This is the first half of a two-part interview with Washington University football head coach Larry Kindbom, who is retiring this season after 31 years coaching the Bears.Part 2 can be found here.

StudLife: Okay, just to start off, can you speak a little bit about how you first got this job and how you felt about your position coming in?

Larry Kindbom: I was very happy at Kenyon [College]. We were doing a pretty good job there, we were winning games and all I ever want to do is find a small college and stay. I had somebody that recommended I look at Washington University and I just wasn’t interested…I knew Washington University was a good school, but that’s all I knew, and I didn’t even know what that meant. Kenyon was a good school. I came out and visited and really liked the place [Wash. U.], but I didn’t get hired. I kind of really didn’t go after a job, the way you go after a job if it’s something you really want, because I was happy. I really was happy where I was and I think I was just coming out to see an adventure, because I really didn’t want to move my family around, that was still the key. I wanted to just find a place and stay. Then, two years later, it opened up again, and then I really looked into it a little bit because I was still intrigued from that year before, and then I got a call from [then-Athletic Director] John Schael. He said “Yeah, we’d like to have you come out if you’re serious about it this time.” I came out and absolutely loved it, enough that I could say “Yeah, I think I will transplant and come out here.”

SL: Do you still have a lot of your old connections back at Kenyon?

LK: Well, I’m right next door to one of them. Brian [Allen, the Assistant Coach for the Offensive Line] played football for me and went on into teaching and then went to Tufts [University] and got a master’s degree. I found out Brian was going to be free and I called him back in 2000 and said “Come join us for the 2000-2001 season.” I still try to stay in touch with them, I hope the best for them, I hope they win, you know, and I’ve been out here so long that Kenyon’s a little bit of a distant memory. I’m a St. Louisan.

SL: When you started the job, Wash. U. hadn’t had a winning season in over a decade. What kind of culture did you inherit and what did you want to change? What did you like about the system that they currently had?

LK: I think all I really did was pulled out a magnifying glass and basically took our team and said “Look through that, what do you want to want to get out of this?” We had really good athletes. I was really shocked. I thought we had better athletes here than maybe even what I had at Kenyon, and we certainly had more of them…We had one comparable score. [Kenyon] had beaten a team by 30 and [Wash.U.] lost to that same team by 40. That didn’t make a lot of sense to me, so…I put a lot into my assistants and said, “I don’t want to change, really in anything from X- and O-wise, because I don’t want our players to think that’s why we haven’t won. It was because we weren’t doing a good job.” Immediately my defensive coordinator left me and ended [becoming] the defensive coordinator at [University of Oregon] and Boise State [University]. So I handed over the defensive coordinator position to a guy that is really in his second year of coaching. He had just been a graduate assistant, so he had really no experience, and I told him I didn’t care. I didn’t want anybody to think that’s the reason why we weren’t winning…I really didn’t want to feel like I had to come in and bring my system…it was more about teaching them. You put in a lot of time here. It’s okay to be disappointed if you don’t win. It’s okay to say “I really want to win.” It’s okay because those are the kinds of students we have at Wash. U. They want to be successful. That’s all I did. It wasn’t like I was a great motivator or anything, I think I really just kind of held out the magnifying glass, told them to keep looking through that and look to that point where the sun shines through and starts to burn, because that’s the passion, that’s what you need to show. All of a sudden, we started having success, and I was just along for the ride really. Mark [Watson] was my first tail back, and he ran for 1100 yards. I think he still holds a school record. [When] he was just shy of the record, we were winning a football game, so I took him out of the game. I said we’re not going to fabricate records here, we’re just not going to do that, but the running backs coach put him back in, and it was kind of neat because he was saying “This is big for the team. This is bigger than you.” I didn’t find out that he was back in until he was there, but that was big because there just hadn’t had anything like that for 10 years. It was like a team thing that hey, “We got a guy whose name is going to be in the record book.” I look back now and can recognize it, but even back then, it was like, I don’t care about that. I don’t, and I still don’t. I don’t care about records or awards or anything else. I care about having a great experience and doing the things that I think our kids have been able to do over the years.

SL: Can you speak a little bit more about the evolution of the play style that has been inherent to the way that Wash. U. plays over the 31 years?

