Wilson’s Page ready to defend school’s state title

FLORENCE—Need a change of perspective? Spend a couple of weeks in the hospital because of the dangers blood clots present to your well-being.

Or get scared half to death when your wife gets in an accident, you’re an hour and 15 minutes from home, your elementary school-age son is beside himself, terrified and you don’t know how bad it really is. And then you finally see her lying there in a hospital, disabled with a broken hip and you’re thankful that it’s not any worse.

Or worse yet, watch helplessly beside the hospital bed of your pre-kindergarten daughter who is incapacitated because of a viral infection that has reached her precious little brain.

Welcome to the last three years of Darryl Page’s life.

A different outlook

The irony of what happened last year, when Wilson won the school’s first football state championship since integration, is not lost on Page, about to start his 16th season as the Tigers’ coach.

When he was consumed with football, yelling at his players, living, breathing the sport day in and day out, Wilson never could take that final step to claim what every football-playing school so desperately craves.

When it finally sunk in that faith and family deserve a more lofty position, when Page finally mellowed out some on the practice field, when he realized that his team was made up of teenagers trying their hardest and when he decided to have more fun with his job, that’s when Wilson’s players rewarded their coach with the ultimate prize, grinding their way through the ’07 postseason and beating Chester for the 3A title in Columbia.

“It’s a game and these are high school kids trying to do the best they can,” Page said. “And when you look at it like that, you enjoy the ride a lot more.”

Page never was so tough on his players that he had a problem getting them to play. But the difference has been not only noticeable, but welcomed by many of the young men Page coaches.

“It changed him a lot,” senior defensive back Grayson Harley said. “The yelling stopped. Now, he just comes to us in a calm way and explains things. It has helped us play better.”

Yes, it can be done

Page didn’t have any idea his changes would help the Tigers play so well they would win a state championship last season.

But when it finally happened, it was a cathartic experience for Page. Not only could he look back at the tough times with his family’s health, but self-doubts he had accumulated through the years being just almost good enough were finally gone.

Wilson won a combined nine games in Page’s first three seasons before things started looking up for the Tigers.

Over the past few years especially, Page has fielded some good teams, a couple he thought were capable of winning it all. But it never happened before last year, and Page admitted he was scratching his head and wondering if it might never happen.

“It got to the point where I was asking, ‘Can I take a team to the championship?’” Page said. “I had a lot of self doubt. But going through that two-year period (wife’s accident and daughter’s illness) changed my perspective on coaching and on the belief that this can be done.”

Not helping were the ever-present whispers around the community that the Tigers were destined to be that team with the undesirable label of good, but not quite good enough.

“We were always next year’s champions,” Page said.

Encore performance?

One thing that many people in the Wilson community didn’t realize was that Page had hinted for a few years that if the Tigers ever did reach the pinnacle, he would give up teaching on the football field and teach only in the classroom.

So how close was he to doing that?

“I still have a copy of my resignation letter on my jump drive,” Page said.

But a phone call from one of last year’s seniors provided all the convincing Page needed. Page confided to the player that he was seriously considering giving up coaching.

“He said, ‘No, coach, we can win it again,’” Page recalled.

And Page said he is convinced the Tigers can do just that.

That feeling doesn’t come without some misgivings.

Since last season was Page’s first taste of a state championship at Wilson, he doesn’t really know what to expect as far as how his team will handle the success.

Then there’s the added pressure, the expectation of success that comes with being a state champion, especially one that returns much of its team from last year.

So Page said he has fallen back on the tried and true coach’s cliché of one play, one prac-tice, one game at a time.

“You can’t win the state championship the first week,” Page said. “It’s just not going to happen. We’re going to go through peaks and valleys throughout the season. And hope-fully, if we get the opportunity to play in the playoffs, we’ll be healthy, we’ll get a good draw and some good things will happen.

“Last year, all those things came together for us.”

So with an optimistic, yet subdued attitude heading into the season, it might make Page cringe a little when he hears Harley confidently proclaim, “We’re going back (to state).”

“I’ve always felt we were a pretty confident bunch, but (winning state) kind of gives us a little more chutzpah,” Page said. That’s a Yiddish term for “courage bordering on arrogance,” according to dictionary.com.

It makes Wilson the primary target for every team on its schedule, teams that are trying to accomplish what the Tigers did last season. But for Page, it’s a heck of a lot better than the alternative — on the outside looking in.

“We know we’re going to get everybody’s best game,” Page said. “But you treasure it for what it is.”