For more than twelve years, country star Chase Rice and his band have circled up forty-five minutes before every show to fire off the same four-line chant he learned as a teenager at A.C. Reynolds High School in Asheville, North Carolina, TheAthletic reports. It came from their football program and never left him, and it rubbed off on Ben Johnson.
“Good, better, best
Never let it rest
Till your good gets better
And your better gets best.”
Rice calls it a core memory and says the mindset shaped the way their team attacked every week. Before his Chicago show in June, he led the chant again. When he looked up, he saw a familiar smile. Ben Johnson, his former high school teammate and now the Bears’ offensive coordinator, was on the tour bus watching.
Three months later, after Chicago earned its first win of the season against the Cowboys, Johnson stood in the locker room and led the same chant. When Rice saw the clip, he laughed out loud and felt the moment hit him all over again. He never expected their old rallying cry to resurface in an NFL locker room.
The High School Message That Followed Them Into the NFL
Shane Laws, now the A.C. Reynolds head coach, remembers teaching that message when Rice, Johnson, and Britt played there. He says the point of the chant was simple. Celebrate the win, but understand that more is possible. His teams repeated it every Friday to reinforce a standard of constant growth.
Rice carried that belief into music. He treats the chant as a reminder that his success still traces back to those lessons from Coach Poss. He believes every player who passed through that program learned the same truth, which is that improvement never stops.
When Johnson searched for something meaningful to share with the Bears, he went back to the voice that guided him in North Carolina. He saw teammates in Chicago responding to the same words that shaped him as a teenager. To Johnson, that unity strengthens a locker room. One voice creates one heartbeat, and the Bears have now made the chant their own.
