Over eight seasons as head football coach at Iowa High School, Tommy Johns has turned the program into a perennial contender.

He earned his second American Press Southwest Louisiana Coach of the Year award after guiding the Yellow Jackets to a 12-2 season and the semifinals this season.

To win 42 games over the last four seasons and reach the quarterfinals or better three times, Johns says he keeps learning to constantly improve his team. It goes back to advice from his father, Mike Johns, the 1994 Coach of the Year winner, a couple of decades ago: learn from as many people as possible and surround yourself with people who can help you expand your knowledge of the game.

“He had a tremendous impact on me once I got into (coaching),” Johns said. “He said, ‘You need to go and learn from other people. You’ve been around me your entire life.’

“There’s a lot of other ways to do this. There’s not just one particular way to run a program. This is the number one thing, he said, ‘Make sure you surround yourself with good people.’”

Johns has travelled the country in recent years to pick the minds of a wide variety of  coaches.

“If you can just pull one piece or tidbit from it, it’s worth it,” Johns said of each meeting with a coach. “It’s unbelievable how the things that you accumulate over the years, and not just from guys that you work with, but other people in the area.”

In 2022, he went to Coastal Carolina and Liberty universities. More recently, he made stops at two Oklahoma high schools — Bigsby and Broken Arrow — and a clinic in the Dallas area.

At Bigsby, he gleaned information about how to improve special teams and structure the program, and from Broken Arrow came defensive tips.

“I knew there were some things that we talked about we wanted to try to take advantage of in the kicking game, be a little bit more aggressive in that area,” Johns said. “We had faced that defense that Cecilia runs, and a couple of teams are starting to morph into that. We wanted to learn more about how to attack. We wanted to see what we could take from (Broken Arrow) and bring into our defense.”

At the Dallas clinic he discovered adjustments to the practice schedule and this season switched to an early morning practice on Wednesdays.

“We try to do something in the offseason to make us better as coaches and program development, player development and all that,” John said. “Typically it’s the afternoon practice. It caught my attention. So afterwards, I went and talked with the coach and got some of the schedule, how they arranged it and all that. It gives everybody just a chance to breathe a little bit. The coaches can go pick up their kids from school.”

Even before he got his first coaching job, Johns found ways to learn. As an equipment manager at McNeese State, he would find his way into staff meetings, learning from Tommy Tate, Matt Viator, Gerald Broussard and Lance Guidry among others, he said. As he has built his staff over the last few years, he wanted a group of coaches who he could learn from.

“I think we’ve been fortunate to do that here,” Johns said. “And our principal (Luke Dietz) and our (other) admins (assistants Shantelle Brown, Seth Storer, Jennifer Underwood, Rachel Zaunbrecher) have given me the chance to hire who we want and who we need. And I think that’s been a huge part of our success.”

His staff includes Matt Dufresne, Stu Cook, Phil Reynolds, Randy Baggett, Christian Trahan, Daniel Hennigan, Cody Fontenot, Mark Fontenot, Adam Hardy, Riley Cormier plus help from trainer Chris Lahaye and Josh Underwood, who helps with social media.

“I’ve picked up on something from everybody on our staff because they’ve all come from different places,” Johns said. “Coach Baggett has a wealth of knowledge. He’s been a solver.

“(Christian Trahan played) at the University of Houston and spent a year with the Cincinnati Bengals. He’s brought a wealth of knowledge just from the standpoint of just kind of how they operated. (Mark Fontenot) is a first-year coach, but he’s been in the workforce. He’s worked for the last four or five years and managed some bigger businesses. So to be around people like that who know how to develop relationships with people, it’s just been refreshing to have people like that around you.”