Coach Tuke: SEMO football achieves 'one of my proudest moments'

Any parent can sympathize with the Southeast Missouri State football coaching staff, as they tried to keep 89 student-athletes on the straight and narrow academically this spring semester. Sometimes, it is difficult to manage several young people through school, let alone 89 of them. However, as with everything else that the Redhawks accomplished during the 2022-23 academic year – both on and off the football field – SEMO reached heights previously thought unattainable.

“It’s reverse engineering,” 10th-year Redhawk coach Tom Matukewicz said. “How do you get the team better? You get the team better by getting the player better. But really, the question should be, how do you get the player better? That is done by getting the man better, and you get the man better.

“If you get the man better, then everything in his life gets better. It is not only a better player, which is ideal, but he’ll also be a better friend, a better son, and a better student.”

With that philosophy in mind, and in practice, the SEMO football program chased after a goal over the past five months of attaining a 3.0 grade point average, as a team, for the 2023 spring semester.

Mission accomplished.

For the first time in SEMO football history, the Redhawks had a 3.05 grade point average.

“It is probably,” Matukewicz said, “up to this point, one of my proudest moments.”

Let’s put this achievement into perspective.

Early in his career, the Redhawk program’s grades hovered around a 2.3, according to Matukewicz. It had climbed in recent semesters to a hair below 3.0, but the team had never been able to break that barrier.

“It is harder,” Matukewicz said of achieving this goal, as compared to winning the Ohio Valley Conference championship. “Whether people realize it or not, every one of my players came here for football. They want a degree, or I wouldn’t have recruited them. But that is not why they are here (specifically).”

Every football player that signs at the NCAA Division I level (and maybe even lower) has dreams (sometimes delusions) of playing professionally, which is Matukewicz’s point.

If Matukewicz told the young athletes during the recruiting process that:

- You won’t win a ton of games at SEMO

- You won’t develop into a professional player, but

- You’ll get a degree, then

Needless to say, the Redhawks wouldn’t be fielding the amount of unholy talent that they will in 2023.

“This is about asking them to not settle,” Matukewicz said of the academic end of the equation. “To push themselves to do things that they don’t want to do, at a high level.

“It’s hard.”

And it takes a team of adults in the room to reach this point.

From Matukewicz, to his assistant coaches, who monitor each of the players within their position groups academically AND athletically, to Director of Football Operations, Brett Blackman, who acts as a liaison between the football program and the SEMO Academic Services, to the staff within the Academic Services, there is a multitude of people who deserve praise – on top of the individual student-athletes – for this historic achievement.

“It is a true testament to ‘Coach Tuke’s’ culture,” SEMO’s Assistant Director of Athletics for Student Support Services/Senior Woman Administrator Betsy Wilcox said. “What he is striving for with these young men, and I think that it is really important that we buy into that culture as a staff.”

Whatever the grade point average attained by each of the student-athletes is each semester is on the student, because whether it is a football player, a gymnast, a tennis player, or whatever, there is a village of people monitoring every step of the student’s academic journey.

“When you have buy-in from all of the staff,” Wilcox said, “all of the way from Coach Tuke to our coordinators of academics (Brooke Hengst and Cassidy Loughary), the wheel will turn, and it works well.”

Wilcox was quick to note that the approach taken with the student-athletes is not heavy-handed, as say, it might be with a fourth-quarter turnover.

“We really focus on taking an approach of love, in respect to the athletes,” Wilcox said. “When you show that you care about them, they, in turn, will turn around and do the same.”