At 6 o'clock on winter mornings, long before Friday night lights illuminate the football field, Josh Roop is in the weight room. He's been doing that for about 20 years.

Tri-Valley football players learn fairly quickly that nobody is going to drag them out of bed. Roop explicitly tells parents not to do it.

"Don't wake them up. Start making them get up for themselves."

If they're late, there will be consequences. That's the point.

"In one, two, three, or four years, your son's either gonna go to a job or he's going to go to college," Roop said. "Hopefully you're not going to be there waking him up anymore. So it's training now for them to be ready to go into life."

That sentence explains quite a bit about how Roop sees football. Winning matters; he is a coach, after all. But it isn't the primary thing he's coaching.

Roop is a 1993 Tri-Valley graduate whose connection to the district stretches back at least four generations. His great-grandfather attended here. His grandfather served as school board president. His father, uncles, brother, and sister came through Tri-Valley.

He returned as head football coach in 2007, even though there wasn't yet a teaching position available for him. For several years, Roop opened Tri-Valley's weight room before school, drove to his teaching job in Unit 5, then returned to Downs for football practice. Eventually, he came home for good, and over the years has taught high school and middle school physical education, served as athletic director, taught driver's education, and worked at the elementary school.

But football remains a particularly important classroom.

"You're going to have successes and failures, and you may have successes and failures on every play," he said. "You've got to learn how to deal with them."

Roop believes football creates repeated opportunities to practice doing hard things. Players become mentally and physically exhausted. They make mistakes. They fail. Then comes another play. At some point, Roop said, every person will confront something difficult enough to make quitting attractive. Football lets young people practice choosing otherwise.

"You've got to decide and make a choice if you're going to continue to keep going," he said. "And you hope it's the guy next to him that's going to make them continue to go."

That responsibility to the person beside you is embedded in what Roop calls the Viking Code: accept responsibility, lead courageously, enact justice on behalf of others, live for a cause greater than yourself, and love one another. Roop borrowed the principles years ago from Joe Ehrmann's book Season of Life, but they have become deeply rooted in the culture he tries to build.

"Living for a cause greater than yourself is huge," Roop said. Today, that cause may be a football team. Someday it may be a spouse, a child, a family, a workplace, or an entire community.

Roop talks openly with players about becoming people others can count on. He wants them to accept responsibility rather than make excuses, to become less self-centered and more focused on others.

"Step up," he tells them. "Be somebody that is worth following and can be counted on."

That philosophy extends to failure. Roop worries that adults sometimes protect young people so thoroughly from small failures that they leave them unprepared for larger ones. He compares it to teaching a child to ride a bicycle. Eventually, the hand has to come off. The child may fall.

"You're going to pick them back up, you're going to brush them off, you're going to tell them what they did wrong and send them on their way," he said.

Then you let them ride again.

Asked why the district has succeeded, Roop returned naturally to football.

"You have good people that pass down a legacy year after year that's willing to build on it and step up," he said. "You have people mentoring and teaching the people that came after them and leaving a legacy."

Roop has lived that cycle himself. Some of his own teachers were still at Tri-Valley when he began coaching here. Former students return for homecomings and football games. The community has changed from the largely blue-collar farming community of his childhood, but the expectations have remained high and perhaps grown higher.

Academic excellence matters. Athletic excellence matters. But Roop believes the foundation beneath both is people.

"It's got to be about the kids."

He sees that commitment in teachers, aides, maintenance employees, lunchroom staff, administrators, and board members. And on football mornings, he sees it in teenagers arriving at a weight room while much of the community is still asleep.

Someday, nobody will care how much they could bench press at 17. Roop knows that. What he hopes remains is the habit of showing up, accepting responsibility, pushing through something difficult, and looking after the person beside them.

Because for Roop, the mission of Tri-Valley football has always been larger than football. It's helping young people become the best versions of themselves.