Applebee’s Love for Coaching Began at K-State
May 22, 2026 | Football, Sports Extra
By: D. Scott Fritchen
He tried out for the Kansas State baseball team. Joel Applebee, who grew up in Russell, Kansas, with a football and basketball in his hands, and who starred in the American Legion baseball league, entertained scholarship offers from community colleges, but he yearned for Manhattan, the education, the people, and the possibilities that could come upon graduation.
And he tried out for the K-State baseball team under legendary head coach Mike Clark.
It was a one-week tryout in the late 1990s. Applebee was a catcher. In the end, Applebee didn't make the baseball team, but he found a college home.
"I always knew I wanted to go to K-State," Applebee says. "We didn't have a lot of family that went there, but I loved the university and I loved Manhattan, and I had a lot of friends who went there, too. I chose to study education, graduated in the 2000, and I knew I wanted to coach."
Applebee's first coaching job? Leading the K-State girls' club softball team for three years after "a fraternity brother suckered me into being an assistant coach and then he left, making me head coach — and it was a great experience, and I loved it."
Sometimes in life, blessings begin small. Applebee took his duties as head coach seriously for the club softball team. He learned organization. He learned how to communicate with administration. He learned how to prepare a season game schedule. And he learned the challenges of transportation while operating with a bare-minimum budget.
Throughout his life, Applebee was a fan of education. Nearly every adult in his family was involved with shaping young and not-so-young minds. His grandfather, Gail Applebee, a longtime principal at Beloit Elementary School, was a 2023 inductee into the Kansas Teachers' Hall of Fame.
Applebee's younger cousin, Brandon Clark, was also interested in education. Clark set state track and field records, and he was a gridiron standout at Valley Center High School, and he caught the eye of K-State head football coach Bill Snyder. Clark, like Applebee, wanted to become a coach. They talked about it all the time while roommates for two years.
Clark, hounded by injuries, finished his four-year K-State career with 25 catches for 465 yards and two touchdowns, and he earned his degree in secondary education. Today, Clark is the highly successful, long-time head football coach and physical education teacher at Derby High School, taking over the program in 2006 at just 25 years old and building the Panthers into one of the most dominant high school football dynasties in the state.
Meanwhile, the 50-year-old Applebee, who graduated from K-State in 2000 with a degree in business education, has also made state titles his business with a 143-43 record in 16 seasons as Mill Valley High School head coach, including 15 consecutive appearances in the 5A State Football Playoffs. Mill Valley captured back-to-back 5A State Championships in 2015 and 2016 and won its fifth consecutive 5A state title in 2023. That gave Mill Valley and Applebee seven 5A state titles in all — 2015, 2016, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023.
But here's the biggie. Here's the singular statistic that tops them all. Applebee is 7-0 in state championship games at Mill Valley, giving him more state titles without a defeat than any coach in the history of Kansas high school football, according to historian Brett Marshall.
Incredible.
"I've heard that," Applebee says. "The biggest thing that I stress to the kids is the daily message of, 'What are you doing to be the best version of yourself today?' I know that sounds cliché and simple, but it's truly what we live by. Whether it's in the classroom, the weight room, on the practice field, sleep habits, nutrition habits, being a part of a family, what are we doing to be our best version? Kids get caught up in perfection, especially high-achieving kids. What we try to stress to them is there's no perfect person out there and if we play a perfect game, you'll never see me coach again.
"Failure is growth, and you're going to have failure after failure after failure, and you're going to continue to make mistakes. Learn from mistakes. What are you doing today to be the best version of you? They're important in how you play physically and mentally and how you act physically and mentally, too. I don't put phrases around the weight room. I'm big into real substance, and I want the kids to understand that. If you work hard, you're going to get something out of it. It's easy to say but very difficult to do on a daily basis. I say it to them every single day starting first thing in the morning."
Applebee's success and diligence have paid off. On May 4, Applebee was named a 2026 inductee into the Greater KC Football Coaches Association Hall of Fame with the induction to take place at halftime of the GKCFCA All-Star Game hosted by Mill Valley on June 5.
An old familiar voice on the other end of the phone informed Applebee of his honor. It was Gene Wier, who won six state titles at Olathe North High School, who coached Darren Sproles, and who finished his 34-year coaching career with a 252-99 record.
"Gene Wier reaching out to me was huge because I have the utmost respect for him," Applebee says. "He's one of the best that's ever done it."
"The honor is very special," Applebee continues. "The committee is of peers who are already in the Hall of Fame. Most of them are retired now. The fact that they'd think of me, I could've never imagined myself being mentioned in the same breath as some of those coaches, who are some of the best mentors to me that I've ever had."
