38, Then 65, Then 80: Inside Galesburg Football’s Slow Rebuild
In late June of 2024, Shawn Hickey walked out to his first summer workout as Galesburg’s head football coach and counted 38 players.
This June he counted 80.
That number is the whole story of where Galesburg football is, and it is a more interesting story than the 2-7 record suggests. Because the hard part of rebuilding a program in a town of 30,000 is not the playbook. It is getting teenagers to keep showing up in February.
The arc
Summer one: 38. Summer two: 60 to 65. This summer: 80.
Hickey is careful about the number that actually matters, though. Raw turnout is easy to inflate; attendance is not. By his count roughly 50 players are now hitting 85 percent or better on workout attendance, against about 30 in that first summer.
That is the figure to watch. A program with 80 names and 30 reliable bodies is still a 38-player program wearing a bigger jersey order.
How he says it happened
Four things, none of them about football.
A leadership council that has to be earned
Thirteen players sit on it. They apply. It meets monthly through the offseason and weekly in season, and each member runs an accountability squad — a group responsible for getting each other to workouts.
Hickey is blunt that the title does not confer the skill: “Just because you’re in a leadership council, it doesn’t mean that you have leadership skills.” The council is where those get taught.
Weightlifting moved inside the school day
This is the least glamorous item and probably the most important. Galesburg now runs multiple lifting classes during school hours, so multi-sport athletes can keep training while they are in another season.
“If we’re going to value weightlifting, they have to be able to be lifting during season,” Hickey said.
In a school this size, the football roster and the basketball roster and the track roster are substantially the same kids. Any program that makes them choose loses.
A speed school open to everyone
Twice a week, any athlete in the building can come. Not a football program — an athletic department one. It widens the funnel.
A retreat with the phones locked up
Late July, Camp Loud Thunder. Archery, canoeing, and a rule: “The phone had to stay back in the barracks.”
You can be cynical about team-building weekends. You can also notice that turnout went from 38 to 80 across three of them.
The trap he is in, stated plainly
Hickey does not dress this up. “Things about culture needed to change,” he has said of taking over. And then the harder sentence:
“We are at a point that we need to get wins to attract players.”
That is the circle every rebuilding coach runs in. Numbers bring wins; wins bring numbers. He has moved the first one three years running. The second has not followed yet.
The context is bleaker than most people realise: in the last 25 years, Galesburg has had two seasons above .500. This is not a proud program in a slump. It is a generation of players who have never seen winning football at their own school.
What he is actually asking for
Not patience, exactly. Attendance.
“The best ticket in town is to come out and see the football team, the band perform, the color guard, the cheerleaders,” he said — and that framing is deliberate. He is selling Friday night as a town event rather than a sporting result, because for three years the sporting result has not been sellable.
Galesburg went 0-4 at home last season and was outscored 381-166.
The number that makes 2026 different
Three or four wins.
Under the old playoff format, a team needed five wins in nine games to qualify, and Galesburg has not sniffed that. But the IHSA expanded the field this year from 32 qualifiers per class to 48, and the practical bar dropped with it.
Hickey’s stated goal is to beat last year’s two wins and get into the bracket at three or four. For the first time in a long time, that is not a fantasy target.
Week 1 offered a data point in both directions. Galesburg lost 48-21 at Dunlap — but scored three touchdowns against a school 277 students larger, having been shut out 44-0 by the same opponent a year earlier. Grady Hickey, the coach’s son and now the junior quarterback, threw two of them.
His theme for the season, delivered at the Western Big 6 coaches’ banquet in Rock Island: “Pressure is a privilege.”
A program that has won two of its last nine seasons above .500 does not usually get to talk about pressure. Having 80 kids show up in June is what earns you the right.
Friday
Galesburg hosts Limestone, which went 0-9 last season, at CBI Bank & Trust Stadium. It is the most winnable game on the schedule before the Western Big 6 slate opens at United Township on September 4.
Eighty players will be listed. The interesting question is how many are still there in October.
Participation figures, quotes and program detail from Shawn Hickey’s interviews with WGIL and Evan Massey, and from Galesburg High School. Galesburg schedule and results →
