 Welcome to the latest edition of Tell Health in Hawaii. I'm Vikram Acharya. I'm the CEO of Cloudwell Health, an all virtual position founded telemedicine organization anchored in Hawaii. We have an amazing show for you today. It is my honor to introduce to you Coach Dick Vermeel. Coach has been a Super Bowl champion, college football champion, founder of Vermeel Wines and a 2022 inductee into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. It's an honor to have you on the coach. So how are you doing today? I'm doing all right, Vik. Yeah, I'm doing okay for an old man. I'm in better shape than some of my friends. I'm getting it. So I'm, Vik, I'm afraid to pick up the phone. Someone's got a health issue and I love the guy dearly. And now I've said some, you know, sorry, moved the rest of the day. That's what happens when you're 385. Well, you look great, Coach. You look great. You've been a close mentor and inspiration for me. And I just really want to thank you. To get things started, Coach, you know, talk to me a little bit about your background, where you're from, what got you into coaching and we'll go from there. Well, Vik, you know, I was born and raised in the Napa Valley, California. I was born in my great-grandfather on the Italian side of my family's home. My dad left it up there and he took over the home and lived there all his life and opened a garage behind it called Louis Vermeel's Owl Garage, the nickname that the Owl Garage because he worked all night. But anyway, that's where I was raised. Small high school, 130 kids in a school and how I got involved with football, playing there, you know, you had to play. There weren't enough, you know, you needed. We usually had about 19, 20 kids on the football team. Every once in a while, you know, I think my senior year we had about 25. A new coach came there named Bill Wood. He really inspired me. He told me I could play college football if I wanted to and I'd never thought about that. That sort of started me thinking about football beyond high school. So I went to junior college and played there two years successfully and went on, walked on to San Jose State, earned a scholarship and decided to be a football coach because of the positive influence that Bill Wolfe was on me and also Dr. Robert Browns and my college coach. He was one of those kind of guys that was always telling you what you could do that you didn't know you could do, you know, and that it really helped me get going. Started in high school then junior college and as you said, college in the NFL. Coach, you know, people like myself are very drawn to you because of the personal connection you build with your players, with the people you work for, the owners, you know, tell us a little bit about how you're able to really connect with people. You know, I've always noticed that that's something that really I notice about you a lot. Well, thank you, Vic. I'll accept that as a compliment. You know, it's something that came automatic to me because that side of my brain is the dominant side. I don't consider myself any kind of an intellectual or brilliant guy, but the other side of my brain has always worked favorably for me, you know, social intelligence and I've always felt I have a natural feel for people. And I think also because how I was raised, a small community, you know, in small communities, everybody's your father. You know, I had 29 kids in my graduating class, okay? And all the dads of the other kids were like second dads to me. You know, you knew everybody so well and you were always getting directed properly, structured properly, disciplined probably, more than most kids would get because you were always under somebody's surveillance and helped to keep raising your expectations and learning what's expected of you as you grow. And I developed, I think, a natural compassion and empathy for people through this process. And then I started high school coaching, Vic, and I really loved the kids. It was so much fun to be with them. And, you know, people always said, who motivates you? And I said, the kids I'm with. And, you know, and I've always been able to recognize the kind of kids that I wanted to work with and also the challenging kids that I thought I could help. And I just never changed that approach all the way through pro football. I told many people, I was a high school coach, coach of pro football, you know? And, you know, it's all about making sure people know you care, you know? And teaching them that hard work is not a form of punishment. It's a solution. It's a way to get better. You know, I've always said there's no correlation between working less and getting better. Never has been, never will be. And a lot of the kids would buy in and all of a sudden they find themselves better than they were when they started and start appreciating the valuable work and they carry it over into everything else they do. And that's what I've done. I carried it over into building solid relationships with people beyond just a coach and player. Most of my close friends, real true close friends are people I work