It was during a Kansas Football Coaches Association meeting in Andover, Kansas, in 2002 that Applebee, an avid learner and listener at coaching clinics, heard Bill Snyder speak for the first time. At the time, Applebee served as defensive coordinator at Junction City High School — his first high school coaching job out of K-State. Meanwhile, Snyder was on an incredible run of 10- and 11-win seasons, and he was months away from capturing K-State football's first conference championship since 1934. The rise of K-State football was legendary, as were the words of the man credited with the greatest turnaround in the history of college football.
"Coach Snyder's unbelievable discipline to focus on the 'now,' he's probably the best ever at doing that," Applebee says. "His discipline to not get distracted from what's important right now is probably some of the best anybody has ever seen. Obviously, he's been an influence on a lot of different things."
And like Snyder, Applebee, too, started from scratch in a way when he entered the doors to Mill Valley High School upon his hiring as football head coach in May 2010. Applebee had impressive stints as an assistant coach at Junction City (2000-04), Russell High School (2004-06) and Derby High School (2006-10), but he didn't even know about Mill Valley High School until his former high school head coach, Joel Thaemert, called him and said, "Mill Valley has an opening, and you should look into it."
Applebee immediately phoned Junction City head coach Randall Zimmerman, one of Applebee's mentors, and whose 238 victories over a span of 32 seasons ranks top 10 overall among active head coaches in the state of Kansas.
"What do you know about Mill Valley High School?" Applebee asked.
"Every single track meet I go to there," Zimmerman said, "they have unbelievable support from their parents."
Applebee was sold on the opportunity.
"I put my application in and somehow got an interview despite never being a high school head football coach," Applebee says. "I was head baseball coach at Junction City for two years when I was there, but that was my only head coaching experience in high school. But I got an interview at Mill Valley, and they brought in a new administration across the board. Principal Tobie Waldeck saw something in me and offered me the job."
Today, Applebee chuckles at the sight that greeted him on his first morning as Mill Valley head football coach.
"I had no office because they were in the middle of a renovation and adding on here," Applebee says. "The weight room was finished enough to where we could enter it from the outside door. The first day, my office was basically the library. Even the principals were working in there because their offices were being renovated, too.
"I had hired a staff, and our new assistant coaches were all new to Mill Valley, too. The renovations to the school included constructing a bigger weight room. We football coaches put weight equipment together and tried to get everything ready. In June 2010, we had one week of team camp to help install things for our kids."
In Applebee's first four seasons, the Jaguars went from six wins, to seven wins, to eight wins, and then in 2013 they engineered the first 10-win season in Mill Valley history. In 2015, Applebee guided Mill Valley to a 38-20 win over St. Thomas Aquinas for its first-ever win against the previously ranked No. 1 team, and which lifted Mill Valley to its first No. 1 ranking in Kansas Class 5A football history. Mill Valley went on to finish with a 12-1 record and the school's first 5A state championship — a feat that the Jaguars repeated in 2016. In fact, Mill Valley won seven 5A state titles in a span of nine years between 2015 and 2023. Along the way, Applebee earned the Eric Driskell Coach of the Year award and was named the National Federation of State High School Associations award winner.
All the sudden, Mill Valley, which prior to Applebee had never had a 10-win season, found itself facing a different kind of challenge: Success.
"One of the things that's difficult to get across to kids and the community in general is once you have success, the hardest part is having them understand that every single team that plays you, it's their Super Bowl," Applebee says. "We tried to flip that and say, 'Why can't every Friday night be our Super Bowl?' We tried to flip that. It's sometimes difficult when you have success, it's a natural instinct that winning is just going to happen. The more success you have the more people are going to do whatever they can do beat you because they want that signature win. That's the most difficult thing when you sustain success.
"Our job as coaches is to get our kids to understand that. That's the biggest challenge year in and year out now, to stay hungry, and just the understanding of what it takes every single day. Winning a state championship doesn't make it a successful season. There are a lot of ways to have a successful season. If kids continue to work every single day to get better, that means we had a successful season. In the world we live in, especially when you have to the Kansas City Chiefs in town and the success they have, everybody equates winning and success with a championship, and that's not always true in my mind."
Today, the Mill Valley football state championship banners hang inside the school's basketball arena along with numerous other state honors earned by teams and individuals over the years — a testament to excellence and the values that Applebee and his coaches have helped instill into their players over the years.
That first step toward excellence arrives each morning with 6:30 a.m. workouts in the weight room.
