Day 24: Football journey…part 5
As my oldest son, Grant, went into the 7th grade, he wanted to play football. I went one of the first days and introduced myself to the coach and told him that I had played at ECU. There were only two coaches at the time, and he asked me if I wanted to help coach. I had never considered it and didn’t really know anything except Offensive line, but I said yes. Over the years, I took classes, read books, and went to clinics, and now, thirty-plus years later I am still doing it. I took 3 years off when I moved to Arizona and couldn’t find a team I liked, and I’m thinking now at 72 I may still have 2 or 3 years left…we’ll see.
I stayed with Grant in Middle School and the year he went to High School, I decided to go meet the coach at Bruton High School where Grant would play. Lo and behold, as we say down South, it was Dave Glosson, one of the players I had been with at East Carolina. He was from the Hampton area of Virginia and went back home to coach and ended up at Bruton High School in Williamsburg where we lived. I told Dave I would film games for him and run the weight room if he liked and he accepted. I stayed coaching at the Middle School for one more year and then when Grant was a sophomore, I moved up to Bruton High School.
Now, it gets a little sticky here, because Bruton had been on a downward slide. In fact, at the end of Grant’s freshman year, Bruton had the longest losing streak in the State of Virginia. I had made friends with the principal, and he asked me if I would join him, and the Athletic Director, to represent the parents as we hired a new coach. It looked bad for Dave, but the principal told me he was going to be leaving anyway and I would be a valuable asset to the selection committee.
We did the interviews and hired a young new coach, Kyle Neve. I immediately wrote a resume and gave it to Kyle so I could be on the coaching staff and for the next 14 years, I was at Bruton coaching the O-line, D-line, and running the weight room for the whole school.
We worked them hard and the weight room got them strong, but we had a bigger problem. When you have lost 22 games straight and you lose the first 5 or 6 of the new season, you have a mental frame of mind that has to be changed before anything will work. As soon, as we got behind, I could hear the boys and see it in their faces…here we go again, another loss. A few years later we would get behind and I could hear the boys say, “There is no way we are going to lose this game!”
This was not easy, and we started from day one. Kyle was fair but didn’t pull any punches. When our starting running back came in for his senior year, he told us he couldn’t make 2-a-days and Kyle told him that was unfortunate, but unless he did, he wouldn’t be on the team, so he quit.
It’s not easy playing in Virginia. In August they have “Triple H” days…Hot, Humid and Hazy! That’s right, there is so much humidity the air is thick and almost visible. Every player weighed in before practice and weighed out after practice and we wrote it down. If you lost 15-20 pounds during practice (water weight), which wasn’t uncommon. You had to gain most of that back by drinking as much fluid as you could before the next practice, or you had to sit out…and I’m serious.
That first year, we lost game after game, sometimes by just a few points, but still a loss. We kept telling them to believe in themselves, play for each other and the love of the game. And then it happened…we were tied 0-0 with a school and it was late in the game. We had been pounding them off our tackle, so they moved their linebackers out of the middle and over the tackles.
Now, we had a big quarterback with a GREAT arm but slow as molasses. I was in the booth with another coach, and we saw that the middle was open, and we told the coach. Coach Neve called a quarterback sneak. I’m pretty sure our QB was named Keith Campbell, anyway, he took off and the middle was wide open. It was the slowest run I have ever seen a human perform, but he crossed the goal line, and we were up 6-0.
We held them for the next series, the horn blew, the game was over and…WE WON!!! You would have thought we won the Super Bowl. We made the front page of the paper with the happiest faces you have ever seen. We finished 1-9 that year, BUT it was the turnaround. We never had another losing season for the rest of the time I was there. Our best regular season was 9-1 and we started regularly making the playoffs.
We were an undersized school playing 2A with only about 800 students. Because 1A in Virginia didn’t have many girls’ sports so we played up. After that turnaround, we sent boys on to play college football every year, including my two sons Grant and Christopher, who played for James Madison University and most notably Bryan Randall who went on to play at Virginia Tech. Bryan established new Bruton school records for passing yards (6,508) and total offense (8,034 yards) playing just his last two years according to Wikipedia because I honestly don’t remember the stats, I just knew they were good.
Even though every year in Williamsburg was a struggle, I loved being with kids who were willing to give everything to be their best. I think we had more overtime games than any school in Virginia. Schools HATED to play us because they knew they were in for a fight. We played “Ironman” football, which means, the kids NEVER wanted to come off the field. They played both ways and all special teams and it was a pride thing.
There were only about 4 of us coaches but after every practice, we all shared on the heart of a winner and how we get better every day. I am so thankful my boys went through that program and that I had a chance to coach them. Very thankful to Kyle Neve who stuck with me all those years and allowed me to do so much.
To this day, many, many years later, I still hear from Bruton players on Facebook or by email and I remember them all with great appreciation.
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