The following feature first appeared in the football game program on Sept. 11, 2021.

 If the truth be told, all fathers – and father figures – secretly want their guys to not just like the same things they like, but also to add a couple exclamations points to that by following in their footsteps professionally.

If, though, the guys pick dad's career, then he gets a little twinkle in his eye and a smile on his face that, to him at least, seems as wide as Woodward Avenue, and he has to gather himself to keep from getting … well, emotional. It hits the bullseye of the sweet spot of the soul.

That includes father figures who are college football head coaches, such as Wayne State University's Paul Winters. Now in his 17th season, he has had a lot of former players, so affected by their relationship with him and their time at the school, become head coaches themselves after their playing careers are done.

Each ex-Warrior who does that is an offshoot on the Paul Winters coaching tree, which gets bigger, stronger and sturdier each year. That's a testament to Winters, not really for what he has done at the school on the field, though that is impressive, as evidenced by the fact he has turned around the Warriors, posting a 91-87 career record heading into this season, and has taken them to the pinnacle with a trip to the Division II national championship game a decade ago. Rather, it is what he has accomplished off the field, away from the lights and cameras, in molding boys into men. That doesn't show up on any statistical sheet – there are no such records kept regarding coaching trees – but it's so much more important in the grand scheme of things.

The Paul Winters variety is a very good tree – one of the best in this region – from which to emanate, grow and prosper. Just ask some of the men who have done it, and continue to do it.

Ty Spencer goes way back with Winters, having arrived at Wayne State in 2005, the coach's third season, as a junior college transfer from Grand Rapids Community College. He played cornerback for two seasons for the Warriors but still hadn't finished work on his degree after he had used up all of his remaining eligibility, and scholarship funds.

"I needed a lifeline – I needed some help, financial and otherwise – and Coach Winters stepped in," Spencer said. "He said, 'We'll get you some money to be a student assistant coach for the 2007 season while you finish up that degree.' I had never really thought about coaching before, but after I got to be with the coaches during their meetings together, and I got involved in some recruiting, I immediately liked it a lot. I found myself thinking about coaching and football all day long, every day, even during times when I should have been focusing on other things."

It wasn't long before Spencer realized he wanted to be a coach, too, just like Winters. And he has become a very good one, again, just like Winters. Now in his sixth season at his alma mater, Martin Luther Jr. High School in Detroit, the 36-year-old has guided the Crusaders to three state championships in two divisions, and in doing so has quickly established himself as one of the state's rising stars among high school football coaches.

He says he has taken a lot from Winters and incorporated it into his own successful coaching.

"Coach is a guy who is very organized and prepares well," he said. "He gets straight to the point and does exactly what he says he's going to do, so there's a real accountability there. And he knows how to get his guys fired up."

Spencer gets fired up when talking about Winters and what his old coach has meant to him as a mentor in both football and life.

"I learned so much from him," Spencer said. "He taught me things that even my own father did not teach me, and my father taught me a lot of things."

Oshnock makes it clear that he never had to think too long or deeply to figure out what line of work he was going to go into.

"I always knew growing up that I was going to go down that track," he said. "I am the son of high school football coach (Greg Oshnock, for whom he played at Lakeview High School in St. Clair Shores)."

What he didn't know was the huge amount of help in that dream that he was going to get from the man who coached him for all four years of his college playing career, Paul Winters (the strong safety was recruited to Wayne State in 2002 by previous head coach Steve Kazor and was redshirted that season).

"I looked up to Coach Winters right from the start," Oshnock said.

And the start was a struggle.

"We had a rough time during my early years at Wayne State," he said. "Some coaches in that position might have taken some short cuts to try to get the program turned around more quickly. But not Coach Winters. That's not who he is. He's a man of principle who has a consistent approach to the game. So he just stayed the course and we kept working hard until the program got better. I got to see that discipline and dedication he showed -- the right way to do things – every day for four years.

"When people talk about Coach, they say he always has teams that are tough. He works his guys hard and loves you as he would his own children. He never came out and told us he loved us – guys don't say that – but he did. I have very fond memories of my time at Wayne State."

