Inside the culture that turned Derby into a Kansas high school football dynasty
Four weeks ago, the silence inside the Derby football team’s locker room said everything.
A 24-20 loss to Bishop Carroll hung in the air like a fog. Helmets stayed buckled. Jerseys stayed on. For more than 30 minutes, the Panthers sat together in silence, stewing over their new reality: that Derby, a program built on championship expectations, had suddenly arrived at a crossroads.
For most programs, the moment would have triggered panic. Three regular-season losses? Derby hadn’t experienced that since 2011. A late-season stumble? The easy storyline would have been that the dynasty was finally cracking.
But inside that locker room, something else happened.
“Being in that locker room right after the game, you could just feel something was... different,” Derby senior Dalton Hornback said. “It was like we all knew what we had to do. And we knew if we did those things, we would get this thing turned around.”
They weren’t afraid of becoming the first Derby team in more than a decade to make a deep playoff run. They were hungry to prove they still belonged among the state’s best.
Since that night, Derby has rattled off three straight wins in the Class 6A playoffs to reach the state semifinals for the 13th time in the last 14 seasons, with a trip to Manhattan awaiting on Friday night. And after dismantling Wichita Northwest 63-21 last week in a game where many outsiders labeled the Panthers as underdogs, it appears Derby has returned to its juggernaut ways.
The adversity didn’t fracture them. It fortified them. That’s because Derby had something most programs don’t.
They had a compass.
And when they needed it most, they knew exactly where to point it.
How Derby football created a culture that never wavered
A decade ago, in 2015, Derby head coach Brandon Clark hired his friend, Kevin Chase, as the team’s character coach and created the One Degree Compass initiative.
It’s a culture system built on four pillars: accountability, character, effort and service. It is the heartbeat of everything Derby football has become.
The premise is simple: everyone has a destination, and if you stray more than a degree off your path, it’s time to check your compass and return north.
The system was born in the Thursday-night culture meetings Chase led for players before he was brought onto the coaching staff, when leadership topics often spilled into life lessons. It took shape on Chase’s cattle ranch north of Towanda, where Derby players and families gathered on summer days for father-son retreats. On those retreats, Chase had sons write letters to their fathers, which allowed them to open up in ways most teenage boys wouldn’t dare and turned vulnerability into a form of strength.
Chase, the former chairman and CEO of Verus Bank, knows culture better than most businessmen. And his influence has reshaped the Derby football program.
“You can never be at your best without a dynamic and consistent culture,” Chase said. “You will never reach your full potential, whether it’s in business or on a sports team. So we took that philosophy and started working on building a culture.”
Players view him as a cowboy philosophizer, a father figure to some who always has the right words at the right time.
“If a kid doesn’t feel comfortable talking to their parents or their coaches about an issue, Kevin is the guy they go to,” Clark said. “Our kids call him all of the time. He’s a huge asset to our program. He has such a wealth of knowledge when it comes to culture.”
Clark is always on the hunt for leadership and culture books, which is how he stumbled upon a book by New York Times best-selling author Dave Gordon titled Tip. The book’s themes of servant leadership, daily intentionality and relational accountability felt eerily similar to the foundation he and Chase had been building in Derby for years. Clark enjoyed it so much, he bought a copy for every coach on his staff.
On a whim, Clark sent Gordon an email — not expecting a reply, simply wanting to thank the author for writing something that resonated so deeply. Gordon was moved by the message and struck by how much a high school football coach in Kansas cared about culture.
The two continued to exchange correspondence and from there, the relationship grew. Gordon became fascinated with the One Degree Compass and encouraged Clark and Chase to write a book about their culture model. When they asked if he would help bring the project to life, his answer was immediate: yes.
For two years, Gordon collaborated with them from New York City while Clark and Chase worked from Derby, refining ideas and building something far bigger than a football manual. The end result was Culture Champion, published last year. The book is rooted in the belief that culture is sustained only when people actively champion it every single day.
