Time in Air National Guard helped prepare Princeton’s Dan Foes for coaching

Dan Foes left a week after graduation from Western High School in 1992 in Buda to join the Peoria Air National Guard and didn’t have much time to celebrate.

“It was like ripping off a Band-Aid and get going,” he said.

While some of the Air Guard went overseas, Foes stayed stateside, mostly in Peoria.

“They worked with your schedule, and [going overseas] didn’t fit my schedule. They always need people to fill in at home, so I stayed close to home,” he said.

His commitment required one weekend a month and two weeks out of the year. During his college years at Southern Illinois University and Illinois State, he used the Air Guard as his summer job to pull “man days,” when his dad wasn’t keeping him too busy.

Foes, who has been a teacher and coach at Princeton High School since 2000, was deployed to work the flood of 1993 based out of downstate Anna-Jonesboro, doing a lot of sandbagging and guard duty, he said.

Foes, 49, got out in March 2004 after the birth of his son, Grant.

“Of course, after 9/11, we were all on high alert getting ready. I had one friend that pulled three to four tours over in the desert,” he said. “Being in 12 years, I was kind of at the tipping point. There were a lot of other factors involved.

“I had a career here at Princeton. The family was coming along, and I wanted to settle down. It was a hard decision to leave. It was just something I needed to do from a personal standpoint and the best for my family.”

Playing sports and growing up on the family farm in Sheffield helped prepare Foes for his time with the Air Guard.

“Definitely having played a lot of athletics and growing up on the farm and doing a lot of farm work, I had plenty of skills to do all the chores we had to do in the military,” he said. “I would say that athletic background helped out immensely over time.”

At the same time, the Air Guard helped Foes prepare for coaching. He spent 22 years as an assistant coach in football at PHS and remains head track coach. He said it’s all related.

“You got put in a lot of leadership roles and a lot of roles where you had to think on your feet, just like you’ve got to do in a game,” he said. “Everything you did, you were reacting to whatever situation you were put into, and it really wasn’t that much different than putting a game plan together for football or track. I would say there’s certainly a lot of skills I’ve used in both arenas.”

Foes said his time with the Air Guard also taught him how to be part of a team when everyone has to rely on each other and everyone knows what their roles are to get the tasks at hand done.

“When I first got in, I worked on F16s. Then I worked on C130s, and I went from loading bombs and missiles to loading cargo. The plane would just taxi up, and we had a lot of roles to do this and make it safe,” he said. “When a big airplane is sitting there running, you can’t hear anything, so it’s all hand signals. Everybody doing their job, relying on the person next to you doing the job.

“It’s not all that much different than athletics and having those teams understand it. Knowing your buddy next to you is doing his job the way he’s supposed to. I would say for me that’s how I coach it quite a bit. Very organized, I guess you could say.”

Looking back, Foes said he would do his time with the Air Guard all over again.

“They taught you to be very versatile,” he said. “Looking back, it was a very good experience.”