with, work for and coach. And players that I've cut because they always knew I was going to do my job and because I wanted to be held responsible. And, but today I probably talked to at least four or five of my different NFL players. One of them Eric Hicks about 10 minutes ago a defensive event from the Kansas City Chiefs and very close to a doctor, Dr. Dante Hall yesterday. I got an email today from Ken Dany because who runs the affiliate magazine and New Jersey Man magazine is doing an article on my Hall of Fame induction and was with Jaworski the other day. Last week I had dinner with guys and tomorrow I'm picking up Franklin Master my linebacker from the Eagles for seven years and we're going to practice him for the OTA. So to me it's always been about relationships. And the other thing, Vic, many times just player coach relationships go deeper than that. There are always people that touch you deeper and sometimes it's hard to explain it has sometimes nothing to do with how good a football player he is or if he's the starting center or the third string guard. You know, just certain kinds of people really touch me. And I hang on to those guys, I'm selfish. I want them in my life. Yeah. They make me feel better. And hopefully I make a contribution to them. Yeah. You know, Coach, when you were coaching players and you knew you could get more out of a player that a player could get to the next level, push to the next level, what types of motivational tactics did you give them? So you knew that they could get to here but if you wanted to get them to the next level what types of techniques and things did you do to really get the most out of your players? Well, Vic first to do anything with players or anybody, they have to trust you. So you have to invest some time to be trusted. And once you're trusted, then they listen to you. It's different than hearing. They start listening to you. And you know, everybody appreciates being appreciated, being praised and in many ways being held accountable. And they also like to work for people that are grateful for their efforts. And it's not all about Dick Vermeer getting a winning record. It's about we as an organization being successful from the top down and being unselfish and attacking a problem more than attacking a person. You know, it's so easy when a mistake is made to attack a person, make him feel like an idiot. And I always evaluated why did he make the mistake? Maybe we didn't coach him well enough. Maybe we didn't ingrain the fundamental well enough. I always left him an out and more willing to take the blame. Yeah, I always say, if you need credit, go to the bank. That's for the business area, you know? People need reinforcement. They need it. And some people need it more than others. And if a guy is really talented and you see it, sometimes they don't see it. I can think of some names that had no idea that it could be as good as they ended up being. So that would happen to me. That's what Dr. Bronson did to me. He started telling me, he put my name in for the freshman coaching job at Notre Dame when Eric Persigian took the job. I didn't even know he did it because he thought that would be a great place for me to start because he saw things in me that I didn't see in myself. I didn't have those kind of expectations then. So I think all these things deep in your ability to look into the people, gain more insight into them, and evaluate them in regard to what they might be able to be. If you continue to treat people what you think they ought to be, they're more apt to end up being that. So in many times, I raised this down to too high. They just didn't have enough, especially when it gets to the NFL. Some of the best football players I ever coached were junior college, high school kids, but they weren't big enough to be in the NFL. But if they took those same football playing skills that they had as little guys and moved it into a big NFL frame, they'd be a great football player at that level. So anyway, that was my approach. Make sure they know you care, number one though. Yeah, yeah. Now, how about coming back from tough losses? You coached a lot of games, a lot of wins, but also some tough losses. How do you re-galvanize the team, re-galvanize the person to be resilient enough to come back and say, look, this was put this one behind us and we're gonna go to the next game. Well, Vic, you remember you and I talked about this. Didn't go real well to the hospital then could have shut it down, like we just closed right to this day, seven miles away, there's no hospital there anymore, Vic. But anyway, I think the fact that you always attack the problem, not the person, and when it's going poorly, it's a multiple reason. Not any one individual has ever held responsible for winning or losing. And we won, we won together, when we lost, we lost together. Some guys can be excited when they played the best game they ever played and got lost and they feel happy. The kind of guy you really want is the guy that feels bad even though he did play the best game. It still wasn't good enough to overcome the shortcomings