“Champion is not a noun, it’s a verb,” Gordon said. “You talk about champion culture, you’ve got to champion the culture every day. You can’t take a day off. That’s what they do here in Derby. They don’t take a play off.”
Just before the book was released last year, Gordon flew to Kansas to spend a few days around Clark and Chase to see their culture in action. What he witnessed — from the Thursday-night culture meeting to the meticulous game-day preparation to the full spectacle of a Derby home game capped by a dominant Panthers win — showed him just how powerful the system Clark and Chase have built in Derby truly is.
“There’s a saying in the business world, ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast,’” Gordon said. “You can have great strategy, but if you have a toxic culture, nobody is going to champion for each other. That’s why culture is so important.”
That’s what has made Clark and Chase — the coach and the cowboy — such an effective pairing. They bring different perspectives to the same mission. Clark, a former standout football player, understands the locker room and what it takes to lead from the football side. Chase brings a culture-building mindset shaped by years in the business world.
What they’ve discovered is that there’s far more overlap between their approaches than one might think.
“Culture is culture,” Clark said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a football team, a business, a family.”
Clark prepares meticulously, sweats details and knows when to light a fire, but his day-to-day coaching reflects something deeper. He doesn’t scream. He teaches. He doesn’t berate. He builds. He doesn’t view his job as coaching football players; it’s mentoring young men.
“A lot of people talk about culture when things go wrong and try to improve culture when things are going bad,” Clark said. “We’re on the other end. We want to be proactive instead of reactive. We try to get out in front of problems before they even happen, so when they do happen, we have a good culture and it takes care of itself.”
The proof is in Derby’s record: 152-20 over the last 14 seasons, 13 semifinal appearances, nine championship-game berths, six state titles.
Culture didn’t just build a winner. It built a juggernaut.
What went into building the Derby football culture
When Clark arrived in Derby as a 25-year-old head coach in 2005, one of his first priorities wasn’t strategy. It was establishing a youth football infrastructure that mirrored the high school program from first grade up.
With Derby being one of the largest Class 6A schools in Kansas and enrolling all students into one high school, Clark understood the potential of a unified system.
The result? A pipeline that produces varsity-ready players who understand Derby values before they hit puberty.
Youth coach Hank Walton remembers attending his first coaching clinic hosted by Clark expecting a masterclass in Derby’s offense.
“You’re all excited to learn the X’s and O’s,” Walton said. “Then you show up and the entire clinic he talked about developing culture.”
At the youth level, Clark wants to make sure the culture isn’t something imposed on the kids — he wants to make sure it’s something they help create.
Before each season, Walton asks his players a simple but revealing question: What makes a champion? The players each write a word on a slip of paper and the coaches look for themes to emerge. They select about 10 words the players themselves have identified as important and build their team culture around them.
Those words become the standard. They’re repeated during practices and referenced whenever the coaches feel like the team is drifting off track. In a way, it mirrors what Clark does at the high school level with the One Degree Compass. The language may be different for third-graders than it is for varsity athletes, but the idea is the same: know your direction, know your standards and correct course before you get more than a degree off path.
Ownership becomes buy-in and buy-in becomes belief.
It all makes Friday nights in Derby feel like something out of a movie.
“Derby is such a special place on Friday nights,” Derby senior Dalton Hornback said. “Our community really rallies around us. There’s definitely a different energy in the air during football season in Derby.”
The energy is obvious even before kickoff. Behind the end zone, dozens of first- through sixth-graders gather in their miniature green uniforms, tossing footballs in the grass, tackling imaginary defenders and glancing up at their varsity heroes walking past.
“They get to see these monsters on the field and you can see the goosebumps on the kids’ arms,” Walton said. “They look up to those guys. They want to be that someday.”
And in Derby, someday feels inevitable.
“When football season comes around, we don’t even say ‘I love you’ anymore,” Walton said. “We say, ‘I football you.’”
In Derby, kids grow up believing that putting on the Derby uniform is magic.
