King’s Fork High School football program recently completed its first “Goal Digger” team activity event.

The student-athletes of the King’s Fork football program came together for the activity last Thursday. Bulldogs coach Scottie Littles asked his guys to write down two personal goals and two team goals they wanted to accomplish this year on and off the field.

“At King’s Fork, we inspire our student-athletes to have goals,” Littles said. “We want to promote growth and having a plan.”

After each player had written down their goals, they put them into small plastic storage bags. All the smaller bags were put into larger bags, and from there they all gathered around a big hole near the practice field to place their goals in the ground.

“A lot of people talk and say they want to accomplish good things, but sometimes they never have a plan to do it,” Littles said. “We want to make sure when our kids graduate and go off to college that they understand how to have a plan to accomplish the things they want to accomplish.”

With their goals in the ground, the players will literally run over their goals every time they step onto the practice field. The idea is for Littles and his staff to get their student-athletes to think about their goals every time they head to the field. They want to encourage the players to think about if they have been doing all they can to accomplish their goals.

At the end of the season, the Bulldogs will dig the goals back up and see who accomplished their goals.

“If you achieved your goals, cool, what’s next,” Littles said. “If you didn’t achieve your goals, what do we have to do to get there?”

Each player added dirt into the ground. Littles wanted to give his players a sense of self-responsibility. It’s a team event designed to build team chemistry. All the players were locked in and excited about what this can lead to.

Camp is starting up for most high school football teams. Littles knows it can be a grind some days. For the difficult days, he wants to remind the players of their goals and to keep pushing through.

“I don’t have to do the ra-ra thing when things don’t go right sometimes,” Littles said. “I can just tell the kids, ‘Look, you wrote down your goals. You don’t want to let yourself, your team and community down. So, we are going to bust our tails and literally run over our goals.’”

The Bulldogs also believe that in the future this could be an annual event that spreads across all sports at King’s Fork.

“Our athletic director, coach (Randy) Jessee, does a good job of building team chemistry amongst other coaches and different sports to interact and be together,” Littles said. “This could be something that can turn into a school-wide thing.”

King’s Fork has opened up camp, and everyone on the team is currently healthy.