Given his age, and the challenges of the job to bring basketball back to Dalton State, it was probably a fair question.
In his interview, former Kennesaw State coach Tony Ingle, 60 at the time, was asked if he felt he had enough enthusiasm for the job.
The Roadrunners were re-starting an athletic program that had been dormant for 34 years, since 1978, five years after Ingle’s last season as a player there. He would be starting from scratch, with no team to coach the first season, no league to join until the second, and no gym to practice in for the first two months of the inaugural season.
So yes, on the surface, in August of 2012, it probably seemed like a job for some youngster, trying to make his way up the coaching ladder.
“Well, it’s been my experience that enthusiasm don’t have an age,” was Ingle’s response, in his thick Southern drawl. “But wisdom does, and thank goodness I got both.”
How many aspiring young coaches can spout off the derivation of the word enthusiasm on the spot?
“Enthusiasm is a Greek word that means God in us,” said Ingle, a devout Mormon.
He has been using the word in speeches for years, in his part-time gig as a motivational speaker. It’s the second letter in one of his go-to acronyms: H.E.L.P. “When you’re happy and enthusiastic, you’re loving and positive,” Ingle says. “That’s when you’re going to help others.”
But Ingle can do more than talk enthusiasm. He’s lived it. He turned his youthful admiration for John Wooden, whom he first met as a Dalton Junior College player at an Atlanta Tipoff Club banquet, into a 40-year friendship. He was executor director of the John and Nelly Wooden coach of the year awards.
As a sophomore, he vowed to win a national championship as a coach one day after he and Dalton Junior College fell just short for the second year in a row. His father had taken a week off work, a $1,000 loan and borrowed a car to get to the junior college national tournament in Hutchinson, KS, in 1973 only to see his son tear up his knee eight minutes into the first game.
Ingle made good on that vow in 2004 when he coached Kennesaw State to the NCAA Division II national championship. Seven years later, he willed Kennesaw State to a 17-point victory over a Georgia Tech team with two future NBA players on its roster.
Ingle was also shrewd enough, in a matter of 20 words during that interview, to emphasize what he had going that few young coaches could – the self-belief that comes from a long history of starting from scratch.
“I’ve learned a lot from the university of hard knocks,” he said.
Ingle was born with a facial deformity that required five operations. He worked his way up from coaching high school basketball in Dalton to an assistant coaching job at BYU, only to get fired after going 0-19 as an interim head coach there.
After 11 years at Kennesaw State, the last of which was the season when the Owls upset Georgia Tech, he got fired. He was dismissed in the wake of revelations that Kennesaw State was not measuring up academically while making the transition to Division I.
“I knew every time something happened, I was just going to get up,” Ingle said. “You’re going to fight. You’re going to get back up, because that’s life.”
Ingle was hired by Dalton State athletic director Derek Waugh, former head men’s basketball coach at Stetson, who’d picked up his 100th win coaching against Ingle and Kennesaw State. He offered Ingle the chance to come home.
“It’s where my mother always wanted me to coach,” said Ingle, the only son of Bobbie Ingle’s six children.
A good answer during a job interview doesn’t really do justice to the kind of fit that this has been for Ingle, and for Dalton State.
Ingle once worked in the carpet mills in Dalton, taking 12-hour shifts on a coater, a carpet-dying machine that heats to temperatures as high as 115 degrees. He was captain of the Dalton Junior College (now Dalton State) basketball team in 1973, and a vice president in student government. He even laid bricks at the Westcott Administration Building on campus, working as a brick mason one summer.
These days, the Dalton Roadrunners don’t have a locker room. Up until about two weeks ago, when they started practicing in the renovated on-campus gym which they share with the volleyball team, the Roadrunners practiced at any of two Dalton area high schools, three recreation centers, and one Presbyterian church.
But their first game at the Northwest Georgia Trade & Convention Center sold out three hours before the game. The Roadrunners are 14-1 in their first season back, including two wins in overtime, and were leading NAIA Division I men’s basketball in wins heading into the holiday break.
Ingle’s mother died of emphysema in 1999, five years before he won that national championship at Kennesaw State, and 13 years before he came home again to coach in Dalton.
“I think she’s helping me coach this team, to be honest with you,” Ingle said. “We’ve won some games we really should not have won. We’ve been very lucky.”
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