of somebody else's performance. So I always remained positive. I always tried to look for the good things that happened within the loss. I tried to use them as ally, as teaching tools. And sometimes you get really upset because you know that you drilled something mentally and physically and emotionally well enough. They should have done it better, but they just didn't focus well that day or had other things on their minds in preparation. Didn't practice well all week. You don't take them off the hook. You hold them responsible, but you don't blame any one person. Yeah, and I always said, if you want a team to get better, the first guy you improve is you, the head coach. Prove it starts there and it trickles down into everybody else. And then you go into attacking the other kinds of problems that created the negative. But I've always felt not. Great football teams are better built through adversity. And I'm not bragging when I say this. The three NFL teams I coached are winning, loss, or win percentage. The first two seasons with all three of them amounted to 34%. Okay. Our third season was 74% win and playoff games. Okay. And one world championship. And that world championship team had the worst win-loss record in the NFL in the 90s at the time we started. Yep. Okay. Three years later, they're world champions. Yep. And if you talk to those guys, first off, when you're losing most of the time, the losing team has early draft choices. So they had some good draft choices in there, but they just weren't put together yet that there were not enough demanded of them and not enough people eliminated that couldn't meet the standards to be successful somewhere down the road. Not everybody is gonna be a winner for you. And sometimes you can really spin your wheels. And if I am so hard that you're like, what's the saying, if the squeaking wheel always gets the oil? Yeah. The truth is that I caught myself doing that at UCLA my first year. I was always overworking and trying to solve the problems of the kids that had maybe too many problems that for me to solve within a year or two. And I started giving more attention and paying more attention to the kids that had fewer problems that were working just as hard or harder than anybody else that they ended up being better. Like John Wooden told me a long time ago. He said, don't worry about what you don't have. Just make what you have the best they can be. When you multiply it and put it all together, it becomes a very, very powerful organization. Yeah, definitely. You know, you were very successful in football and now you've made the transition to making wine. Walk me through that a little bit. That's a, you know, that's a great story. Well, first off, I'm not a winemaker. I'm not an authority on wine. I don't have a sophisticated wine palette but being born in Calisoga in the Napa Valley. I was born in my great grandfather's home, the Italian side of my family who was in the Napa Valley after being successful in San Francisco, making wine. Had a vineyard where we still pick grapes from the same ground that he owned part of. So it was sort of in my blood. I grew up helping my grandfather for me or my dad's dad make our family wines. We pick the grapes, do the crushing. I've got in there and did it. You know, you make 50 gallons every year and new vintage in these things. And I can remember how important it was to my family on the holiday seat, French Italian family, holidays, new vintage being poured, friends bringing over their wine bottles with no labels and the French would be talking to the French, the Italians would be talking to the Italian and I had no idea what they were talking about. But I got such a great feeling from watching people appreciate, enjoy wine in conversations and with their meal. I said someday down the road, I'm gonna put my dad's name, Jean-Louis Vermille, exactly pronounced that way. And my great grandfather, Jean-Louis Vermille's name on a wine bottle. It was not my intention to turn it into a business. It was a hobby. And fortunately for me, there's a little winery named on the edge winery up in the mountains above St. Lena, who was married into the Freddie Annie family that I knew all my life that owned the vineyard. And he said he would make a Jean-Louis Vermille Cabernet. He was making anyway, instead of bottling it with on the edge label, he would bottle it with Jean-Louis Vermille Cabernet. It just so happened in 1999, which was our first release, we won the Super Bowl. So the Vermille name helped sell that bottle of wine. And so we said, well, let's keep doing it. So, and it was great. I had no money involved, no partners who just, he was doing it and I was, if I wanted wine, I would buy it like I was a retail customer. That's excellent. We did that. And then all of a sudden I've got a couple of friends with money that are entrepreneurs and wanted to be in the business, the wine business. And they came to me and said, can we get involved? You have the mechanics, the relationships, the vineyard and the winemaker, let's do it together. So we turned it into a business