Coach Michael Kelly started coaching HSE football last fall.

Coach Kelly, who is also the Advanced Weight Training coach, came to the school from Seymour High School, where he was the head coach for 3 seasons. Before that, he was an offensive coordinator and an offensive line coach for Fishers High School and was a part of the 2010 5A state championship squad.

Kelly is a part of numerous coaching and strength and conditioning organizations, the biggest ones being the Indiana Football Coaches Association, the American Football Coaches Association, and the National High School Coaches Association for Strength and Conditioning.

Kelly was inspired to become a coach after having a coach while he was growing up that motivated him and pushed him to be better, he started coaching in 2005 after he graduated from Taylor University, which was jokingly described by Kelly as ‘The Harvard of the Midwest’.

Kelly originally saw that HSE set their players to a high standard when he was coaching for other schools, saying that he saw that they were willing to work hard and play physical. Kelly decided to come to HSE because he was excited to work for an athletic department that already had a good culture established and wanted to coach hardworking students and take advantage of the great facilities that HSE provides.

As a coach, he wants his players to leave the program better men than they came in. He wants them to play football disciplined, with integrity and with respect for one another, and to do things the right way. He tries to coach with a blend of being hard and demanding as well as building a relationship with his players. He holds them to high expectations. He also said that Football is unique because of the amount of teamwork and dependence on others it takes, and that football is the only sport where you spend 9 months of the year training only to play 3 months.

Kelly believes his greatest accomplishment is seeing students advance off the field because of their involvement of football, and seeing players graduate high school and go to college that never thought they could get that far academically. He is a transformational coach, and wants his players to grow as both athletes and people while in the program.

Off the field, Kelly enjoys spending time with his family and watching his children grow both academically and athletically. He has three children, Karson (13), Addison (12), and Braxton (9). Other than that, Kelly is 100 percent focused on his team and his class.