MUSKEGON TOWNSHIP – Cody Kater knows there’s been a lot of gossip about the career decisions he’s made over the past few winters.
He says he lets most of it roll off his back, but admits there’s one type of criticism that bothers him.
“The biggest thing I’ve heard that upsets me is the idea that I have no loyalty, that I just jump from job to job,” said Kater, who just moved back from Georgia to the Muskegon area with his wife Hannah in the past few weeks.
The simple fact is that Kater is a young professional just reaching the prime of his career, and he bounced around a bit while searching for a job that would allow him to meet the goals he set for himself.
He had always been curious about football programs at larger high schools, and what it took to run one and be successful. He always wondered if he had the coaching skills to take over a struggling program and achieve the kind of success that he experienced as a player and assistant coach at Montague High School.
[1]He also wanted a job that would allow him to grow as an educator and make a difference in the lives of lots of students, not just football players or other athletes.
Kater found all of that at Reeths-Puffer, where he was named the new head varsity football coach in January, after a year of bouncing around a bit while he figured out the path he wanted to follow.
One part of his job will be serving as a student advocate, with a responsibility to work with freshmen and other kids who are having a difficult time adjusting, or may have other troubles in their lives.
Kater says he’s just as excited about that opportunity as he is about coaching the football team.
“That was a large part of it, the chance to work with at-risk youth,” he said. “That’s something I’m really looking forward to, to make sure they feel like they are cared for, and that they know they can do more than what they are doing. That’s what we’re here for.
“My mom was a mental health nurse for 30 years, so I understand how important that is, particularly for so many young people these days. This will give me a platform to make a difference.”
Going his own way
Bouncing around from job to job is hardly unusual for young people, but Kater’s circumstances were different.
While he never made any sort of hard commitment, it was widely assumed that he would eventually take over as the head football coach at Montague when longtime coach Pat Collins moved on.
After all the success he had at his alma mater, it sure seemed like the likely scenario.
He was the amazing young quarterback who led Montague to its first two state championships in 2008 and 2009, under Coach Collins, who himself was the Montague quarterback back in 1992 when the Wildcats made their first appearance in the state finals.
Kater returned to Montague after college, got a teaching job, became the head varsity girls basketball coach, and joined Collins’ football staff. He was the offensive coordinator for the 2020 Wildcat squad that won the school’s third state title, with Coach Collins still in charge, and his son Drew Collins calling the signals at quarterback.
[2]Both Pat and Drew Collins departed the scene after that last state title. Drew graduated and went to Michigan Tech University, while Pat resigned and became the head football coach at Holland West Ottawa.
Not to worry, Wildcat fans thought, because the natural successor had been waiting in the wings for six years, and was going to take over the great program that he had a big hand in building.
But Kater had different ideas, much to the astonishment of just about everyone.
He interviewed for the Montague job and it was offered to him, but in the end he decided it was time to go his own way and see what he could accomplish at a larger school, away from his hometown and loyal base of supporters.
Not long after saying no to Montague, Kater accepted the offensive coordinator job at Muskegon, where he would have worked under longtime coach Shane Fairfield and helped lead the most successful high school football program in state history.
Only a few weeks passed, however, before he called another career audible and announced that he would be moving to Georgia to become an assistant coach at Tift County Schools under former Lowell coach Noel Dean, who had recently accepted the head coaching position there.
He never ended up coaching at Muskegon at all.
At that point a lot of local fans assumed we had seen the last of Cody Kater, at least in a coaching capacity.
But Kater had one more surprise up his sleeve. In early January, after only one season in Georgia, he was suddenly named the new head coach at Reeths-Puffer, one of Muskegon County’s three largest high schools, where the formerly powerful football program has been underperforming for several decades.
Now Kater will have his ideal professional situation, moving back to Muskegon to be close to his family, testing himself at a bigger school that has a lot of football issues, and having the ability to work with and help many students succeed.
“I know I let some people down that I truly care for,” Kater said about deciding to leave the Montague program. “I let some people down that I looked up to. It was tough that way. But if they truly care for me and know who I am, they understood why I wanted to do my own thing.
“My ultimate goal was to be at a larger school in West Michigan, where I could see my family still, but I could also get out of my comfort zone. There were questions I always had for myself, like could I do it somewhere else? Instead of having that platform given to me, could I create the same type of winning culture elsewhere?”
That explains the decision to forego the Montague job and join Fairfield’s staff at Muskegon. But why did he walk away from that opportunity and go to Georgia instead?
