Post by krazykev on Nov 8, 2008 8:40:18 GMT -5
GREENSBORO -- Bill Hayes still likes to watch football practice. It's in his blood, going back to his days at Winston-Salem State and N.C. A&T, days when he'd walk from station to station watching the workouts, the intricate and mundane details of building toward Saturdays.
Game days were for the fans, he always said.
Now the athletics director at Florida A&M, he still marvels at the little things, the assistants working with their talent, the student leaders taking charge when the assistants aren't looking.
"I love it," he said this week as he got ready to make the trip here for today's FAMU-A&T game. "I love watching them get ready. It's just like a football team."
Hayes was talking about the band.
He's out of coaching now, not by his own choice since he was removed as the football coach at A&T after the 2002 season. And if he's bitter about, he keeps it to himself. He has bigger concerns at FAMU, and all he wants for A&T is the best.
Hayes talked to George Ragsdale this week, and he had nothing but kind words for the interim coach in charge of the football program at A&T.
"I like Ragsdale a lot," he said. "I love Ragsdale."
It's a relationship based on common backgrounds and a perspective that only a couple of people could possibly know. Hayes knows what Ragsdale's up against, knows what happened after he left and the A&T program began a slow spiral into disgrace. Hayes has thought a lot about it having been at four past, current and future MEAC schools, including WSSU and N.C. Central, an original MEAC member. And he's come to a conclusion.
"It's a young man's game," he said. "I remember when I first got started I would head out to recruit at 4:30 in the morning and not get home until 1 a.m. I was stupid. I was driven. I was a young man and didn't know any better. That's what it takes now."
From his new perspective in Tallahassee, Fla., he looks out over the MEAC and sees his peers still coaching, middle-aged men, old men. And he's heard what A&T wants to do to rebuild its football program, ironically in his own image. The talk is of old-school coaches with ties to the historically black system and the recruiting hotbeds in North Carolina.
There's talk of Henry Frazier at Prairie View and Jim Webster at Tennessee State, and Hayes said either would do a great job. But for how long? He has a name that's not being talked about much, and he thinks it's the perfect man for the job:
Connell Maynor.
The former A&T quarterback is probably Hayes' favorite player of all time, a kid he coached at WSSU and probably made the biggest impression on Hayes when he was considering moving from Winston to Greensboro in 1988.
"He came up to me and said, 'Coach, if you go, I'm going, too,' " Hayes said. "He was the only one who said it."
Maynor had a remarkable career at A&T, helping Hayes rebuild a program, then embarking on a career that took him into coaching on the college level and eventually into the Arena League as a player and a coach. As an AFL player, he is still the only player to play quarterback, wide receiver, linebacker and kick returner. He's now the offensive coordinator of the AFL champion Philadelphia Soul.
"He's excelled everywhere he's been," Hayes said. "And he's a young man. He's 38, and he'll give A&T 20 or 30 years. Imagine that. He knows the state. He's from Fayetteville. And he knows all the high school coaches throughout the area. They were his teammates."
That's the little secret Hayes had all those years here. He knew the high school coaches and the A&T alums, and they sent him players. That, he said, is how A&T can get back to where it was. That, he said, is the only way A&T can get back.
Hayes will speak his mind on this, but that's about it. He won't stick his nose in someone else's business. This isn't his call, and he knows it. But he knows A&T football better than anyone, and he cares about the Aggies and he cares about his former players.
He'll be here today not to reminisce or to look back on glory days and championships. He'll even bring with him the man who succeeded him as A&T's coach, FAMU associate head coach and defensive line coach George Small. He won't be here to gloat or to say, "I told you so," even though he did just that. Hayes has moved on, and he has bigger things to worry about now, like getting the 430-piece FAMU band's travel plans set up for a classic game next season.
"I can send the football team to that game and back three times for what it's going to cost to move that band," he said. "They have more assistants than the football team. They had 10 (expletive) drum majors! But my, oh, my, what a band. I thought I knew, but I had no idea."
A&T had no idea what it was getting into when it sent Hayes packing six years ago. He did, and he told the people what he thought. And he'll tell them now, too, if they'd only listen to him this time.
Contact Ed Hardin at 373-7069 or ed.hardin@news-record.com
