Goodreads asked James R. Riffel:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

James R. Riffel For A Coach at Heart, it was kind of funny, because the original impetus had very little to do with the final product. A couple of the college football teams I follow fired their head coaches, and I pictured some old coach and wondered what it would have been like in the aftermath. So I developed a character, figured out his approximate age and backtracked to when he would have been born, gone to high school and played college ball. When I figured he'd have played in college around the turn of the decade from the 1960s to 1970s, I looked for programs with compelling stories that needed to be told and, well, that's what I ended up with. The eventual story ended up being better than what I originally envisioned.

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