Building Champions: Dan Lever, Silverton High School (OR)

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The full text of “Building Champions: Dan Lever, Silverton High School (OR)” by Dan Lever, from the Vol 3 — Fall 2026 issue.

Building Champions The most important parts of the job rarely have anything to do with an odd front or Cover 3 BY DAN LEVER Coaches, we are all well into our seasons. The grass is cut short, the lines are freshly painted on Fridays, and you can smell the popcorn from the concession stand as your team warms up before kickoff. Friday nights are a special place, and it doesn’t matter whether your stadium seats 500 or 5,000. One of my favorite things about our game is that it is a gathering event.

Communities come together around high school football. Our sport accommodates almost every body type and reaches across nearly every demographic. Football might be the last sport where a kid can show up with last year’s cleats and, most of the time, the program will take care of everything else. There is something special about that. But being a high school football coach hasn’t gotten any easier. As the popularity of our sport has grown, so have the expectations.

Many of us probably make less than a dollar an hour when you add up all the time we put into the job, yet we sometimes face pressures and expectations that would make a CEO uncomfortable. Everyone who can grill a steak thinks they can run a restaurant, and everyone who has watched football thinks

23 they can coach it. Some of them are even nice enough to remind us of that from the stands on Friday nights. If you count assistant coaches, support staff and players, many head coaches are responsible for well over 100 people—and somehow, when one of those 100 people makes a mistake, it often ends up on our desk. Yet the most important parts of our job rarely have anything to do with blocking an odd front or figuring out which concept is best against Cover 3. A kid loses his father.

Parents go through a divorce. A player is struggling academically. A young man is dealing with something at home that none of his teammates know about. Eventually, every coach finds himself sitting across from a kid who needs something much bigger than football. Those moments matter. WHAT KIND OF TEAM DO YOU HAVE? If you are a coach, you are probably a competitor. Show me a coach who isn’t competitive, and I’ll show you someone who is probably in the wrong profession.

By this point in the season, most of us have a pretty good idea of what kind of football team we have, and I think teams generally fall into one of three categories: championship, competitive or developing. I have coached all three. We all want to win the big one every year. But if you have been doing this long enough, you understand there are a lot of factors that determine whether that happens. Talent matters. Injuries matter. Your schedule matters. Sometimes the ball bounces your way, and sometimes it doesn’t.

There is a certain amount of luck involved in winning a championship. But here is what I have come to believe: you may not have a championship team every year, but you can build champions every year. That is something we control. You may not have a championship team every year, but you can build champions every year. THEY WILL REMEMBER HOW YOU MADE THEM FEEL Sometimes we underestimate the lasting impact of what we say and do during the short amount of time we have with our players.

I can still remember how my high school and college coaches made me feel. Your players will too. Grown men look back on four years of high school football as some of the greatest times of their lives. Think about that. We get to be part of those memories. Don’t miss that opportunity because you are so consumed with winning the next game. In our program, we constantly remind ourselves that kids play football for one very simple reason: football is fun. So sometimes we play a ridiculous game after practice.

Sometimes we wager conditioning on whether an offensive lineman can catch a punt. Sometimes you have to laugh. Football can teach discipline, toughness, sacrifice, accountability and perseverance without making every moment feel like life or death.

Friday night matters. It just shouldn’t feel like life or death. FIND YOUR GLUE GUYS Here is another lesson I have learned: stop trying to please everyone. Most parents will think you are a pretty good coach when their kid is playing. Some of those same parents will suddenly question your intelligence when their kid isn’t. Don’t waste your energy trying to change that. But there is an important distinction between playing everyone and valuing everyone.

Every player in your program should feel valued, even when his role isn’t the one he dreamed about. We call some of these kids our “Glue Guys.” They are the scout-team players and the backup quarterbacks. The kid who might get only a handful of varsity snaps but is the loudest person celebrating when his teammate scores. They show up every day, compete, serve their teammates and make your program better.

They are the glue that holds the whole thing together, and we intentionally find ways to recognize them throughout the season. When I think back on some of the best teams I have coached, I don’t just remember the all-state quarterback or the linebacker who made 100 tackles. I remember the Glue Guys, and I remember what they contributed to our team. There is an important distinction between playing everyone and valuing everyone.

LET OTHER PEOPLE CARRY THE MESSAGE Another thing I have learned is that your players don’t always need to hear the message from you. In our program, we are constantly trying to connect what we do in football to what our players will experience later in life. Tuesday night is what we call Tough Tuesday, one of our more physical practices of the week. After practice, we have a team dinner and bring in a guest speaker.

Over the course of a long season, even the most motivational coach in America eventually gets tuned out. That’s okay. Bring in somebody else who can reinforce the values you are trying to teach: your principal, a police chief, a respected community member, a successful alumnus, a local business owner, a former player, even one of your assistant coaches who has a story your players need to hear. Sometimes a young man needs to hear the same lesson from a different voice before it finally clicks.

Winning championships is special. Building champions lasts a lifetime. -DAN LEVER

Sometimes a young man needs to hear the same lesson from a different voice before it finally clicks. DON’T MAKE YOUR LOVE TRANSACTIONAL Maybe the biggest thing I would tell coaches is this: don’t be transactional with your joy, your appreciation or your love for your players. If you’re happy with them when they win and angry with them when they lose, eventually your relationship becomes transactional. Instead, ask them how they’re doing. Know what is happening in their lives. Tell them you appreciate them.

Catch them doing things right. When you see one of your players modeling your program’s values in the hallway, the classroom or the community, point it out. Football gives us a scoreboard every Friday night, and that scoreboard makes it incredibly easy to define ourselves by wins and losses. Don’t fall into that trap. If you’re up when things are good and down when things are bad, you’re becoming transactional.

But if your players know that you care about them whether you win, lose or draw, you have an opportunity to become something much more important. You become transformational. At the end of every season, only a handful of teams get to call themselves champions. That’s the reality of sports. But every coach reading this has an opportunity to build champions. You can build better teammates. Better students. Better sons. Better future husbands and fathers. Better employees, leaders and members of your community.

Years from now, most of our players won’t remember the exact play we called on thirdand-7. They may not remember their record. They might not even remember the score of the biggest game they played. But they’ll remember the locker room. They’ll remember their teammates. They’ll remember Friday nights. And they’ll remember how their coach made them feel. Winning championships is special. Building champions lasts a lifetime.

Dan Lever – Head Football Coach, Silverton High School Dan Lever is the head football coach at Silverton High School and a veteran educator with nearly 20 years of experience. A fourth-generation teacher and coach, Lever takes great pride in continuing his family’s legacy of impacting young people through education and athletics. He is also a proud graduate of Linfield College, where he played football.

Lever has coached at the Division II, Division III, junior college, and high school levels, including over a decade as a head coach. He took over a 2–9 Tualatin High School program in 2016 and quickly turned it around, leading the team to a 7–4 record the following season. He finished his tenure at Tualatin in 2021 with a state runner-up finish and was honored as the 6A Coach of the Year.

In 2022, Lever accepted the head coaching position at Silverton High School, where he has led the Foxes to three conference championships and a 5A State Championship in his first four seasons. Lever is a physical education teacher at Silverton and holds a Master’s Degree in Sports Studies and Athletic Administration. His program is built on fundamentals, discipline, and elite practice habits, with a strong emphasis on developing tough, confident, and high-character student-athletes.

Photograhy for this feature provided by: Pam Shetler