Photo credit: J Thomas Taylor Photography.

New Hickman head football coach Justin Conyers points the way during practice.

Three words that sum up the high school experience are Friday Night Lights. The Kewpies haven’t had a winning season in 12 years. However, last winter, there was a change. 

The former head coach of Hallsville High School’s football team, Justin Conyers took the reins this year. Conyers is no stranger to coaching in Mid-Missouri; he has coached at every public high school in Columbia, winning a state championship when leading Battle High School, as their first-ever head coach. 

Growing up in Columbia, Conyers played in the local Columbia Youth Football League (CYFL) and always knew he wanted to be a Kewpie.

“My dream was to be a Hickman Kewpie. There was no question about it. There was no way I would have [gone] to Rock Bridge,” Conyers said. 

The players hope that the football program at Hickman is once again on the rise.

Under Conyer’s coaching, lots of changes have been implemented. 

“Uniformity was number one, we ordered gear for everybody,” Conyers said.

Along with giving the team new clothes, Conyers also helped the team improve their behaviors and attitudes. 

”It was a slow learning process. Here we are now… they’re holding each other to that standard, [we] set the standard of, this is what we’re going to do to be consistent,” Conyers said.

Conyers has key pillars on which he bases his program and coaching. The first of these pillars is consistency. 

“Everything that we do doesn’t matter if it’s a warm-up and stretch routine..consistency in our approach and being transparent with one another and making sure that we’re accountable to one another,” said Conyers. 

Many new team coaches face struggles when meeting the team or getting to know their players. Conyers combatted this issue by meeting with the team before practices started.

“[We made] sure these kids understood who we were as people, what our expectations were for the program, and trying to build culture and doing those things really was has been really good for us, because that was the positivity piece of building those positive relationships,” Conyers said. 

Within Conyers’ team, another key pillar that they focus on is being a family, and even though a lot of teams finish their huddle by saying family, they want to truly mean it. 

“We’re going to mean it, and we’re going to have each other’s back all the time, or that’s not going to be something that we’re going to fake, right? We preach every single day, but it’s been a building process, because I felt like we said it, but we didn’t mean it early on. Now, when we say family, I feel like we mean it,” Conyers said.

Hickman’s football season starts tonight as they play Marquette in Clarkson Valley at 6:30 pm. The Kewpies have high hopes for this season, and Conyers is flipping the script and setting the record straight. 

“Don’t expect to see the same things you’ve seen in the seasons past. Expect to see us conduct ourselves in a better, respectful manner for us, to compete at a high level, and to have expectations of ourselves. To know that we have certain expectations for us as a group, collectively. I feel like there’s a high buy-in right now from our guys. We need to have success. Success is measured in a lot of different ways, but we need to win. We could talk about all these things and preach all these things, but if we don’t go out and we can’t formulate that success on the scoreboard. I want everybody out there to know that we have a much higher expectation than probably we have [had] in a long time,” Conyers said.