced by the successful football tradition in Vilonia and in Arkansas. The team gives boys a chance to be part of a positive group and to be rough in a controlled setting.
The life lessons learned in junior high obviously carry through to high school. Last season, the high school team under coach Jim Stanley made the semi-finals, and the Varsity Eagles have been ranked the No. 2 by the Arkansas Football Coaches’ Association.