Allen turns Royals into a powerhouse | SPSL football

Kent-Meridian High School head football coach Brett Allen moves around the sidelines with a measured, steady pace and then switches to a run to bark orders to his players, then immediately regains his steady composure.

Kent-Meridian English teacher Brett Allen is a different man who casually strolls from the front to the back of the class and only rarely raises his voice to emphasize a point.

There’s more to Allen than just the coach who’s turning the Royals this year from lost hope to SPSL powerhouse in his fifth year. The Royals (3-0 league, 5-1 overall) play Kentwood (2-0, 5-1) in a South Puget Sound League Northeast 4A showdown at 7 p.m. Friday at French Field.

The 10-year teaching veteran has also worked in public relations, written sports columns and gone through his own personal trials in college. Allen’s coaching style, focusing on constant dedication to the task at hand, has brought the Royals their first winning season in more than a decade. His stepfather’s motto of placing things of value first in life have influenced his decisions and helped keep him on track through difficult times.

But for much of his life Allen never considered working with kids, looking instead to be a sports writer.

Allen grew up in South Seattle and moved to Skyway after his parents divorce. After spending a few years in Skyway, his mother settled in Renton where he graduated from Hazen High School in 1992. Allen played football at Central Washington University in Ellensburg and double majored in print journalism and public relations with a minor in sociology.

His stepfather, Ed James, impressed upon him at an early age the importance of planning and patience as well as the importance of big things of substance like family, God and other people instead of himself.

“He’s always passed on work ethic, and looking at your life and making small improvements, waiting for the long-term gain,” Allen says. During several years at CWU, he fell off of that mantra.

Troubles in college

While the coach has been praised for his work, he says that his time at CWU was one of the roughest of his life, when he got into drinking and drugs while on the football team. He spent almost six years in school — and nearly dropped out — before finally changing his attitude in 1996.

James’s watch words of looking at the things that mattered in the future, such as family, God and others that helped him turn his life around and he refocused on his studies.

The year was also a pivotal moment for Allen, when he met Aisha Duckett, who would become his wife.

“I knew within a few weeks that I was going to marry her,” Allens says. The couple were engaged five months later.

He says that Duckett’s drive and motivation to finish school (she had come out of community college and made it clear that she was there for two years and moving on) also helped motivate Allen to change his study habits.

After graduating they moved on to the Tri-City Herald in Kennewick. Brett wrote sports columns while Aisha worked on the paper’s business and marketing side.

“That’s the best job I’ve ever had. If I was single I’d go back to doing it,” Allen recalls. But Brett’s long night hours and Aisha’s day hours weren’t working, and they moved back across the mountains when she found work at the Tacoma News Tribune in 2000. Allen found work at a PR firm, but it was short lived.

“I hated what I did,” he says. “Working for someone else’s bottom line, cold calling journalists and glad-handing people made me feel so fake and I felt empty.”

While he was able to write occasionally, most of the work was trying to sell reporters on article pitches.

“The majority of it was the slimy, glad-handing stuff and my personality doesn’t really go that way.”

His father’s lessons of putting value in things that last such as a family and others guided him away from that job and into his teaching career.

A career change

The firm turned out to be an unexpected boon for Allen, when a co-worker approached him to speak at his wife’s journalism class at Renton High School. The positive atmosphere from the class gave him a major incentive to consider changing careers, and he spoke with his wife about it that night.

“I wanted to do something that mattered to the world,” he says, “not just some company’s bottom line, and mattered to me.”

Allen became an instructional assistant at K-M working in the Read Right program, where he helped struggling students bring their reading skills up to grade level. He also enrolled at Antioch University in Seattle for a masters in teaching program and a teaching certificate. He completed his student teaching at K-M and was emergency certified in 2004 to teach freshman English. He took his first teaching job at Mill Creek Middle School in 2005.

If he weren’t teaching English, he says, he would like to pursue social studies or history because “I’m a nerd for those things.”

Teaching and coaching have gone hand in hand for Allen, who says that the goal in both instances for him is to build life lessons into his teaching, not just the immediate material that he places in front of his students.

“There are some guys who coach the game strictly through Xs and Os, we try to teach the game so that kids truly understand it at all levels, and teach life lessons.”

Allen’s mantra of goal setting, confidence, work ethic and self respect come into this way of teaching. Whether it’s teaching ninth graders in his English class to speak publicly through 30-second speeches or getting the varsity team to believe in themselves and their abilities, it always comes back to teaching something more than just how to pass or how to write.

With the football season and school eating up his time, Allen looks to his family for relaxation, including his daughter Kaiya, 4, and son Mekhai, 2.

“They just crack me up at this stage in the game.”

It’s also a challenge for him to have a classroom, a football family and a personal family.

“I do sometimes feel like I’ve got a million balls in the air,” he says.

Allen finds himself much more distanced from his family during football season. One night, while tucking his daughter into bed, she said that she didn’t want him to coach football.

“It was like a punch in the stomach. She understood that I wasn’t with her because I was with football.”

It’s helped to bring the kids to games and practices, so they can see just what he does and why it’s important to him. It also helps when he ties it back to those family values.

“They know that my job is to teach people, so they do understand that part, and I talk to them how football is the same way. That’s one thing my wife is trying to teach the kids, is putting other people first is important.”