LLOYD — As his team practiced, Chris Mullins heard from his staff about grey hairs beginning to peek out from under the trademark curved bill of a baseball hat.

So goes the life of Greenup County’s 31-year-old football coach. It’s been a stressful offseason for the second-year Musketeers coach and Greenup County High School math teacher.

Most importantly is the job that was added to his resume on the morning of July 27: New dad.

A week before preseason camp started for the Musketeers, Mullins’ wife, Meredith, gave birth to the couple’s first son — Liam Campbell Mullins. It was easy to understand why Liam’s father might have been dragging his first practice back.

“We didn’t get much sleep,” Mullins laughed. “Not only because you have to feed him every two hours, but you’re just so excited. Instead of watching TV, you just sit there and watch the boy because it’s our first and everything is new and exciting. He’s all the entertainment we really needed.”

And while it is entertainment, the stress and mental exhaustion gets to take its toll, especially when preparing for a job as a teacher as well as running a football program.

Mullins knows it’s a little easier to have a coaching staff that understands how much he went through the past couple of weeks.

“I was lucky to have such a great staff that they were able to take care of things while I was away for a couple of days,” he said. “They were able to keep things going, they left me alone, didn’t call my phone off the hook, or send me a bunch of text messages other than ‘Congratulations.’”

Clay Couch, Greenup County’s defensive coordinator, could easily tell Mullins was drained from his added responsibility, but said he’s doing a good job coaching a team that has been built around youth.

“There is always a lot of stress at the beginning of the season anyway,” Couch said. “He’s taking it well. And we have a young team, we don’t have veterans. It’s not easy, and we go out there and grind it out every day.”  

It seemed like nothing went right for the first-year head coach during an imperfect 0-10 season last fall.

Mullins took over a team with only two players with varsity experience, had a team with 33 players overall, worked with a new staff in new roles, inherited a football program in debt, had coaches quit and be dismissed midseason, and had injuries decimate his team, whittling it down to only 18 players in uniform.

But while many coaches might take a “woe is me” attitude regarding the situation, Mullins continuously kept his players in mind.

“We had a lot of high character kids on that team last year,” he said. “They deserved a lot more than they got. And that’s the way things go sometimes. Sometimes we feel like we don’t get what we deserve, but it’s not up to us to decide that.

“Our kids did a good job accepting the fact that maybe we weren’t out there every Friday to win the game, maybe we were out there to learn a little about ourselves.”

Mullins remembers a three-day stretch in the 2011 preseason camp that resembled something out of a horror film.

Players going off in ambulances, three players suffering concussions, upset parents calling him and to top it all off, Mullins finding himself locked out of his office.

As he was leaving at midnight of the third day, having to be back at practice at 5:30 a.m., he could only think positively.

“As I was leaving I thought to myself this was one of the worst days ever,” he said. “But as I locked the door I told myself if I can survive these few days, and I can make it through days like this as head football coach at Greenup County, then there is not a day that I could not handle.”

That attitude’s been contagious.

“He always keeps us positive,” Couch said. “Our staff all work together, we meet together, we always talk, most of us work in the school and he always keeps us together.

“It can’t get any worse than 0-10. The days he’s been put through, the injuries we had last year, it’s amazing.”  

But the Greenup County native credits the optimism he instills to his staff to a tradition he had of going to see his parents during his lunch break.

After losing six of his 11 starters last year, and feeling down after losing, he had a memorable conversation with his dad.

“Finally he said ‘Son, you need to change your attitude,’” Mullins recalled. “‘It’s not about things can’t get any worse, it’s things can’t be that bad.’

“I started thinking back to whenever I said things can’t get worse, and something amazing would happen and unexpected and things would get worse,” added the coach.

Mullins said he and his staff jokingly changed their attitude to that mantra of not getting any worse.

“We have good kids,” he said. “We’re learning as a staff, we’re coaching and playing a game we love and we have great support from the community and the administration.

“So things aren’t that bad, things are going to look up for us.”

KYLE HOBSTETTER can be reached at khobstetter@dailyindependent.com or (606) 326-2658.