Larry Mueller has played football, coached high school football in southern Illinois, mid-Missouri and in the grid-iron-crazy part of western Missouri for nearly 40 years.
Needless to say, he knows what a football field looks like.
But when he decided to come out of retirement to coach again, the piece of land he first laid eyes upon just outside of the Doniphan High School building was no football field. Inside the temporary parcel was a less than ideal playing surface.
In retrospect, it might have been the apt description for the facility in terms of football. But it was the starting point for Mueller, the new football coach at Doniphan, which was venturing back into the sport for the first time since 1979.
"When schools add football, they normally add it to a new school, not a pre-existing school that wants to start it up," Mueller said. "We were pretty unique in that and it was a challenge."
The Doniphan R-I School Board approved the startup of a football program in the spring of 2016. The school previously offered baseball and cross country for male athletes in the fall and was in need of more options for students. It was also one of the largest schools among MSHSAA member schools that did not play football.
Mueller was hired last summer for year one of the plan. He also took on responsibilities as the school's athletic director and assistant girls basketball coach.
His challenges went well beyond a field in need of a serious makeover. He was a coach without equipment and players. But perhaps he was the man best suited to fill that role.Years ago, Mueller helped start the program at Hollister High School as an assistant coach.
"I learned a ton of stuff from that experience as far as how to set the program up," He said. "But in this instance we got such a late start that my previous experience went out the window and we had to hit the ground running."
The field and equipment was a costly venture that Mueller said was minimized whenever possible, but the expenses have been helped tremendously and totally by Doniphan For Football Inc., a non-profit started by Gary Pennington, as well as local businesses and community members.
"The community is the backbone. Everything we've got, that's all been raised by the town and the people of Doniphan," Pennington said. "We've tried to talk to everyone we can and make as much money as we can to make this all possible."
A plot of land for a future stadium site just north of the high school was among the numerous donations from local community members.
Just last week construction crews began moving dirt on the new field, which will feature grandstands on both sides, lights, locker rooms, a weight room and concession stands by the start of the 2018 season.
"It's starting to take a little bit of shape now," Mueller said. "I think everybody, coaches and players, are excited to actually play a home game."
Muller said he and his players and coaching staff will have a hand in helping build the weight room and locker rooms as the year-long project begins to look more like a finished product.
Community members still have the opportunity to etch their name in brick pavers that will line the walkway to the stadium. Naming rights to the stadium are still up for grabs while Southeast Health has already pledged money to sponsor a state-of-the-art scoreboard.
The facility aside, football annually is the most expensive item in a high school's budget.
Football for Doniphan, which fields most of the costs for the program in its first phase, needed to make an initial outlay for helmets and pads for the program, which Pennington said ran about $450 a player. The bulk of the sum went toward a $200 top-of-the-line helmet for each player.
"Obviously you're not going to skimp on that so we put them in the best helmets money can buy," Pennington said. "We wanted our kids to be safe no matter what it took."
With equipment in hand, Mueller recruited the hallways and started informative weekly football sessions and practices in the summer leading up to that first season. He called the one-hour after-school sessions that focused on football plays and technology as "teaching the kids a new language."
"We crammed football into them as much as we could cram football in them," Mueller said. "Used every one of our contact days and just kept putting in plays."
It's currently Year 2 of the program and the Dons expect to be up and running come August 25, when they begin their second season, much more prepared than the first.
Last year, the Dons played six games with a clear disadvantage. Not only were they equipped with players who had little to no experience playing between the white lines, they were facing much bigger competition.
Poplar Bluff is the only local school that fields a freshmen team and already had a full schedule, meaning Doniphan's ninth graders were forced to play a majority of their games against junior varsity teams.
"The best way to describe that first season was we put the uniforms on and looked pretty," Mueller said. "We tried to teach the plays the best we could and that's all we did."
The experimental first year has laid the groundwork for this season.
Muller has hired a full coaching staff, equipping both the junior varsity and junior high teams with three coaches as well as some volunteers. With a new plan in place, Mueller is hoping his players play the part, not just look it.
The school will play another year of JV and junior high games this season, before stepping under the Friday night lights of varsity football in 2018. Doniphan already has an eight-game schedule in place and hopes to join one of the SEMO Conference divisions in the future. The Dons likely will compete in Class 2.
But make no doubt, Doniphan has football under the guide of Muller and a community that supports it. And the Dons are homeowners.
"When we say protect our house, our community is helping with this whole thing," Mueller said. "When it's all said and done our boys will have a hand in helping build this thing. So really this is ours, and we're looking forward to the day when we can play in our own backyard."