Meanwhile, Applebee, who has been married to his wife Amanda for 23 years and has three children in Hayden (20), Holden (17) and Lola (14), follows his same routine on football Fridays in the fall.
"Our team lifts every morning on a gameday, and even on every state championship Saturday, the first thing we do is get them into the weight room and lift from 6:30 to 7:15," Applebee says. "Then I teach my classes for the day, then I go home and I go for a run, and then I clean the house. Cleaning the house gets my mind off of things. I think Amanda probably likes it. But that's what I do. I try to run every day, but every Friday I make sure I go for a run to clear my mind and makes you feel good, and then I clean the house."
When Applebee meets the team inside the locker room at 4:30 p.m. for a 7:00 p.m. kickoff, the final touches are put on a weeklong preparation to clean the opponent's clocks. And when Applebee and the players head toward the 6,000-capacity stadium, they are greeted by cheers from sold-out crowds.
"One of the coolest things we have going on here is a very supportive community, and they've really, really made our Friday nights a very special thing here for our kids," Applebee says. "We do the 'Jag Walk,' where we walk from our weight room through the high school down to the stadium, and it's just grown and grown and grown. Now there's hundreds of people out there tailgating and they line the sidewalk from the school to the stadium. It's a pretty cool deal.
"A Friday night in the fall here is a lot of fun for our kids."
Now as summer hits, the grind begins again.
"This is one of our busiest times in the year," Applebee says. "Summer has become our spring ball. You're working more with your kids in the month of June and a couple weeks in July. We've had multiple staff meetings in the spring preparing for the summer about schemes, culture, and things like that. Those are the types of things we're doing as a staff. Now the kids, we lift every day as a football program 6:30-7:15 a.m. Monday through Thursday.
"I love it. Football is the ultimate team sport. You have all 11 players doing their job on one particular play for it to be successful. If one thing breaks down, it can break down the whole team. That, to me, is such a challenge. That's probably what drew me to it."
It's been Applebee's passion for nearly three decades.
And soon he'll be inducted into a Hall of Fame — perhaps his first Hall of Fame induction in a remarkable career that seemingly has no end in sight.
"Our success is indicative of our kids and their mentality and understanding of daily improvement in everything they do," Applebee says. "That's very, very important here. That's 100% their mentality. You can't let up."
That's probably a part of why Mill Valley has never lost a state championship game.
He tried out for the Kansas State baseball team. Joel Applebee, who grew up in Russell, Kansas, with a football and basketball in his hands, and who starred in the American Legion baseball league, entertained scholarship offers from community colleges, but he yearned for Manhattan, the education, the people, and the possibilities that could come upon graduation.
And he tried out for the K-State baseball team under legendary head coach Mike Clark.
It was a one-week tryout in the late 1990s. Applebee was a catcher. In the end, Applebee didn't make the baseball team, but he found a college home.
"I always knew I wanted to go to K-State," Applebee says. "We didn't have a lot of family that went there, but I loved the university and I loved Manhattan, and I had a lot of friends who went there, too. I chose to study education, graduated in the 2000, and I knew I wanted to coach."
Applebee's first coaching job? Leading the K-State girls' club softball team for three years after "a fraternity brother suckered me into being an assistant coach and then he left, making me head coach — and it was a great experience, and I loved it."
Sometimes in life, blessings begin small. Applebee took his duties as head coach seriously for the club softball team. He learned organization. He learned how to communicate with administration. He learned how to prepare a season game schedule. And he learned the challenges of transportation while operating with a bare-minimum budget.
Throughout his life, Applebee was a fan of education. Nearly every adult in his family was involved with shaping young and not-so-young minds. His grandfather, Gail Applebee, a longtime principal at Beloit Elementary School, was a 2023 inductee into the Kansas Teachers' Hall of Fame.
Applebee's younger cousin, Brandon Clark, was also interested in education. Clark set state track and field records, and he was a gridiron standout at Valley Center High School, and he caught the eye of K-State head football coach Bill Snyder. Clark, like Applebee, wanted to become a coach. They talked about it all the time while roommates for two years.
Clark, hounded by injuries, finished his four-year K-State career with 25 catches for 465 yards and two touchdowns, and he earned his degree in secondary education. Today, Clark is the highly successful, long-time head football coach and physical education teacher at Derby High School, taking over the program in 2006 at just 25 years old and building the Panthers into one of the most dominant high school football dynasties in the state.
