By the time he was a junior at South Carolina, Terrence Trammell had accomplished just about everything a college track athlete could at that level, so he decided to pursue a professional career and make a run at the 2000 U.S. Olympic team.
But he didn’t turn to his college coach to be his trainer. He didn’t seek out the best pro coaches in the field. Instead, he looked to his roots, to the man who set Trammell’s foundation in the sport when he was a ninth grader at Southwest DeKalb: his high school coach Napolean Cobb.
The result was a silver medal in the 110-meter hurdles event at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, the first of two Olympic silver medals Trammell won during his career as one of the more decorated track and field athletes in U.S. history. He said Cobb was a major influence and motivator.
“He is definitely one of the top coaches I have come in contact with on any level,” said Trammell, 36, who retired a few years ago and now runs Trammell Athletics, a speed-and-agility training company. “Had he decided to move to the level of coaching elite athletes, he would have had success there, too.”
Cobb is one of six legendary high school coaches — including Harvey Cochran (baseball), Larry Campbell (football), Odis Spencer (football), Jane Williamson (basketball) and Dexter Wood (football) — who will be inducted into the Georgia Athletic Coaches Association (GACA) Hall of Fame on Saturday at the Northwest Georgia Trade and Convention Center in Dalton.
“It’s definitely a great, great honor,” said Cobb, 73, who recently retired from a second stint as the head coach at Southwest DeKalb by winning the school’s ninth state team title, capping a 50-year career that spanned six decades. “But it was never a goal to reach the Hall of Fame. We just wanted to do the best job we could with the kids we had. This honor means I guess we did a pretty good job.”
Born and reared in Atlanta, Cobb graduated from then-Turner High, where he was a standout performer in football and track and field. It also was the place where he was exposed to his first coaching mentor, Judo Brown. He would go on to be influenced by Ed Temple, his college coach at Tennessee State, who led the program during the famed “Tigerbelle” era, which featured Olympic legend Wilma Rudolph and Ralph Boston, himself a three-time Olympian.
After graduating from Tennessee State in 1965, Cobb spent two years coaching football and track in Chicago. He then moved to Berkeley (Calif.) High, where he had the opportunity to learn from Bud Winters, who coached more than 100 All-Americans and 27 Olympians at San Jose State, known in the late 1960s and early ’70s as “Speed City.”
In 1972, Cobb returned to Georgia as the football and track coach at now-defunct Gordon High in DeKalb County, where he led the program to three state titles in 1975, 1976 and 1978. Then it was on to Morehouse, where Cobb resurrected that program, leading the Maroon Tigers to three consecutive Southern Interscholastic Athletic Conference championships in his final three years there — 1987, 1988 and 1989.
Cobb returned to the high school ranks in 1989, when he took over at Southwest DeKalb. Under his leadership, the Panthers dominated the 1990s, winning six state titles in 10 seasons, including a mythical national championship in 1996 with a team that featured future Olympians Trammell and Angelo Taylor (400-meter hurdles). After another brief stint at Morehouse, Cobb returned to Southwest DeKalb to restore that program to a championship level this season.
“It’s about the fundamentals and the scientific aspect of the sport,” Cobb said, referencing lessons he learned from Brown, Temple and Winters. “That’s how you build and maintain a program that will last for years and years.”
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