Before they were college coaches, they were students.
And the teachers that college coaches from Georgia football coach Mark Richt to Georgia Tech men’s basketball coach Brian Gregory had when they were in school still inspire them today.
Georgia women’s basketball coach Andy Landers still corresponds with Mary Alice McCall, who taught him English in sixth grade.
Georgia Tech football coach Paul Johnson enjoyed the thrill of being taught by some of the same teachers who taught his father.
Georgia Southern football coach Jeff Monken spent time in his father’s classroom. Like his fellow coaches, he wants to inspire because he was inspired.
“I saw the influence he had on young people,” Monken said. “They felt a bond and a love for my dad because he cared about them and wanted to succeed.”
The coaches listed several teachers they wanted to thank, but here are a few that inspired them (answers have been paraphrased):
Bill Curry, Georgia State football coach
I’ve been providentially moved from one great coach to another. The same is true in the classroom. I had a great fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Mable Bolton. I was moving into a new school in College Park at Newton Estates Grammar School. I was a problem child, ADHD or something. They didn’t know what to do. She did.
She was a disciplinarian. She sat me in the back of the room. Until years later I didn’t understand why. She could see me back there. I wouldn’t blend into the other students in the room. But right behind me was a shelf with about 15 little orange volumes.
One of my redeeming characteristics was I loved to read, even back then. My parents were avid readers.
I had already been influenced by Rudyard Kipling’s “The Jungle Book.” I’m not talking about Disney, I’m talking about the real thing. The Pack and the leaders of the pack. How cool would it be to run like Mowgli through the jungles? She let me sit back there and read about George Washington, Ben Franklin. They were all biographies. I was just mesmerized. How did Thomas Edison do what he did? He was told he was incapable of learning? He wouldn’t quit. He tried 11,000 times to make a bulb and wouldn’t quit. Maybe I should keep trying.
I can still see those little volumes, those little orange books. They made me want to be a leader.
Charles Kelly, Tech assistant football coach
Aside from my dad, who was also a math teacher and coach, Brenda Childress taught me biology as a freshman and anatomy as a sophomore. I’ll never forget, her expectations were very high. But she had a way of making you reach for things you didn’t think you could reach.
I apply it all the time and I think about it a lot. I think about things she said in class. One time, I can remember doing a project. I put a lot of work into it. I turned it in and she made some corrections. She said to me, “Work like that will make you do good things later on.”
Lewis Preston, Kennesaw State men’s basketball coach
Donna Guthrie was my senior high school English literature teacher at Franklin County (Va.) High School.
We read everything from Shakespeare to Dante’s “Divine Comedy” to Beowulf. She helped me gain my love of reading, which has helped me a great deal.
What was incredible about Mrs. Guthrie was she made reading fun. She told us you could go to different worlds and meet incredible people. Little did I know that I would be doing that in basketball; being able to correlate what we were doing and seeing different lands and different cultures. It stuck with me.
In fact, I was just saying it to my girls the other day, talking about my oldest daughter, Alex, loves to read. We are always talking good books. She will read to me. My youngest daughter is getting the hang of it.
Gregory
His name was R.J. Hannan at Hersey High School in Arlington Heights, Ill. He was my high school counselor and also taught a class called “Marriage and Family.” It was about being a good father and mother and raising a good family, all those things. He was just a guy that I saw as an educator who did more than teach.
Unfortunately, he passed away when I got the job at Dayton. He was fond of my career. He never got to see me coach.
One of the things he taught me, which has been echoed by so many coaches I’ve had, is if you work hard and are a good person then usually things work out pretty well. It’s simple and to the point. It works.
Johnson
I grew up in a small town. My first- and second-grade teachers, Mrs. Webb and Mrs. Collins, both taught my dad. That was neat.
I had some great teachers. It would be hard to single one out. [I learned] No matter what it takes, it’s your job to get the information across. If the information’s not across you didn’t do a good job getting there.
Landers
Mary Alice McCall was my sixth-grade English teacher at Binfield Elementary School in Maryville, Tenn. I think I needed structure, looking back on it. I think I needed parameters because Mrs. McCall was a strict teacher. She had a great knack for helping me understand what it was that she was teaching.
I didn’t make the best grades in class, but she made it interesting to me. I wanted to do well because I wanted to please her because she had this conviction about what she was doing.
I do a lot of correspondence. I consider myself to be good at it, and I give her the credit. I never stopped trying to get that piece right. That’s something she instilled in me and has stayed with me all my life. When I have written something from time to time and read it, I don’t know if anyone else thinks it’s good, but I think it’s good. I can’t help but think back how she held us accountable for doing this type of work the right way.
Monken
My grandmother, Louise Monken, was a teacher. She taught until she was 90, full-time. We were all led and inspired by grandmother. She dedicated her life to teaching and educating.
My dad was a high school teacher, as was as my mom, who was a teacher and a guidance counselor. My dad was a high school coach. When I got to school as a freshman I had him as a PE teacher.
It was unique being a student in my dad’s class and seeing how students, parents, administrators admired my dad. He was patient, kind, but still a stern disciplinarian.
My dad has five siblings, four boys and a girl. All six are teachers. All five were head football coaches in Illinois growing up. What’s a great testament is to all those men, there are seven of us who are sons who have gone into coaching football.
We saw how important our fathers were in the lives of kids in communities where we lived. We all wanted to be an influence for other people as well.
I don’t think we can ever escape our parents and the influence they’ve had on us.
Richt
Ms. Helmer, my third-grade teacher at Kohl Elementary School in Broomfield, Colo.
She believed in me. She just encouraged me.
I might have made this up in my mind, but she might have talked to my mom about skipping me up a grade because I was doing well. I knew she liked me, and she made me feel like I was smart.
She taught me that students have to know you believe in them. They have to know that. You don’t want to give praise unless something is praiseworthy. It’s helped me in finding things that are worth saying “Good job. You do that well,” or “I believe in you as a person or as a team.”
