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Nevada alum Pettibon packs punch on Tiger middle school coaching staff
Former Nevada High School gridder Brett Pettibon brings a wealth of knowledge to the Nevada Middle School coaching staff.
The 37-year-old Pettibon is a 2001 grad of Nevada High School, a first-team All-Conference selection at wide receiver his senior campaign. He then took his talents to the collegiate level, earning a track scholarship to Pittsburg State University.
Since graduating from PSU in 2006 Pettibon, a history teacher, has spent the past 13 years at Lamar H.S. as an assistant coach under seven-time state champion Scott Bailey and his juggernaut Lamar Tiger football program. Pettibon, who was hired by Nevada R-5 shortly after the school year concluded this past May, was also the head girls’ track-and-field coach for the past seven years at Lamar.
After being a part of Lamar’s improbable state title seven-peat, Pettibon says he hopes to impart some of his wisdom to the Nevada Middle School football program.
“Just the idea that if you want to succeed you’re going to have to put in not just what’s expected of you, but you’re going to have to go above-and-beyond,” Pettibon said of Coach Bailey’s philosophy. “You can’t just work hard when the coach is looking, but you have to be willing to do it when nobody’s watching.”
Pettibon said Bailey never allowed his players to get complacent from the mind-boggling success they achieved on the field.
“The reward for hard work is more hard work,” noted Pettibon, who oversaw Lamar’s JV offense and was a defensive backs coach. “Once you have success, you can’t just sit there and be happy about it, because now the level of expectation is even higher. So then you have to work even harder to meet that expectation.”
From a coaching perspective Pettibon chose a good year to make the jump from archrival Lamar back to his hometown, as Nevada’s middle school program has robust numbers this season, with 80-plus student-athletes out across seventh and eighth-grades.
“I want them to learn the fundamentals, I want them to learn to compete really hard,” Pettibon, the eighth-grade defensive coordinator, said of his personal expectations for the upcoming campaign. “Obviously, we want them to win games, but I care more about preparing them for high school. In the long-run, nobody’s going to care, ‘hey, that’s the group that went undefeated in eighth-grade,’ if they get to high school and go 5-5. We want to win games, but more than anything, we want to prepare them to have a successful high school career. Part of that is learning the fundamentals, and also teaching them what it means to be a team, and how to hold each other accountable.”
Pettibon said if the football program can sustain the current numbers as the student-athletes advance from middle school to high school, it will “make a world of difference in the fourth quarter, when you have fresh bodies to put out there.”
Pettibon is a big proponent of student-athletes participating in multiple sports.
“I think the best athlete is the one that does three sports,” began Pettibon. “I think whenever a kid does one sport, they get good at the fundamentals of that sport, but there’s a big base they’re missing. So, they grow fast in that one sport, but their peak isn’t nearly as high if they (compete) in different things and build a foundation. I think it also builds more of a competitiveness. Also, just the team aspect of it. A lot of times if you focus on one sport, it’s more about you and not your friends and the community as a whole.”
Pettibon further elaborated on his time with the Lamar football program.
“It was something that you never think is going to happen,” he said of the seven-peat and the recent nation-best 57-game win streak. “You have a couple good years, and you build on success, and more people want to be a part of it. One thing we were fortunate with was the community bought in and supported us.”
Pettibon said the extended seasons were highly advantageous for Lamar football.
“Because of the extra practice time we had a lot of younger kids get reps and get prepared,” Pettibon said. “So by the time they were juniors and seniors they had another basically full season of practice.”
Pettibon discussed his fondest memories during his tenure at Lamar.
“I had four cousins that were part of some of those state championships, so just being able to coach people that I knew growing up, which is going to be a lot like here," he said. "So, just the ability to coach people I knew growing up, (that was) pretty exciting.”
Said Nevada Middle School head coach Toby Thorp: “Brett is probably the most highly decorated middle school coach in Missouri, having won seven state championships.”
Pettibon, who has long resided on a farm just outside of Nevada with his wife and three young children, said he really didn’t know what to expect upon accepting the high school history teaching/middle school coaching position with R-5.
“Nevada and Lamar are pretty much the same community," he said, "(Nevada’s) just a little bit bigger. Lamar was an excellent community to be in, but I didn’t live there, and just thought that I could do more here — and I could (spend) more time with family (working here).”