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Wayzata Football's Lambert Brown Is WCCO's Coach Of The Year

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- It's been a season where most has gone right for the Wayzata football team. They are unbeaten, and ranked number one.

"It's been fun," said head coach Lambert Brown. "I think every single day I enjoy coming here. I think our kids love being together, our coaches love being together. And so, you know, I think when we ended the game, the first thing I said was, 'The best part of winning right now is that we get to have two more weeks together.'"

On this day, the team finds out there is a reward: Brown has been chosen as WCCO's Coach of the Year.

It comes with the territory when you win games, and it comes from a culture they are constantly trying to build.

Lambert Brown
Lambert Brown (credit: CBS)

"I want our culture to be that we just get better every day," Brown said. "We should leave practice, we should leave the classroom better than when we came in. As long as we can get them to continue to make that a part of who they are, they're going to be an OK football team and they're going to be good kids and good people when they leave the program."

That's what the Minnesota Vikings and the NFL look for in a program.

"The things that you're looking for overall are, number one, the performance of the team," said Jeff Robinson, youth football development manager for the Minnesota Vikings. "But when you go behind that, you want to look at what the coach is doing as far as not only the wins and losses, but as far as how he's getting the kids to respond in school, as a collective group."

And that's part of what makes a season special. It's never about the awards. It's always about the people.

"Nobody gets 'Coach of the Year'… if you don't have really good players and really good assistant coaches," Brown said. "So it's a credit to them, and I'm lucky to be around them all every day."

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