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BY VAL TSOUTSOURIS
Sports Editor, RTC
Drew Mosson’s coaching journey started when he spent seven years as an assistant coach at Argos under his father Gordon.
Then he got his first taste of head coaching experience with the Madison-Grant girls in the 2021-22 season.
Then came two years as a boys basketball assistant coach under Eric Thompson – one year as at Peru in 2022-23 and he then followed Thompson to Huntington North in 2023-24.
But when the Culver job opened up, a chance to return closer to home appealed to him. He was hired at a school board meeting on July 15 and will replace Kyle Evans as the Cavalier bench boss.
“A couple years ago, I was the head girls coach at Madison-Grant, but getting back on the boys side was important to me,” Mosson said. “Obviously, when you work under Gordon Mosson, my dad, for seven years, it makes it a lot easier to understand how things need to be ran and things to do in preparation and things like that and then the last couple years working for Eric Thompson, a really successful coach that goes about it the right way, I was more sure this year maybe than I ever have been just because of my last couple years with Eric, seeing it from a different perspective and not the family side of things. I’ve been looking for jobs the last couple years. This one seemed right at the right time.”
That means he will coach against Triton, his alma mater, in the Hoosier North, from where he graduated in 2013, and against Argos.
“Getting back to where I’m from is something that was important to me,” Mosson said. “Obviously, I was a Triton grad, so getting back to the Marshall County area was first and foremost something we were looking forward to as a family.”
Mosson also was enthused about working with principal Brett Berndt and athletic director Mike Zehner. Berndt was the Culver boys coach from 2001-08 before beginning his administrative career.
“Brett Berndt and Mike Zehner are two of the best administrators that you could want to work for,” Mosson said. “I kind of got to know them in my years at Argos. Those were the first steps that I was excited about when that job came open, and then on top of that, obviously you watch film on the kids that were returning, and I felt like there was enough talent there to where we could kind of try to build something from the ground up.”
After graduating from high school, Mosson said his initial interest was in athletic training. He suffered a concussion in the spring semester of his freshman year at Olivet Nazarene University in Bourbonnais, Ill., and had to move home.
At that point, Argos hired Gordon Mosson.
“I’m sure deep down I always knew I was going to be a coach just based on my dad, and I missed some time in high school, so I sat down by (Triton coach) Jason Groves and (assistant coach) Matt Landis and some of my assistants at Triton and tried to learn from them a little bit in high school,” Mosson said. “So at 19 years old, Dad asked me to be his varsity assistant. It just kind of worked out that I was living at home at the time.
“It didn’t take me long to figure out at Argos that this was basically what I wanted to do forever. The teaching just kind of went along with it for me. I changed my major to P.E. (physical education) after that one year, just based solely on the fact that I was coaching. The coaching is the passion for me now. The teaching just goes along with it because you should be a teacher if you’re a coach.”
While he was an assistant at Argos, Mosson took classes at Ivy Tech and then Indiana Tech before graduating from Manchester University.
“Being able to make an impact on a kid through basketball was something that was a different feeling than I had felt before,” Mosson said. “Now it’s like I almost crave that. How do I impact a teenager’s life to where they’re going to grow up and be a good parent, a good spouse, a good professional in the world is really what it came down to for me.”
Mosson remembers attending John Glenn practices, where his father coached from 1982-2007, when he was 6 years old.
“Most of the time, I was shooting by myself on the side,” Mosson said. “It’s not like I was always standing next to Dad listening to everything he said, but again, I was always trying to figure out why were his teams so good and why did his players always play hard and they played good defense and they worked together and those are things that I just remember as a kid I noticed and I could take with me as I began to play at the high school level and now into my coaching career.”
Asked how coaching has changed just in the 10 years he’s been in the profession, he said that coaches have to pay more attention to their feeder system. He called the feeder system that Groves, a John Glenn grad who played for Gordon Mosson before winning nine sectionals, four regionals, four semistates and a state title in 2008 at Triton, has built “ridiculously awesome.”
“Kids are a little bit different than when I first started,” Mosson said. “You’ve got to give them more opportunities to come in the gym. They’re not asking to come in the gym as much as my first couple years at Argos. … If you make it to where there’s time to come in and do a workout and get in the weight room and lift and get some shots up, they’re coming in and doing those things. You just have to make it more available to them than you might have 10 years ago.”
Mosson said he has held five open gyms since he was hired. He thanked the administrators, including Berndt, Zehner and superintendent Karen Shuman, for letting him do workouts in July even though Mosson said July is more of a month for fall sports. He also thanked football coach Austin Foust for being good to work with.
“We’re going to be building a lot of relationships come November as quickly as we can, so we can get them ready to go,” Mosson said.
Mosson called Culver’s weight room facilities “unreal.” He said football and basketball players come in from 7-8 a.m. a couple days a week to lift during the summer. He also said that Culver will increase the number of weight classes it holds during the school year from two to five per day.
Kyle Evans, the coach whom Mosson succeeded, is the strength coach and runs the weight program in addition to his duties as a Marian University Ancilla assistant coach. The rest of the coaches help when they can.
“Once the school year starts, from what I’ve been told, everybody is pretty much in weights class, so … we don’t have to take time out of our practice to go in the weight room and spend an extra two hours a week in the weight room just trying to get strong, and I think it will work out really nicely that way,” Mosson said.
Mosson takes over at a time of change in the Hoosier North. Knox and LaVille are leaving the conference, and Argos, Oregon-Davis and North Miami are joining.
Only Winamac is in Class 2A; the rest are in Class 1A. And only Triton and North Judson had winning records last year.
“When I was at Argos, we played pretty much all the Hoosier North teams,” Mosson said. “So I think it’s a really good small-school conference. Now that we’ve added Argos, Oregon-Davis and North Miami, and Winamac fits in the same boat. Their enrollment is just a little bit higher. Their demographics in Winamac are very similar to what ours are at Culver and Caston’s. It’s a rural school with a lot of farm kids, things like that.
“I think it’s a really good conference. I’m excited to see how our kids can compete and hopefully finish decent in the conference for sure.”
Mosson will teach Alternative Education at Culver. He is married to the former Hannah Jennings. They are parents to 1-year-old son Lux.
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