Meanwhile, the 50-year-old Applebee, who graduated from K-State in 2000 with a degree in business education, has also made state titles his business with a 143-43 record in 16 seasons as Mill Valley High School head coach, including 15 consecutive appearances in the 5A State Football Playoffs. Mill Valley captured back-to-back 5A State Championships in 2015 and 2016 and won its fifth consecutive 5A state title in 2023. That gave Mill Valley and Applebee seven 5A state titles in all — 2015, 2016, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023.
But here's the biggie. Here's the singular statistic that tops them all. Applebee is 7-0 in state championship games at Mill Valley, giving him more state titles without a defeat than any coach in the history of Kansas high school football, according to historian Brett Marshall.
Incredible.
"I've heard that," Applebee says. "The biggest thing that I stress to the kids is the daily message of, 'What are you doing to be the best version of yourself today?' I know that sounds cliché and simple, but it's truly what we live by. Whether it's in the classroom, the weight room, on the practice field, sleep habits, nutrition habits, being a part of a family, what are we doing to be our best version? Kids get caught up in perfection, especially high-achieving kids. What we try to stress to them is there's no perfect person out there and if we play a perfect game, you'll never see me coach again.
"Failure is growth, and you're going to have failure after failure after failure, and you're going to continue to make mistakes. Learn from mistakes. What are you doing today to be the best version of you? They're important in how you play physically and mentally and how you act physically and mentally, too. I don't put phrases around the weight room. I'm big into real substance, and I want the kids to understand that. If you work hard, you're going to get something out of it. It's easy to say but very difficult to do on a daily basis. I say it to them every single day starting first thing in the morning."
Applebee's success and diligence have paid off. On May 4, Applebee was named a 2026 inductee into the Greater KC Football Coaches Association Hall of Fame with the induction to take place at halftime of the GKCFCA All-Star Game hosted by Mill Valley on June 5.
An old familiar voice on the other end of the phone informed Applebee of his honor. It was Gene Wier, who won six state titles at Olathe North High School, who coached Darren Sproles, and who finished his 34-year coaching career with a 252-99 record.
"Gene Wier reaching out to me was huge because I have the utmost respect for him," Applebee says. "He's one of the best that's ever done it."
"The honor is very special," Applebee continues. "The committee is of peers who are already in the Hall of Fame. Most of them are retired now. The fact that they'd think of me, I could've never imagined myself being mentioned in the same breath as some of those coaches, who are some of the best mentors to me that I've ever had."
It was during a Kansas Football Coaches Association meeting in Andover, Kansas, in 2002 that Applebee, an avid learner and listener at coaching clinics, heard Bill Snyder speak for the first time. At the time, Applebee served as defensive coordinator at Junction City High School — his first high school coaching job out of K-State. Meanwhile, Snyder was on an incredible run of 10- and 11-win seasons, and he was months away from capturing K-State football's first conference championship since 1934. The rise of K-State football was legendary, as were the words of the man credited with the greatest turnaround in the history of college football.
"Coach Snyder's unbelievable discipline to focus on the 'now,' he's probably the best ever at doing that," Applebee says. "His discipline to not get distracted from what's important right now is probably some of the best anybody has ever seen. Obviously, he's been an influence on a lot of different things."
And like Snyder, Applebee, too, started from scratch in a way when he entered the doors to Mill Valley High School upon his hiring as football head coach in May 2010. Applebee had impressive stints as an assistant coach at Junction City (2000-04), Russell High School (2004-06) and Derby High School (2006-10), but he didn't even know about Mill Valley High School until his former high school head coach, Joel Thaemert, called him and said, "Mill Valley has an opening, and you should look into it."
Applebee immediately phoned Junction City head coach Randall Zimmerman, one of Applebee's mentors, and whose 238 victories over a span of 32 seasons ranks top 10 overall among active head coaches in the state of Kansas.
"What do you know about Mill Valley High School?" Applebee asked.
"Every single track meet I go to there," Zimmerman said, "they have unbelievable support from their parents."
Applebee was sold on the opportunity.
"I put my application in and somehow got an interview despite never being a high school head football coach," Applebee says. "I was head baseball coach at Junction City for two years when I was there, but that was my only head coaching experience in high school. But I got an interview at Mill Valley, and they brought in a new administration across the board. Principal Tobie Waldeck saw something in me and offered me the job."
Today, Applebee chuckles at the sight that greeted him on his first morning as Mill Valley head football coach.
"I had no office because they were in the middle of a renovation and adding on here," Applebee says. "The weight room was finished enough to where we could enter it from the outside door. The first day, my office was basically the library. Even the principals were working in there because their offices were being renovated, too.