in 2008, making about, I think 2,000 cases in so the first year. And then now we're, now, right now, after 13 years, we are a successful business. We're in the back, the business is going well, we have about 470 club members now. Excellent. We have bottled about 1,800 cases of this 2020 wine vintage. Less than normal, normally win a little over 2,000 all the way up to 25, depending on the crush, because we buy our grapes by the row, not by the ton. And if these six rows produce six tons, we get six tons. If they only produce three tons, we only get three tons. So that's how much we make. So that's the process. And we have a tasting room in Napa, California. And it's now successful. And so for us, it's never gonna be big money. But it's in the black, make a little money, we're paying our bills and we're having fun with it. And we've hit our niche, very little wholesale market anymore and all. We did that initially to create cash flow. Now we don't have enough wine to do that. So we sell direct, it's quality wine. Thomas Brown is our wine consultant. Andy Jones is our wine maker. It's being made at Mendingwall Winery. The grapes are picked at Freddie Annie Vineyard. It's a 170 acre vineyard that I've been involved with the vineyard all my life. So, that's my story. We're actually gonna make a Hall of Fame wine. You mentioned me going into Hall of Fame. We're getting a couple of tons of grape from Beck Stoffers in Napa Valley, which is considered one of the finest vineyards in the United States, let alone the Napa Valley. It's a lot more expensive. And it gives our wine makers a little better chance to make even a higher quality wine than we're already making. And our cabernets are scoring between 96 and 93 all the time now on a consistent basis. Now that team, you put together that, a lot of the lessons that came from the football field translate right into your business. I mean, the patient. I can make, you know, if you're like your business, if you don't have good people with you, you don't have a chance. If all you're doing is solving problems, people that have average or below average motivation or desire to excel or desire to make a contribution to your success, you're not going to win, especially two in the NFL. Now your, your failures won't be on the sport page, won't be on ESPN and won't be on Monday night football. But the results can be the same. That's why it's so important to be able to hire the right people. And I was always looking for people that I thought were better than me and somebody I could learn from and become better because I'm learning from them as they learn what my strengths are and what I could help them with. And when you put it together unselfishly, it's amazing how much fun you can have. Yeah, for sure. You know, coach, what are your thoughts on, on telehealth? We have obviously through COVID, a lot of people had to take care of themselves, see a doctor through the computer. You think that's something that's going to stick around that people are going to continue to use it? Oh, it's here to stay. You know, I have people, you know, because I have a celebrity's name, okay? I can get a doctor's appointment, all right? I have texts, text numbers that I can text my cardiologist and he'll get back to me. I can get you in tomorrow, okay? But you know, most people don't have that advantage. So I think it's critical to be able to communicate early if you have a problem. You have to wait. And I've had people say, I can't get an appointment for three months. Three months. What's the problem going to be like in three months if you have one today? You know, you never know. And sometimes problems end up being much less severe than you think they are, but they also end up being much worse than you thought they were going to be. That's where the telehealth can make a contribution. And first, and it doesn't have to be the head doctor. It can be a quality nurse that experiences and knows what you're talking about. It's a lot different than, you know, just talking to some guy off the street and getting an opinion, you know? Everybody's got a cure. Everyone's got opinion, but in a well-organized telehealth program, you're talking to people to know what they're talking about. Exactly. You're talking to them today. And I think, you know, how many people you can save if you start early? Exactly. And like you said, what normally takes sadly months can be done same day. This is especially good. Especially you were here in Chester County, you know? Now we lost two hospitals, including the one you were running. They couldn't shut them down. And no one, a deal to purchase it and start it over, hadn't come through. So, you know, people are jammed into areas now and it's tougher to get right to a doctor and confront him. Especially if you're not the former head coach of the Eagles. It's true. Very true. You're all a famed induction coach. What was it like getting the call? I know Kurt Warner came to your home. What was it like? Coach, life's work. I mean, it's just that we were all so happy when that happened. Well, thank you, Vic. I know