“When I make a decision, it’s all about ceiling,” he said. “What ceiling is higher? There were money considerations involved (in Georgia), and some other pieces to the puzzle that contributed to that decision.”
Kater said he discovered during his one season in Georgia, when his team went 6-4, that he was ready to become a head coach.
“The school was in the largest class down there, we had 2,200 kids, and it was kind of nice to see how a school this size and the football program ran,” Kater said. “It was a great learning experience.
“I wanted to throw myself into deep water and see how I did, knowing it would probably be a short-term stay. We knew it wasn’t going to be where I would end up pursuing a career coaching path. I knew I wanted to be a head coach the whole time. I just didn’t know if I was prepared.
“Overall it’s exactly what I needed. It was something that gave me a new perspective. Having been a girls basketball head coach, I knew what it was like to have that creative control. In Georgia I had some control, but not a ton of it. At first I didn’t think I needed that head coaching control, then I decided maybe it was time for me to be a head coach.”
Rebuilding the Rockets
If Kater really wanted to test his ability to build a winner from scratch, he picked the right school in Reeths-Puffer.
There was a time when R-P was a traditional area football power that reached the top of the mountain by winning a state championship in 1992. But the winning culture dried up over the last few decades, and a series of head coaches were unable to spark the old fire and get the Rockets rolling again.
The Rockets were 3-6 last season and 2-5 in 2020. They’ve only won six games in a season twice since 2000. Their best seasons in the last two decades were 2007, when they went 6-4, and 2013, when they were 7-3.
Rebuilding at R-P will extra be challenging because of the competition. The Rockets play in the O-K Green conference, along with state powerhouses like Muskegon, Mona Shores and Zeeland West, and against state champion head coaches like Fairfield, Matt Koziak and John Shillito.
Over the last three years the Rockets have been outscored 145-28 by Mona Shores and 142-28 by Muskegon.
[3]Now it’s Kater’s job to narrow the gap between Reeths-Puffer and those schools and guide the Rockets back into the playoffs.
“Right now we are determining what the expectation will be for the coming season,” Kater said. “We have to find out what our seniors and juniors want to get out of the season. The longer-term goal is to close the gap in the county. Right now there is a gap between Muskegon and Mona Shores and Reeths-Puffer. We want to close that gap within the next two or three years and ultimately win the county. If we can do that we will be in good shape to compete statewide.”
That might sound like a very ambitious plan for a 30-year-old who has never been a head football coach before. But Kater does have a state championship pedigree, as a player and assistant coach, and a fundamental understanding of what it takes to reach that level.
As the quarterback at Montague, he led the Wildcats to a 13-1 record in 2008 and guided them to a 41-20 victory over Leslie in the Division 6 state championship game. The next year he led the team to a 14-0 record and a 21-20 win over St. Mary Catholic in the state title game.
As the offensive coordinator at Montague, he helped lead the Wildcats to the state finals in 2018 (which they lost to Jackson Lumen Christi), the semifinals in 2019 (which they lost in overtime to Maple City Glen Lake) and finally a state championship in the 2020 season, when Montague beat Clinton in the finals.
[4]Kater’s 2020 Montague offense piled up 574 points in only 12 games (the season was shortened due to COVID), which averages out to 47 points per game.
“There’s a lot of work that gets put into it,” he said about winning a state title. “Fans don’t see everything that goes into it. There has to be a certain amount of dedication, a culture of going the extra mile. And there have to be a lot of high-character people involved. In my coaching career, it’s always been the case that character drives the process, and the process drives the results.
“At a larger school, I think it will be important to have a staff that is really interested in player development and ensuring that their unit is strong and improving. You can’t have just one guy running everything. You need to build a staff that can take on larger loads while all being on the same page, and doing whatever extra work is necessary to make sure the job is done.”
Kater’s predecessor at Reeths-Puffer, Matt Bird, was a successful head coach for many years at Grand Ledge High School, a bigger school near Lansing, before leaving for R-P. Yet he struggled with the Rockets when it came to wins and losses.
So what did Bird and his staff miss with their handling of the Rockets, and what’s the proper approach?
“I really don’t know how it got away (at Reeths-Puffer),” Kater said. “Obviously a lot of different teams want success, and they think they are putting the work in, but maybe they’re not putting the right work in. Maybe they really don’t know how to work hard as well as efficiently to get results. I just know, going forward, that it’s going to be really important to be optimistic and really believe in hard work.
“There are a lot of great programs out there that have been working their rear ends off to make sure they’re prepared every season, and they piggy-back their success from one season to the other. It becomes a tradition that never graduates. That’s what we’re going to try to emulate.”
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