Was It…Just a Job?
From 7-23-14
When I first started coaching @ Newton Co., I thought I just "had a job". Soon, things happened to let me know that I had something that was "more" than just a job.
I started out with 5 Civics classes a day, and I had a student in one of my classes that didn't appear to me to be very smart--and I wondered what would happen to a student like that. One day I borrowed a truck to go & get some furniture that a friend was going to loan us for our little apartment, and the truck broke down right in the middle of the highway! I was helpless in mechanical areas, and was stranded, when a car pulled alongside, and the driver--this weak student, offered to assist me. Within a matter of minutes, the truck was running again, & I was on my way to Atlanta! Along the way, I couldn't help to think about how "dumb" I was, and how brilliant that young student was! That experience helped me to realize that every person has a worth--and it was my job as a teacher and a coach, to help them realize their worth.
On one of our early trips with our team, from the time we got off the bus at the opponents' gym & their coach met me, he began to rant & rave about how he "hated his job" and could hardly wait until he "got rid of those brats!" I remember praying, "Lord, please don't ever let me get to the point that I don't want to work with young people!"--and if you read the previous post about Billy Dean's death, you'll remember about Jan's comment during his funeral, "I'll never complain again about the time you spend with young people"--a vow she lived up to during the rest of my 50-year career! I like to feel that I was working with young "eaglets"-- and I wanted to help them reach their full potential. I didn't want them to stop dreaming, I wanted them to "soar"! Now we had to set out to make our program something really special. Every school has some advantages, as well as some disadvantages, and you try to overcome the negatives--and make the positives a part of the tradition. In our early years, I convinced our principal that I wanted to give out free passes to our games to prominent people of the community, knowing that it would influence others to think our games were important enough to attend. Soon, they were glad to be able to buy tickets to our games. We tried to provide, in a first-class way, every thing our players needed--except their desire & effort--to be successful. I had a washing machine, but no dryer. We had pipes running through our dressing room on which I would hang practice uniforms for them to dry. When I pulled them off, it was like they were starched. One day, Jimmy Gardner ("the chicken-dance man" who meant so much to our program) was in our dressing-room and noticed that we needed a dryer. He went downtown--& pretty soon, we had a new dryer & didn't have to use the pipes any more! At that time, the Covington News didn't have adequate personnel to cover all our games, and Jan wrote articles about our games for them to publish. The articles written by Jan never said anything bad about the coach (except when we occasionally lost). The next "bright idea" Jan had was to take a lot of pictures which were used for game-action photos for the paper to publish. After a short period of time, all this changed when the local paper began sending Bob Greer & photographers to our games. When Mr. Walker Harris established our first basketball Booster Club, we were on our way! With our outstanding young people and a supportive fan base, we were beginning to establish a 1st-Class program with a great basketball tradition! In the next post, we will continue our story.
