Little did Charley Casserly know how valuable Dick King's seminar would be.

It was 1974 and Casserly was a 24-year-old athletic director at Cathedral High School in Springfield, Mass. His school had 3,000 students. A football team, a basketball team and a baseball team. But he wanted to blow the program up. He wanted the stadium packed. He wanted the locals to talk about Cathedral teams six days a week and watch them on the seventh.

To raise attendance, he held pee wee football exhibitions before high school varsity games, then gave the pee wees free tickets to the high school games but made their parents pay. While the other New England high schools focused on girls field hockey, he started a girls soccer program. "My dream," says Casserly, "was to be the Bill Veeck of high school sports."

	Casserly brings his Yankee ingenuity to the Texans.

But Veeck, the mastermind baseball owner/promoter responsible for sending a midget to bat for the St. Louis Browns in the 1950s and Comiskey Park's Disco Demolition Night in the 1970s, wasn't holding any seminars. Dick King, a minor league Bill Veeck, was.

On his own dime, Casserly hopped a flight to San Francisco for three days of Kingisms on how to promote and develop your team. King's presentation included ideas on how to market your team from A to Z. And he handed out a list titled "King's Kommandments" that began, "So you want to be a sports executive ..." It included 10 gems such as: 1) Thou shall not make excuses; 3) Thou shall develop an amiable relationship with the news media; 7) Thou shall prepare and offer the very best concession products; and 10) Thou shall make a nice profit.

They remind me of Casserly's Commandments, the guidelines Casserly sent Texans owner Bob McNair for building a franchise, which are featured in my current Mag story about the NFL's newest team.

"For the last day of the seminar they gave me a huge book with the King's Kommandments and some articles about him and put me in a room with a mentor and a guy named Slugs," says Casserly. "We were supposed to talk about my program, but the mentor just kept telling stories and, after each one, he'd look up at Slugs and say, 'Isn't that right, Slugs?' Then Slugs would just grunt, 'Uh-huh.' It was like a classic comedy routine."

A year later, when Casserly had ditched his dream of becoming high school AD extraordinaire and started coaching football at Minnechaug HS in Wilbraham, Mass., he still wanted to build on the status quo. Wilbraham had no youth football program, which meant the high school team didn't have much talent coming in. Look to the King, Charley. Kommandment No. 2: Thou shall create community awareness.

So Casserly coaxed local sponsors into supporting pee-wee football and funding a high school weight room. He chalked the fields himself, and broke out the stopwatch for the hundreds of kids who showed up to play. "You learn to scout talent when a group of 100 kids who never played before tryout," says Casserly. "You need to figure out who can play."

That's been Casserly's top priority since. As an unpaid intern with the Redskins in 1977, as the team's assistant GM four years later, as the architect of the Redskins' Super Bowl win in '91. And now, while building a team from scratch.

Everyday after practice, he's in the conference room adjacent to his office, grading players. A check mark for those who do their job, a plus for those who do more, and a minus for those who don't do enough.

Appropriately, Casserly's office looks out onto a roller-coaster at the amusement park across the street. Buried in one of the cherry wood cabinets is the file Dick King gave him 28 years ago. "I've thrown a lot of stuff away since then," says Casserly, looking through it. "For some reason, I kept this."

Just then he comes across a graduation certificate congratulating him for finishing the program. "You know what," Casserly says. "I should frame this."

There's no doubt he's earned it.

Chad Millman is a frequent contributor to ESPN The Magazine. E-mail him at chad.x.millman@espnmag.com