Coach Tuke: The lessons learned from 2023 will never leave me

Tom Matukewicz is entering his 11th season of leading the Southeast Missouri State football program and his objective for his student-athletes during the winter months has never been in question.

“We spend most of our off-season getting our players better,” Matukewicz said recently.

That growth isn’t limited to the players, however.

Fans at Houck Field may sit and question a 3rd-and-long call by the Redhawk coaching staff from time to time, but what can never be in doubt is the amount of self-reflection that Matukewicz puts in following each season, and that includes the agonizingly frustrating one that just ended.

Southeast Missouri State entered the 2023 season with its most talented roster in program history and carried with that a top 10 national ranking and a whole host of athletes that were designated as preseason All-Americans.

Little did anyone realize that the euphoria circling the program in August would be the high point of the fall.

“In December, we’re going to tell the world a story,” Matukewicz said during the mid-season. “We’re either going to say, ‘We started off 1-4 and couldn’t get it on track, and we had a bad season,’ or we are going to fix the things that are causing the problems and go and win six straight.”

It was the former.

A never-ending stream of injuries, coupled with unfathomable close defeats (the Redhawks lost four games by a combined 10 points), left Matukewicz’s program with a 4-7 record and not a sniff of a postseason berth.

There wasn’t anyone familiar with the Redhawk program that ever gave a second of thought to such a year being remotely possible. But it happened.

So, what did Matukewicz learn from the experience?

“The thing that I knew,” Matukewicz explained, “but didn’t do (in 2023) is that it takes what it takes.”

What Matukewicz was referring to was the degree of training and preparation for success to occur.

“It doesn’t matter how many players you have coming back,” Matukewicz continued. “To get good at football, it takes what it takes.

“And we didn’t pay that price.”

Matukewicz said that his unwillingness to push his veteran team physically, which he referred to as being “fearful,” resulted in his team not being as capable as possible, which very well could explain four losses by a combined 10 points.

“The reason we didn’t (pay that price) is because I was fearful,” Matukewicz said. “I felt like that if I go out there and scrimmage and (All-American wide receiver Ryan Flournoy) injures his ACL (knee) or (All-American running back Geno Hess) tears his shoulder up, then I’m dumb.”

SEMO trained hard, but not as physically challenging as it takes to win a championship.

“We just peeled back,” Matukewicz said. “We didn’t do enough good (players) on good (players) that it took to get good at football.”

Matukewicz added that he lost focus in his message to the team.

He began to focus on the end result each Saturday, as opposed to concentrating on the details that it took to achieve the desired result.

“Winning kind of hijacked the message,” Matukwicz said. “Since I have been here, this has always been a process-driven program, but all of a sudden, it became about outcomes.

“What happened was that we stopped talking about, and focusing on, the things that win. We just focused on winning, which is why that prevented us from having a successful season.”

Matukewicz said that there were other things that went awry, none more critical than losing All-Everything quarterback Paxton DeLaurent for the second straight season to injury. However, this season, and those lessons that he mentioned, are permanent reminders for Matukewicz moving forward.

“I call them tattoos,” Matukewicz said of the two lessons he mentioned. “They’ll never leave me again.

“I never had a team that had eight All-Americans coming back. I thought that I had to change how I coached them. That was a mistake.”