"I had hired a staff, and our new assistant coaches were all new to Mill Valley, too. The renovations to the school included constructing a bigger weight room. We football coaches put weight equipment together and tried to get everything ready. In June 2010, we had one week of team camp to help install things for our kids."
In Applebee's first four seasons, the Jaguars went from six wins, to seven wins, to eight wins, and then in 2013 they engineered the first 10-win season in Mill Valley history. In 2015, Applebee guided Mill Valley to a 38-20 win over St. Thomas Aquinas for its first-ever win against the previously ranked No. 1 team, and which lifted Mill Valley to its first No. 1 ranking in Kansas Class 5A football history. Mill Valley went on to finish with a 12-1 record and the school's first 5A state championship — a feat that the Jaguars repeated in 2016. In fact, Mill Valley won seven 5A state titles in a span of nine years between 2015 and 2023. Along the way, Applebee earned the Eric Driskell Coach of the Year award and was named the National Federation of State High School Associations award winner.
All the sudden, Mill Valley, which prior to Applebee had never had a 10-win season, found itself facing a different kind of challenge: Success.
"One of the things that's difficult to get across to kids and the community in general is once you have success, the hardest part is having them understand that every single team that plays you, it's their Super Bowl," Applebee says. "We tried to flip that and say, 'Why can't every Friday night be our Super Bowl?' We tried to flip that. It's sometimes difficult when you have success, it's a natural instinct that winning is just going to happen. The more success you have the more people are going to do whatever they can do beat you because they want that signature win. That's the most difficult thing when you sustain success.
"Our job as coaches is to get our kids to understand that. That's the biggest challenge year in and year out now, to stay hungry, and just the understanding of what it takes every single day. Winning a state championship doesn't make it a successful season. There are a lot of ways to have a successful season. If kids continue to work every single day to get better, that means we had a successful season. In the world we live in, especially when you have to the Kansas City Chiefs in town and the success they have, everybody equates winning and success with a championship, and that's not always true in my mind."
Today, the Mill Valley football state championship banners hang inside the school's basketball arena along with numerous other state honors earned by teams and individuals over the years — a testament to excellence and the values that Applebee and his coaches have helped instill into their players over the years.
That first step toward excellence arrives each morning with 6:30 a.m. workouts in the weight room.
Meanwhile, Applebee, who has been married to his wife Amanda for 23 years and has three children in Hayden (20), Holden (17) and Lola (14), follows his same routine on football Fridays in the fall.
"Our team lifts every morning on a gameday, and even on every state championship Saturday, the first thing we do is get them into the weight room and lift from 6:30 to 7:15," Applebee says. "Then I teach my classes for the day, then I go home and I go for a run, and then I clean the house. Cleaning the house gets my mind off of things. I think Amanda probably likes it. But that's what I do. I try to run every day, but every Friday I make sure I go for a run to clear my mind and makes you feel good, and then I clean the house."
When Applebee meets the team inside the locker room at 4:30 p.m. for a 7:00 p.m. kickoff, the final touches are put on a weeklong preparation to clean the opponent's clocks. And when Applebee and the players head toward the 6,000-capacity stadium, they are greeted by cheers from sold-out crowds.
"One of the coolest things we have going on here is a very supportive community, and they've really, really made our Friday nights a very special thing here for our kids," Applebee says. "We do the 'Jag Walk,' where we walk from our weight room through the high school down to the stadium, and it's just grown and grown and grown. Now there's hundreds of people out there tailgating and they line the sidewalk from the school to the stadium. It's a pretty cool deal.
"A Friday night in the fall here is a lot of fun for our kids."
Now as summer hits, the grind begins again.
"This is one of our busiest times in the year," Applebee says. "Summer has become our spring ball. You're working more with your kids in the month of June and a couple weeks in July. We've had multiple staff meetings in the spring preparing for the summer about schemes, culture, and things like that. Those are the types of things we're doing as a staff. Now the kids, we lift every day as a football program 6:30-7:15 a.m. Monday through Thursday.
"I love it. Football is the ultimate team sport. You have all 11 players doing their job on one particular play for it to be successful. If one thing breaks down, it can break down the whole team. That, to me, is such a challenge. That's probably what drew me to it."
It's been Applebee's passion for nearly three decades.
And soon he'll be inducted into a Hall of Fame — perhaps his first Hall of Fame induction in a remarkable career that seemingly has no end in sight.
"Our success is indicative of our kids and their mentality and understanding of daily improvement in everything they do," Applebee says. "That's very, very important here. That's 100% their mentality. You can't let up."
That's probably a part of why Mill Valley has never lost a state championship game.
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