Tribute to Tennessee High School Football Coaches

NOTE: Jim played football and baseball at McNairy Central High School in Selmer. (Class of 1981). He played football and baseball at Rhodes College in Memphis before transferring to Lambuth where he earned his undergraduate degree (Class of 1985). His head coaching career in football included stints at McNairy Central (1988, 2009-2011); Humboldt (1998-2001) and Jackson Central Merry (2008).

As a head coach, you understand that the players, the X’s and O’s are what you really want to concern yourself with. But there’s a lot of peripheral stuff involved, such as fund raising, booster clubs, getting out into the community, and if you’ve ever coached high school football in a small community, you understand how important high school football is to those communities.

This story takes place in Humboldt. On game-day, we always kept the kids after school. We never let them go home before a game. We’d have a walk through, then feed the players their pregame meal. People were really, really helpful in providing pregame meals for our players. It didn’t cost the program hardly anything.

There was this new restaurant that came to town. They wanted to promote themselves as the restaurant that fed the Humboldt Vikings. So we went to the restaurant for our pregame meal. Everything went well, the kids enjoyed themselves, the owner was very gracious.

After the meal, we board the bus and head out to Halls for our game. We go through pregame drills and all of our pregame talks, preparing for the game.

Well, midway through the first quarter, my center comes off the field in the middle of our drive. I ask him if he’s hurt and he informs me, “Coach, I’m not going to make it through the rest of the game unless I go to the bathroom.”

I’m a little upset that this kid didn’t take care of his business before on the front end, especially when you consider that the field house is nearly a half-mile away from the stadium. It’s a long walk, but I tell him to hurry up and get back to the field.

After we punted and went on defense, the same thing happen to our middle linebacker. He comes off the field and says, “Coach, I got bubble guts.” I’d never heard that phrase before, so I asked him again what was wrong. He apparently had the same problem as the first player did.

We went through a steady trickle throughout the entire first quarter of players needing to go to the bathroom. We ended the first half with primarily a freshman team on the field.

By halftime, everyone had seemed to clean themselves out and we were able to finish the game with our original starting lineup. But there for a while, I had my doubts we’d be able to finish the game. By the way, we won the game.