Brooks Barta brought Coach Snyder to town Sunday afternoon for the open house and dedication for the new weight room/Fitness Center that the community raised the funds to build for Holton High School. Coach Barta brought him in as a way to say thanks to those who donated time or $$$ to the project. After the tour of the weight room, Coach Snyder spoke for a little while and then opened up for questions from the crowd. There were a couple of his answers that I thought people on here might find of interest.
Ring of Honor - (Seems like a topic that keeps coming up on here time after time... Someone from the crowd asked when the next class would be inducted?)
Coach stated that he had been involved in the selection of the new class and that 4 more would be added this fall. He did not say who the 4 were since it was just "recently" finalized and nothing has been officially released yet, but it was just determined that they would be inducted at the first home football game. He said that it was quite an ordeal to schedule a time to get everyone back while dealing with NFL schedules, etc. (If this is old news I apologize, but he made it sound like very new information so if it is, then here it is..
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Assistant Coaches Leaving - (Someone asked about the impact on KSU football from losing so many assistants over the years, did any have a negative impact on the program?)
Coach said that in his opinion losing assistants never had a negative impact on the program... then he hesitated and said except for maybe once. (I perked up)... he went on to say the standard lines about brining in good people and wanting those people to get their chance to move up professionally... always wishing them the best. Then he went back to the "one time", except this time there was no maybe. He said that in 1998 losing the assistant coaches in the manner and time that we did affected the outcome of 2 ballgames. He went on to emphasis that was the only negative impact of the program was those 2 games and even the next year we might have been a better team going 11-1 so the long term impact of the loss of those coaches might not have been negative, but it DID change the outcome of those 2 games.
So I know that probably every wildcat fan probably feels like I do and that we would have been in the National Championship if the coaches had stayed put or handled it in a different manner, but THIS IS THE FIRST TIME I AM AWARE of Coach Snyder out and out saying it. I have heard Coach speak many times and most of the time it is his standard character and young people speech and talks a lot about the success of Kansas State University and not much about football specifically. The open mic, fielding questions from the crowd was pretty cool. Still very Coach Snyder like with very long answers, but cool. He even mentioned it was very "town hall meeting like"... I thought about standing up and chanting "GOVERNOR, GOVERNOR, GOVERNOR!!!" but I held back and missed the opportunity
I hope others will find this info as interesting as I did. Also got a picture of him with my 1 year old daughter that will go very nicely with my other memorabilia in the K-State basement.
I think a good time was had by all.