LK: The thing that we really tried to get out of that first group—and we’ve never stopped—is to play hard, and it sounds like a coaching cliche kind of thing, but you know when you’re giving everything you have on every play…What we did is—and this is really kind of funny—we started scheduling ranked teams, and of course, my athletic director says “Look, we have a terrible history, recent history of where we’re going.” I said “Yeah, but understand that if our kids can see what the bar is, they’re smart kids, that they’ll make the decision to be there or they won’t, but that’s really what I want them to see.” I don’t want to try and paint a picture for them, and there’s some great danger in that, right? You could have the best teams on there and have your brains beat out week in and week out and that might not have been so good, but from day one, our players took on that challenge. In our second year, we were 7-3 and just barely missed going 9-1. But it wasn’t the record to me so much as the fact that we’re going in there every game and competing. The[re are] two things I always look for in recruiting: We want guys who want to compete and we want guys that are going to go six seconds at a time. We call them a six-second player. [We] have students that want to compete, and I’ve never seen any of our teams turn down [playing against] the best teams in the country. There’s a lot of good schools out there, but there’s something special about what I see here at Washington University, and I think part of that comes because of the collaboration and energy and the things that the student body brings to each other that you do not see at other schools in the same way. It’s like, “Okay, what do Wash. U. kids want?” A standard of high excellence. Let’s put it in front of them.

SL: In 31 years at Wash. U., you’ve only had five losing seasons. Can you speak a bit more about the consistency and how you were able to keep up the high standard throughout all of these years?

LK: Yeah, it’s funny because one of the things our kids will hear from me after every ball game, win, lose or draw, is “winning is an imposter.” You can play your best game and lose and you could play your worst game and win, because a lot comes down to the team you’re playing. When I look back and I see there’s a lot of wins there, I feel good about that, obviously. When we go out there and play, we play to win, right, I’m not crazy. I’m competitive, maybe more competitive than I should be at a place like this, but then I don’t want them to judge themselves on that…it’s kind of looking at a statistic. The average American guy makes $60,000 a year, whatever that number is, right? That’s an average, nobody’s average, so I don’t look at the seasons that way. “Well, we had six winning games this year and four winning games that year, that’s a winning season, that’s a losing season.” It’s more along the lines of, with the identity of this team that we had, how do we measure up to where we could’ve been? That’s where I feel good. I feel good, like this team is unbelievable, what they’ve done, and it’s because we’ve lost a lot of guys along the way. If we’d been healthy all the way through, we might say 6-2, we’re darn disappointed, we should be 7-1 or 8-0, but we lost leadership, we lost some things along the way, and these guys are really at a level that I say “Wow.” That’s not necessarily more than I would hope for, but we’re certainly playing about as high a level as they can be playing right now because we’re playing young kids, they’re building the chemistry.

SL: How much has this job changed you as a person and what can you accredit those changes to?

LK: I think that totally benefited by coaching the quality of student athlete that I have, just from being at this school. When I was hired, Chancellor Danforth said “I want you to know that this is a school of dialogue,” and I had never thought of a college that way. I always thought it was a learning institution, and faculty teach, the whole thing. I’ve learned more from my students than they’ve ever learned from me. How could you benefit more than that? I feel like I’m the student and they’re the teachers and I realized that I have some mentoring positions that I have with each of those kids, but to be able to learn about life, about cultures, about growing up in rural Arkansas, and live in downtown New York City and all the different things that they brought to them academically. Andrew Whitaker, who’s a junior for us —who won a national championship on the four by four relay team and he’s indoor and outdoor track —he’s a biomedical engineer. He’s done research this past summer and that’s just a Wash. U. story, like how can you do all that? Here I am thinking that I’m overwhelmed with a lot of stuff and then I look at what Wash. U. students do. How can I not grow?…I’ve learned to share. It’s dialogue, it isn’t Larry Kindbom talking down to the players. Now listen, I’ve learned to listen because they’re going to teach me something, you know, and if I don’t listen, I might miss out on maybe the most important thing I’ll ever get in my lifetime.

SL: What is your most cherished memory from your time here at Wash. U.?

LK: I don’t have one. When a guy is going to get married, a guy who’s worked his butt off to get to medical school, gets in. I mean, those memories are so, so strong with me. My kids are in college now and I got one out of college and those are really the moments. From a game standpoint, I remember them all, but they’re not to me as vivid or as colorful, Things like just a guy coming back and saying “Man, thanks. Thanks a lot,” and giving me a hug. I mean, that’s so much bigger than any win I’ve ever had. I can’t even begin to measure it.