Justin Boser (center, in headset) takes over as the new football coach at Greenwood after five seasons at Clarksville.
Submitted photo | News and Tribune
Greenwood’s football team won a total of three games over the last two seasons. Compared to what Justin Boser inherited at his last head coaching stop, that’s downright rosy.
The 34-year-old Boser, who was officially hired as Greenwood’s new head coach at a school board meeting on Tuesday night, is no stranger to hard times. Five years ago, he took over a Clarksville program that had lost 35 games in a row. After he dropped his first 11 games there and 16 of his first 17, Boser was able to start laying a foundation for success; he posted three straight three-win seasons before going 5-6 this past fall (with one of those wins against Greenwood Christian).
Now, he’ll try to get the Woodmen moving back in the right direction in a similar fashion.
“How I went down there, and the plan that I went down with, is going to be very similar to the plan I bring in here,” Boser said. “(Former Greenwood coach and current athletic director Mike) Campbell’s talked a lot about, he’s built this program on family, and that’s how I build my programs. I went in and I showed those kids at Clarksville that, first and foremost, I care about them. I care about who they’re going to be after high school. So we start there, and we start building them up.
“It’s a little different here, where that’s already established, but I’m going to establish it the first thing I do with them, and then it’s just about putting that install in, having that game plan ready for Week 1.”
What that game plan looks like will depend largely on what he sees in the returning Woodmen.
Boser considers himself an offensive-minded coach, and he’s got the receipts to prove it. Last fall, Clarksville running back Robert Lamar rushed for 3,035 yards and 37 touchdowns — second in the state Roncalli’s Luke Hansen. And lest you think Boser is strictly a pound-it-on-the-ground type of guy, he also coached a 3,000-yard passer (Evan Stambaugh) during his three-year tenure as the offensive coordinator at Lebanon.
He feels just as comfortable running spread or run-pass option schemes as he does settling into an I-formation.
“It’s adjusted to personnel,” Boser said. “I think in high school, you have to be able to do that, because you have the kids who are there and going to that school. You don’t get to go out and pick and choose like in college.”
Campbell, who retired from coaching to become the Woodmen AD, is confident that he found the right guy for the job. He had scouted Boser’s Lebanon offenses in 2015 and 2016 in advance of potential sectional matchups — but more important than Xs and Os was what he saw inside of Boser’s heart and soul.
“Number one, we were looking for a fit,” he sit. “Who’s a person who is going to fit at Greenwood, who understands our situation, and then a quality man, a guy who is going to be a part of our Woodmen family, and he certainly checked all of those boxes in our first meeting.
“It kept coming back to the quality of man that he is, and that’s what sold us.”
The son of a longtime central Indiana high school assistant coach, Boser was a decorated high school quarterback at Hamilton Heights and then went on to play at St. Francis while working on an education degree. He knew from an early age that he wanted to get into coaching.
His goal was to be a head coach by age 30; he accomplished that at Clarksville. Now, Boser moves his family (wife Megan and their three children) to Johnson County, where he’ll take over for a coach who had taken the reins at Greenwood when Boser was still in high school.
When Campbell stepped down after his 17th season at the helm, he made it clear that he planned to stay out of his successor’s way — and he repeated that assertion on Wednesday morning. Boser, though, made it clear that he plans to use Campbell’s experience as an asset.
“Obviously, that’s going to be a sounding board for me,” Boser said. “I’ve been running a program for five years, but there’s obviously going to be some different aspects to this program that I didn’t have at Clarksville. In a way, I would have seen somet things that are similar when I was at Lebanon. … Having these conversations with Mr. Campbell the last few weeks have been very positive.
“I’m fairly confident that he’s not going come down and tell me to run iso or to throw a pass; I don’t think that’s going to be any kind of issue. I know he’s still going to be passionate about Greenwood, as he should be.”
Campbell’s youngest son, Carson, is a sixth-grader who will be playing football for the Woodmen before long; that made this hire both professionally and personally important to him. Boser considers it an honor that he was the one Campbell decided to trust going forward — and he’s eager to get to work coaching in the Mid-State Conference, one of the most competitive football leagues in the state.
“I love that challenge,” Boser said. “I love to be able to be right in the middle of really good football.”
