“Dad’s attention to detail was amazing,” Chuck said. “We worked to get it perfect in practice, and perfect is almost unachievable. If you ever got it perfect, then you were doing it right. “He wanted us to know what we had to do in every situation. He


 players. That’s the way he was with everything he did, whether it was coaching or farming or whatever it was. He always wanted to be the best at whatever he was doing.”


If you didn’t follow the game closely, Ron Cole had a beautiful football mind, especially on defense.


“He could just see something in his mind and draw it up on a  there would be other coaches who looked at it for hours, Dad just said, ‘Nope, you’ve got to do this, this, and this.’ “Defensively, if you go back and look at our stats, the number of yards that teams gained against us was minimal. He would take away what you were good at, and then he anticipated what you were going to do, and he had a plan for that. So we not only took away your 1, 2, and 3 options, we took away everything else, too. He was always trying to stay one step ahead, and he was always think-


38 /// May 2026


ing about ways to stop Rockhurst or Hickman, because he knew we would probably play them at some point.” In the two decades as Pete’s top assistant and defensive coordi- nator, Ron helped the Jays win nine state championships (1976-78,  other seasons. When Adkins retired after the 1994 season — af-            no-brainer who would get the job. For Pete’s sake, it’s Ron Cole. The program remained at a very high level under Cole, as the Jays


            the state title game, winning it all in 1997. That was the 10th state championship in the history of the program, making Cole the only man to be a part of all 10. “After we lost Jankowski,” Adkins said, “Ron came in, and he was our next good one. He did a wonderful job for us. He had a very good football mind on him, one of the best I’ve ever been around, high school coach or college coach.”


Chuck, 56, summarized his feelings about his dad, but he spoke


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