Easton Splane, a former Derby star who is now playing at Central Missouri, remembers that time of his life vividly.
“I remember every year in Derby junior football when we were in elementary school coming out to games and looking up to the varsity football players,” Splane said. “It’s special when you grow up and put on the uniform and you see those little kids there because you know you were in their shoes and you realize how big of a deal it really is here in Derby.”
Inside the varsity program, culture is reinforced in its own subtle ways. Even the vocabulary has evolved.
Chase once told Clark that “practice” doesn’t fit Derby’s mission — you can practice bad habits, after all. So they renamed it “preparation.”
This past year, they pushed even further.
“Words are important and they’re part of your culture, so we started calling it ‘separation,’” Clark said. “We’re going to separate from the team we’re playing by our actions in practice, by our actions watching film, by our actions of not getting in trouble. So we focus on separating Monday through Friday and the kids have really bought into that.”
When everything in a program points north, adversity doesn’t fracture you.
It forces you to recalibrate.
Why Derby football is still winning games
The Monday after the Bishop Carroll loss, Derby arrived at what proved to be a pivotal practice.
Clark saw a change immediately: it was the team’s best practice of the year. Then they exceeded it the next day. And the next. And each day that followed.
In the three games since, Derby has beat Topeka 49-0, then gone on the road to upend Junction City, 28-7, and Wichita Northwest, 63-21.
“We knew we would have to play our best game to beat Junction City and we did,” Clark said. “And we knew we would have to play our best game to beat Northwest and we did. It’s going to take that same effort, that same mindset Friday night because we know we’re going to have to play our best game or we’re not going to beat Manhattan.”
Part of Derby’s resurgence came from returning to health, finally slotting players back into natural positions. Star running back Arieus Finley, who has rushed for nearly 1,500 yards and 16 touchdowns, is healthy again. The return of quarterback Blade Clark has added much-needed balance to the offense. The offensive line, led by senior Max Robinson, is rounding into form and the defense, led by seniors like Hornback and Houston Bowlin, is peaking at the right time.
Clark credited the senior class, players like Hornback, Bowlin and Robinson, for refusing to let Derby’s season end in disappointment.
“Having influence is great, but having influence isn’t always leadership,” Clark said. “But those guys who have influence in our locker room, they have the right leadership and the team has followed them. Now it feels like we have a whole locker room of Dalton’s and Houston’s and Max’s.”
Derby didn’t have to call an emergency meeting after the Carroll loss. It was the exact kind of moment Clark wanted to be prepared for when he built his program’s culture. So instead of panicking, Derby’s players simply stayed the course. The Panthers became a team that instinctively checked its compass and steered itself back on the path when it sensed the season was slipping a degree off course.
“The kids understand that they represent Derby and they want to make Derby proud,” Clark said. “They’re playing for the community and the school now, not just for themselves. When kids see the bigger picture like that, it’s just a lot of fun.”
That bigger picture has guided Derby for years.
Clark doesn’t chase wins anymore. He doesn’t obsess over rings or measure his career against past glory.
In the process of building one of the most impressive dynasties in Kansas high school football history, Clark realized the winning comes and goes, but the impact he left on kids would last. He started finding more joy in seeing teenagers become husbands, fathers and leaders. Along the way, he reclaimed what mattered most to him: building men, building character and building a culture that endures long after the scoreboard turns off.
“If (winning) is what my passion was after 20 years as a head coach, I think I would have burned out a long time ago,” Clark said. “I care more about building a good culture and watching our kids grow and mature. We never talk about the scoreboard. We don’t ever talk about state. Our goal is for our kids to graduate from our program as better men, that’s physically, emotionally and spiritually.”
And now, the season comes down to another trip to Manhattan — the team that ended Derby’s postseason run last year. The Panthers are hungry for their first championship since 2020 and they’re more than happy to embrace their newfound role as underdogs.
Because they’re not chasing revenge. They’re chasing north.
They always have been.
This story was originally published November 21, 2025 at 7:07 AM.
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