Oshnock, who will turn 37 on Sept. 16, has taken his lessons from that time at WSU into his varied coaching career. He is in his first season at Grand Rapids Northview, where he's trying to rebuild the program, and his eighth year as a high school coach overall after having been an assistant at a variety of colleges, including Wayne State, Central Michigan, Eastern Michigan, Cincinnati and Ferris State.

He's found his niche at the high school level.

 "I will stay there," he said. "I love the high school game. Friday nights are sacred."

And so is his admiration for Winters.

"Coach is an outstanding man," Oshnock said. "For a young man, he's a tremendous male role model. He's a guy you look up to. You want to grow up and be just like him."

And that's a heckuva lot, for Jake Weingartz is the fourth-year head coach at Davison High School, which won a state title in 2019 and returned to play in the title game again last season, and his 14th year overall in coaching.

"The whole gamut, from x's and o's to how to handle a team and how to run a practice, I've learned from Coach," he said.  

That's not all he took from Winters, though.

"Integrity. When I think of Coach Winters, that's what I think of," said Weingartz, a Lapeer East High School product who played four seasons (2003-06) as a wide receiver at WSU. "Kids are smart. They know a fake when they see one, and Coach is the real deal. He's a no-nonsense guy with a lunch-pail work ethic who will love you up. He always does the right thing, and in college football today, you don't see that a whole lot.

"Hands down, he's one of the best individuals I've ever been around. He's a great coach, but an even better person."

The most important position in team sports is, without a doubt, quarterback. And the most important relationship in team sports is that of the quarterback and head coach. If a team has a great quarterback and a great head coach, then it has a chance to be truly great, regardless of the other circumstances or how far it must go to get there.

With that, then, the seeds were planted – and the key relationship was formed – in an unlikely place, Painesville, Ohio, located 30 miles northeast of Cleveland, for Wayne State's meteoric rise from a program trying to find its way to its greatest football moment, a spot in the Division II national championship game.

It was early in 2008 and Paul Winters, in his first years as Wayne State head coach, had returned to his native Northeast Ohio to recruit a quarterback from Painesville Harvey High School named Mickey Mohner. Other than hope, Winters didn't have a great deal to offer the first-team All-Ohioan. The program was struggling and coming off a 3-8 record in 2007. Despite perhaps some reasons not to do so, Mohner and his father, Michael, listened closely to everything Winters had to say.

"There was just something about him, the way he talked, the confidence in his voice and the way he carried himself," Mohner said. "So when he looked me right in the eye and said, 'We're going to compete for a national championship,' I just believed him."

The Warriors at that moment then had everything they needed – a coach who would become great but hadn't quite gotten there, and a quarterback with all kinds of ability who had yet to set foot on a college campus, let alone suit up and throw a pass –t to flip the program upside down and play for the Division II national title nearly four years later, in 2011.

"Coach's mantra was, 'Climb the mountain,' and we did that year," said Mohner, now back at Painesville Harvey as its second-year head coach, trying to do what Winters was attempting to do at WSU in 2008, get the program back on the right track.

It took a lot of hard work at Wayne State, but as long as the coach and quarterback were on the same page, which they were then and continue to be even now, all these years later, in terms of their relationship and respect for one another, there was a good chance it could get done. And it did.

"It takes a mental and physical toughness to play for Coach, because he holds you to a certain standard," said Mohner, who just turned 32. "And if you don't meet that standard, you're not going to play.

"I've copied that. I'm trying to establish the same thing at Harvey. We're holding these kids to a standard, to a degree of high character and integrity. We're going to do things the right way, just like we did with Coach at Wayne State. We're not going to shortcut anything here because we didn't shortcut anything up there."

Harvey High School, by the way, is also the alma mater of the NFL's all-time winningest head coach, Don Shula. He comes from the Paul Brown coaching tree, the mightiest tree in that forest, having produced three other Pro Football Hall of Fame coaches in Chuck Noll, Bill Walsh and Weeb Ewbank.

So, in Painesville, where his coaching career Paul Winters took an abrupt about-face, couldn't have picked a better place to plant his own coaching tree. He knows that full well, and is proud of it, but he'll never admit it.