Area coaches know ups, downs of leading their alma maters

Jackie Hayes doesn’t recall the year, but he recalls the scene vividly.

His Dillon High School football team had been defeated a couple of days previous in a lower state title game.

When Hayes arrived for school Monday morning, there was a sign attached the door.

“It said, ‘11-2, find something else to do,’” Hayes recalled. “Expectations are sometimes unrealistic at Dillon.”

That can be true anywhere, but especially if you’re a hometown guy coaching your alma mater, some coaches say.

Hayes played his senior season for the Wildcats in 1979 and graduated the following spring.

The familiarity between coach and townspeople can be a great asset when things are going well.

It can be just as damaging when things are going poorly.

While people love a hometown hero, they also can be quicker to criticize someone with whom they’re familiar.

“When people know you pretty well, they want to come up and give you some suggestions on what you’re doing wrong,” said Lake View coach Daryl King.

Fortunately for King, a 1994 Lake View grad, the Wild Gators have done little wrong this season, his first as his alma mater’s coach. Lake View is 10-1 heading into Friday’s second-round playoff game at Blackville-Hilda.

“Winning takes care of a lot of things,” he said. “I haven’t found out a lot of (the potential pitfalls) for myself yet. I’m sure I will one day.”

Winning does take care of a lot, but certainly not everything, as Hayes can attest.

But Manning coach Robbie Briggs said in his situation, the positive has far outweighed the negative.

“You’ll always have one or two individuals who want to express their opinions, but I’ve had almost nothing but positives,” he said. “And the No. 1 positive is that you can get things done a lot faster when you have those connections with people.”

It makes sense.

Any high school football coach will tell you that a major component of a program’s success is making sure the community is fully behind its team.

That doesn’t mean just vocal support. It means financial and material help, too.

Briggs, now in his eighth season coaching his alma mater, said when he took the Manning job he was able to skip the step of making connections with businesses and supporters in the community, thereby saving valuable time.

“And you know who to approach, who not to approach and how to approach them,” Briggs said. “You have to know how to sell your program and what turns (potential supporters) off.”

But, too, there must be a point at which contact between coach and community is out of bounds, Briggs said.

In fact, it might have been a related aspect that kept Briggs from getting the Manning job a few years earlier.

Briggs said he got overlooked for the job at first because of his youth — he said he was 25 or 26 at the time — and because administrators were fearful that he couldn’t handle the pressure of being approachable by pretty much anyone in the community.

“The were worried about me trying to please everybody,” Briggs said.

It can be tricky.

Briggs was a hometown star when he played for Manning in the late 1980s and the Monarchs won the Class 3A state championship his senior season in 1988.

At least partly because of that, Briggs said, Monarch fans expect the best and expect to be able to talk to their coach about it.

“You want to be approachable,” Briggs said, “but at the same time let them know what that cutoff point is without being rude.

“Everybody’s been OK with it. But I’m sure if we were 5-6 or 4-7, it’d be different.”

Hayes can certainly relate, even though the Wildcats have been successful in every way except on the state championship level.

Hayes can readily rattle off numbers — his teams have played for three state titles, played in numerous lower state championship games and won eight or nine region championships, he said.

But winning state titles isn’t everything, contrary to what some people might believe.

“My philosophy is how do you measure your program,” Hayes said.

“Do you measure it by consistency year after year? Sometimes you can assemble a great team and win a championship and then go six or seven years without having a winning season.

“I’m really happy with the consistency level,” even if it’s not what ultimately matters to some fans.

One thing the coaches can agree on about coaching in their hometown is that it helps with their ability to identify with and connect with their players.

“If you’ve played in the system, they know you’ve done it before,” King said. “What we expect of them is something we’ve all done. We’re not asking them to do anything we haven’t done ourselves.”

Fans, though, can be a different story. King said he thought long and hard about the pros and cons of coaching in his hometown before taking the job.

“It’s fine as long as you’re winning,” King said. “But if you’re losing, I imagine it would be hard to escape because everybody knows you.”