As a former Big Ten Conference and Rose Bowl Most Valuable Player, Brent Moss has a great deal of football mastery to pass along.

As someone with a troubled past he readily acknowledges, Moss has just as much hard-earned wisdom to offer.

In fact, as Moss enters his second season as coach of the Racine Threat, a minor-league football team that is laden with former Racine County players, sometimes it's difficult to differentiate the coach from the mentor.

"I'm more of a life coach, I'm not just a football coach because some of those guys went through the same things I went through," said the 37-year-old Moss, whose team opens

Saturday with a 3 p.m. preseason game against the Menominee/Marinette Timberjacks at Ameche Field in Kenosha. "I can relate to just about anything because I've been through it all.

"For them to go out there and volunteer and put themselves on the line every day and to follow directions, it's amazing. There's nothing there to keep them there. It's the love of the game and I need to keep that inside of them, that they did something.

"I just want them to improve as an individual and a man."

So along with drawing X's and O's for his team of about 40 players, Moss doubles as someone who can discuss personal issues with his players. He tries to help them find work or to find a place for them in some college program.

Furthermore, the Threat has a no-cut policy. So if some marginally-skilled or perhaps out-of-condition player shows up, Moss insists, "I'll take him and I'll work with him every day."

To relate to those players, Moss can draw upon a number of experiences. Take the time he was a little-known sophomore in 1992 and University of Wisconsin football coach Barry Alvarez switched Moss from his bread-and-butter position of tailback to the far more unglamorous role of fullback.

"I called my dad (Henry) and I must have complained for about an hour," Moss said. "And my dad said, 'Take what you get.' It was kind of like where you have to be quiet and keep going after something. When you love something, keep going after it."

By the 1993 season, Moss was back at tailback and was the focal point of a team that put Wisconsin football back on the map with a victory over UCLA in the Rose Bowl.

But Moss, a supervisor for Precise Contracting and Design in Racine, has been able to strike up a balance between trying to make an impact with his players and fielding a competitive team. In his first season as coach last year, the Threat went 8-4.

With Ben Adrian and another former Park standout, running back Greg Sanders, leading the offense and linebacker Roosevelt Watkins among the standouts on defense, the Threat have the makings of another team worthy of your entertainment dollar.

Adrian, Moss believes, has the capability of developing into a quarterback who is as good as any in the Mid-States Football League. But he says that with a caveat.

"He's one of the talented quarterbacks that I have seen," he said. "But he wants to be perfect and no one can be perfect."

The same goes for Sanders, in Moss' estimation.

"He's one heck of a back - one heck of a back," Moss said. "But he's got to have that hunger."

In terms of having players to mold as players and men, Moss has that. What he doesn't have is a shot at playing the Racine Raiders.

Moss said the far more established Raiders have shown little interest in playing the Threat. He hopes that's a standpoint that can be eventually swayed.

"We should be playing each other," said Moss, whose last game as a player was with the Raiders Aug. 4, 2007 at Horlick Field. "We could make it a rivalry every year.

"We can co-exist. It doesn't make sense for us not to play each other."

2009 Racine Threat Schedule

All home games at Kenosha's Ameche Field unless noted

June

SATURDAY - MENOMINEE/MARINETTE TIMBERJACKS, 3 p.m. (exhibition)

July

11 - McHENRY COUNTY PIRATES, 7 p.m.

18 - at Chicago Thunder

25 - NORTHERN ILLINOIS COWBOYS, 7 p.m.

August

1 - KANKAKEE PLOWMEN, 7 p.m.

8 - CHICAGO MUSTANGS, 2 p.m.

15 - at Leyden Lions

22 - KILBOURN CITY HAWKS, 7 p.m. (Horlick Field)

29 - at Midstate Steel