Dave Hanna was there when it all began.
He’d just started his senior year at BYU in the fall of 1972, helping defray the costs of higher education by working for Dave Schultess in the sports information office, when an unproven assistant named LaVell Edwards took over as the Cougars’ head football coach.
Up close and personal, Dave watched Edwards’ inaugural season and then, after being accepted into graduate school, the next two seasons as well. His job with the SID department was to go to the BYU locker room after games to gather quotes for the media.
Thus he was there in the locker room at the old Cougar Stadium (capacity 30,000) on Nov. 9, 1974, after BYU defeated 16th-ranked Arizona State 21-18 — one of the biggest wins, if not the biggest, to that point in the Cougars’ rather meager football history.
He was gathering quotes when LaVell walked in and started addressing the players … and then stopped. The coach was unable to continue because emotion overtook him. All he could do as he struggled without success to gain composure was give the team a thumbs-up and stand down.
Then came what Dave describes as “the loudest ovation I have ever heard in my life. The lockers became kettle drums, the cheering, it seemed to me, was going to lift the roof right off the locker room.”
To Hanna, what he witnessed that day wasn’t just the reaction to scoring a major upset, it was a reflection of the way the players felt about their coach and the way he led them.
To say Dave was hooked on Cougar football, and its iconic coach, might be a tad understating it. He graduated with a master’s degree. in organization behavior and left Provo behind in 1975, but he didn’t leave the football program behind. His career, starting with Procter & Gamble and later as a consultant to numerous successful companies, took him around the world. He followed the Cougars religiously, including during the years he lived in Germany when BYU was a perennial entrant in the Holiday Bowl and he’d watch the game on Armed Forces Television — at 3 in the morning.
As much as he reveled from afar in BYU’s wins (and the 1984 national championship) throughout the Edwards Era, he was mesmerized by the way LaVell continued to lead the team in his unassuming, effective way. In his day job, Dave advised, consulted and observed many of the business world’s top leaders. In the BYU coach he saw their equal and then some, a man who not only adhered to recognized leadership principles, but added a few more that were all his own.
So when Dave retired in 2020 and moved back to Provo, he decided it was time to capture his observations for posterity.
The result is “LaVell’s Leadership Playbook,” the book Dave released this month, just in time for another football season. (You can find it on Amazon.)
In chronicling many of the biggest wins in the Edwards era, Dave assigns one of eight fundamental business principles he watched LaVell consistently employ. They include: 1. Compete using your unique strengths, 2. Instinctively follow the game plan, 3. Build new, consistent, and enduring capabilities, 4. Solve problems at their source, 5. Handle whatever the competition throws at you, 6. Develop true partnerships, 7. Adapt to changes in your world, 8. Never write off an individual.
“I saw him routinely living up to these eight points and what a difference it made with his players, on and off the field,” notes Dave. “Great leaders instinctively follow the game plan. I think that was true with LaVell. His leadership made such a huge impact on so many people.”
To help prove that point, Dave’s is one of two books released this month celebrating LaVell’s leadership. “The Leadership of LaVell Edwards,” by Mark D. Ogletree and Dave McCann, was released Aug. 3 by Cedar Fort Publishing. (Dick Harmon featured the book in his Aug. 16 Deseret News column: Twenty-six years after LaVell retired and ten years since his death, the tributes, and the books, just keep coming.
McCann, the veteran sportscaster, Deseret News columnist and author, thinks he gets why: Because the coach never set out to have books written about him.
“He’d probably be embarrassed to have two books about him, and that’s part of his charm,” says McCann. “He did what he did because it was in his fiber, because that’s who he was, he didn’t do it for any other reason.”
For the definitive word about how LaVell would react to this latest flurry of attention let’s go to Ann Cannon, his daughter:
“I think he would be grateful his legacy is still there and important and affecting people,” she says, “but I think surprised is a good word for how he might react. He never did take himself too seriously. A long time ago he once told me it would be embarrassing for the football coach to make more than the president of the university. I remember one time we were eating in the food court at the mall and a man at another table kept looking at us. My dad assumed he recognized him as the coach. Then after a while the man came over and said, ‘I think you work for the grounds department at BYU, don’t you?’ He really got a kick out of that. He loved it when stuff like that happened.”