you're sincere in saying that. First thought was beyond my expectation. It was beyond my expectation. People all the time now see me. Oh, coach, you deserve. Why did it take them so long? Do you know how many coaches I think deserve it just as much as I do? How about Dan Reeves? Mm-hmm. Okay. The eighth-winning as coach in football. Both of these guys have passed away with over 200 wins. Super Bowl appearances except for Marty Shottenheimer. Dan Reeves multiple times. How about Tom Coffman? These kind of guys, Mike Shanahan, Mike Holgren, Dan Coriel, these guys are all, George Sievert. To me, they all deserve it. And they've only put now, counting me 11 coaches in the Hall of Fame in the last 26 years. These guys deserve it. So I'm honored. I'm very pleased that 48 people decided it was my turn. But be honest with you, Vic, my wife, my family, my grandkids never sat around at dinner table and ever talked about me going in the Hall of Fame. Never. So it was sort of an overwhelming experience. I knew in a few years past, I've been a candidate. I've been talked about each year. With the new system of selecting coaches, we're getting coaches in each year now. They have a five-man panel that go off and screen the coaches and then select one and they settle. They submit that coach's name to the board of 38, 48 people or 43 other than them. If you get an 80% vote, you get it. If you don't, you don't go in. When I got the call in late June, that I had, in fact, Dave Baker called me, we were walking through the San Francisco airport on the way to go to do some work in the vineyards. And he says, coach, I'm calling you and I'm not calling you, buy a case of wine. Then I'm calling to tell you, you've been selected as the nominee for the coach of the year. If we put a coach in this year, it will be you. Then you saw Kurt Warner show up here and it's overwhelming or humbling, really is. Yeah. I can't think of another person who deserves it more than you. You know, I think it's really... I can, I can. You know, coach, to the young people that are trying to build companies, trying to get through the challenges of the pandemic, you know, make something of themselves. What types of advice and inspiration can you give them? Make sure the motivation to do it is beyond what money you can make doing it. Make sure it's a passion of something you really want to do. And it's not like going to work every day. It's not a grind. It's a challenge and a commitment that you're willing to make because you're passionate about wanting to do it. And you have a vision of what it's going to take. You have a process defined in your mind, how you're going to do it. You have a mind of a selection committee of the kind of people you want with you and what you're looking for in those people. You have a vision of how you want to end up after so many months, after so many years. And where you... But these things all have to be thought out. And if you have enough good people around you, they'll help you do some of the thinking. In all my success, I've always had a lot of people that can make a contribution and a few that can make a difference. The few that can make a difference can direct those that can make a contribution and you collectively put them together. And you can end up being successful. But if you don't have a deep passion, you won't get through the adversity. Right? Right. You won't get through it. You'll hang up and think, oh, I don't like this. And you'll try to go do something different or different or some other profession. Yeah. Yeah, I made up my mind. I wanted to be a football coach and a physical ed teacher. And I got in the physical education classes and I said, you know, I'm not sure I want to stand here five days a week and watch kids take a shower after a PE class and sit throughout the ball and play softball for a few weeks and track for a few weeks and soccer for a few weeks. And I'm on a coach one ball. So every time I had an opportunity to move up the ladder, I took it because it gave me an opportunity to spend more time on what I was really passionate about. No doubt. No doubt. I can't thank you enough for being on coach. And just every time I talk to you, it's so much motivation, so much inspiration. I know our audience is going to feel the same way. I mean, I feel like I'm in the football field right now. And nobody... I was yesterday at the same market where we had breakfast. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And you have an ability... Street grill. Yep. I remember it well. I remember it well. You know, you've always been there for me. You've always been there for your players, for the people you've worked with over the years. And nobody deserves this recognition of the Hall of Fame more than you. Well, thank you. You know how I feel about that deserved term. But thank you very much. I hope your business goes well. I'm pretty confident. In fact, I'm very confident, Will. You got it. You got it, coach. You got it. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Have a good day. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.