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Zone Read: Kellis is Coming

Arizona Sports News online

The West Valley is littered with elite blue blood programs with unparalleled success. Centennial, Liberty, Desert Edge, Cactus, and others have been high school football staples west of Interstate 17.

While Kellis High doesn’t boast the same tradition, or achievements, the Cougars are building their own program foundation, behind a young head coach whose vision long preceded the prosperity. 

A Vision of Opportunity

Not many coaches would jump at the chance to take over a program that went 1-27 the previous three seasons, but Ben Kullos, then in his mid-20’s, never looked at it that way.

Growing up in the west Valley playing for Liberty, and with family ties to the Peoria School District, Kullos saw what could be, not what was, from the school sitting in the shadows of State Farm Stadium in Glendale.

“When  I applied, there were some people that said, ‘Man, are you sure? They won one game in three years,'” Kullos said earlier this week to the “Zone Read.” “The location here is phenomenal. We’re right off the [101] freeway. We’re just down the road from…all these schools that have this rich history. Why can’t we carve out our own little piece in the Peoria Unified School District?

“That’s what kind of took me here in the first place.”

Make the Climb 

Kullos’ arrival coincided with the losing stopping. 

In his first season (2021), he flipped the COVID script from 0-8, to 6-4. The foundation was laid.

Later, “Make the Climb” would define the Cougars’ method to their madness.

The three-word sentence is far more than a surface level catch phrase at Kellis.

It represents the program’s core values and beliefs from inside the walls of the football facilities. 

“It’s process over outcome, and it’s a journey to get to the top of the mountain,” Kullos explained. “It’s not necessarily a state championship. Winning at home. Winning our first game in two years at home [in 2021] felt like climbing Mount Everest.

“The whole thing is about doing it with the people with you and focusing in on the process. Focus on the next step. You’re going to trip and fall down the mountain if you spend the whole time looking at the top…you spend all your time looking back at where you’ve come, you’re going to get passed up by someone else.”

Weighty Issues

Before Kellis football won on the field, they had to win in their own weight room.

An area which was prioritized by Kullos, a former defensive coordinator and interim head coach at nearby Mountain Ridge.

“I’m a strength and conditioning coach by nature,” he said. “The weight room is really, really important to any sports programs, specifically football, just from the amount of confidence that can be developed in there.”

Kullos inherited some talent, but those players initially lacked consistency – something they quickly found in grinding through workouts and pushing their bodies to places they’d never been.”

The hard work, complemented by their new found success under the Friday night lights, helped catapult Kellis from fall fodder to a factor in 5A.  

Learning from a Loss

Kellis hasn’t been on the wrong side of the scoreboard much in the last 14 months. 

KHS finished 9-2 last season. This, fall, they’re 5-1 heading into their Friday night match up against winless West Point. 

The Cougars’ defense didn’t allow more than 12 points in the five wins, while the offense averaged over 42 points in that same span.

The outlier was a 44-21 loss at Horizon in mid-September. 

For a still-building program like Kellis, measuring stick games against a heavyweight like Horizon, regardless of the outcome, can be beneficial in a number of ways.

“First off, we learned that Horizon’s pretty good,” Kullos quipped. “We hung with them for a half. We saw a gap. We saw a gap between where we were at [as a team], at that time. We’ve been focused on, regardless of the opponent, closing that gap from week-to week, hoping that, if we do see a team like Horizon in the playoffs in November, we don’t walk away from it going, ‘Well, we played them close.’ 

“We want to go out and win those games.”

You Never Forget Your First

At Kellis, it’s been a total team effort.

The coaches, players, and really whole school has bought into the build – a build that hasn’t seen a losing season since Kullos arrived.

Leading the climb has been his first senior class, who have not only raised the current football bar of success, but established a work ethic and winning culture for the younger players in the program to emulate. 

“This senior group is really, really special to me,”  Kullos noted. “There’s so many of them. Not all 27 of them have been here from the beginning. We’ve had some kids transfer in, but they’ve seen what now our younger classes haven’t seen.

“When these kids came in as freshmen, they weren’t used to seeing the things our current freshmen are seeing. Like continuing to win, talking about playoffs. Like, that wasn’t really a thing. We’ve grown on the backs of these seniors. So many of them played [varsity] as sophomores. We have probably 5-8 kids who are three-year starters now that have gotten better each and every year.”

The highlight of the season, to this point, was a Week 2 28-7 thumping at Peoria, a school Kellis had never beaten in program history (0-5 all-time entering the season). 

One (or More) for the Record Books 

In their 17 varsity seasons, Kellis has yet to win a playoff game. Last year’s magical regular season, which included a perfect 5-0 record in region play, as well as an eight-game winning streak heading into the post-season, ended abruptly with an opening round 24-2 loss at Millennium.

This year’s version of the Cougars is deeper, and more experienced, but…

“It’s kind of the elephant in the room when you’ve never done it before,” Kullos said of the drought. “When we went into the Peoria game, we didn’t talk much about Peoria week about being the first team to [beat them]…but certainly all off-season we did. All off season we’ve been talking about what it’s going to take to win that first game against Peoria, talk about what it’s going to take to win that first playoff game.”

Kullos and his team aren’t going to deviate from the “process over outcome” approach, a philosophy he’s preached since taking over the program at its lowest point and turning Kellis football into a consistent winner.

With victories, brings interest from kids already on campus. The Cougars, who have over 50 varsity players, also have added a few key transfers, including running back Rob Cordova, who led Cactus in yards rushing, and tied for touchdown runs, last year as a sophomore. The 6-foot, 190-pounder made his debut last week, rushing for 48 yards and a touchdown.

Everything is front of the Cougars.

The best may be yet to come.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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