Individual awards are the last thing on the minds of most high school coaches.
Doug Cox and Lyle Foster didn’t start coaching to seek out trophies. The pair of Thunder Basin High School coaches both became involved in sports to mentor young adults and help guide them through perhaps the most important years of their athletic careers.
Both Cox and Foster were honored with awards neither of them sought out this month. The pair of Bolts coaches both earned Coach of the Year honors from the Wyoming Coaches Association for the spring season.
Foster won the award for girls soccer and Cox won the award for softball. Coach of the Year awards are voted on by coaches in the WCA.
Foster wins again
This year isn’t the first time Foster won Coach of the Year in Wyoming for girls soccer. He won the award in 2019 after guiding the school to its first girls soccer title in school history.
The Bolts won the title again this year and finished the year a perfect 18-0. Thunder Basin outscored its opponents 74-4 over the course of the three-month season.
Foster started coaching youth soccer when his daughter was 5 years old. Eighteen years later, he’s enjoyed a successful career on the sidelines. He took over the Thunder Basin program in 2018.
One of the biggest things Foster has learned coaching soccer is the importance of organizing a team in the right way. A coach has the task of putting all the right pieces together to utilize everyone’s talents simultaneously.
“It’s really just about understanding your players,” Foster said. “You have to make sure they’re in the right spot to succeed. It’s them that have to execute on the field, but as coaches we just try to do the best we can in regards to putting them where they can excel.”
This year’s Thunder Basin team will go down as one of the best girls soccer team in Wyoming history. While coaching the team to an 18-0 record was rewarding, the season didn’t come without obstacles, Foster said.
“There’s a lot of challenges when it comes to coaching a team where the expectations are so high,” Foster said. “It was a lot of fun but I think when those expectations are there it comes with certain levels of just expecting success.”
It’s an honor for Foster to be recognized for his coaching this season. But he credits his team — and specifically his players — for stepping up and getting the job done.
“It’s nice to receive accolades and to be recognized for the accomplishments of our team, but it doesn’t happen without the players. It just doesn’t,” Foster said. “But it is fun to be recognized. I guess it just kind of confirms what you’re doing and what you’re asking your players to do on a daily basis.”
With two state championships under his belt, Foster knows trophies are what a team strives for every year. But at the same time, trophies aren’t what define a team or define a coach in the long run.
“It’s a privilege to be a coach,” Foster said. “It’s all about understanding that your job as a coach is to mentor and teach. If you put that into perspective and keep the kids and the players as the No. 1 goal, you realize that coaches have such a profound impact on the kids and that’s always a rewarding process.”
Cox credits the players
Like Foster, Cox didn’t intentionally seek out the Coach of the Year trophy to hang up in his living room this spring. It was an award that came naturally after the success the Thunder Basin softball team found this season.
Cox has coached the Bolts for both years the school has competed in sanctioned high school softball. Thunder Basin won its first state championship last month with a 12-2 win over Cheyenne Central in the title game.
The state championship trophy was by and large the most important hardware this season. Coming home with the Coach of the Year award this week is just another testament to how hard his team played this spring, Cox said.
“I don’t coach for accolades,” Cox said. “It’s all about the girls. It’s nice that the coaches in Wyoming voted for me and they thought we did a good job this year but we coach our program to be 100% about the girls.
“I don’t get to play the game. The girls get to play the game and they’re the ones who get to win and lose. I’m just there to try and help them develop their skills along the way.”
Cox started as a baseball coach 15 years ago but switched to softball when his daughter started playing. He instantly fell in love with the speed, energy and physicality of softball.
After a disappointing finish to Thunder Basin’s first softball season last year, the Bolts responded with a 25-4 record and a state championship trophy this spring.
“It was a goal set by the girls to win a state championship and they really came together and played for each other,” Cox said. “They really had that mindset that they didn’t want to disappoint each other and that really set our team apart from our team last year.”
Cox’s biggest challenge has been to bring girls together that don’t normally play together during the traveling softball season. With such a condensed season in the spring, Cox and his coaching staff didn’t have much time to smooth out lineups and team chemistry before the start of the regular season.
But the Bolts found their stride almost immediately and ended the season as the best team in the state. Cox is just glad he was there to experience it with his players.
“It was special for me to be able to fight there every day with my team,” Cox said. “I think we really got the best out of everybody and it made for a pretty good year.”
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