Alex Kingsbury
Putting his team through a dry run of the complicated "Wingbone" offense, Wofford College Terriers Head Coach Mike Ayers wipes at the beads of sweat sliding down the back of his neck and soaking the cord that holds his whistle. The South Carolina sun is so intense in August that the assistant coaches all sport matching broad-brimmed straw hats. The pressure is on with the team's opening game only two days away, and it doesn't help that easy passes keep zipping through receivers' hands like so many rays through a palmetto frond. The coach calls for his boys to take a knee: time for the final pep talk before the team hops on the plane for the game at the University of South Florida.
"If there's anything left in the tank at the end of the game," he says, "then we will have lost."
Even with a full tank of effort, the odds of victory aren't good. The Wofford College squad had an unusually high number of seniors on the team last year, which means that they're underclassman-heavy this season--young, small, and inexperienced compared to their peers. "It's a rebuilding year" is the familiar refrain around Spartanburg. But whatever the outcome, the players know that the coach demands only one thing: hard work.
Sports coaches, particularly in football, hold a unique place in society. They become surrogate fathers, teachers, and role models. Hollywood often caricatures them as the demideities of small-town America.
There are countless schools, towns, and cities where the football coach is an institution. But for every George Halas, Vince Lombardi, and Bill Belichick, there are countless others who never coach an NFL squad and sculpt only the rawest of talent. They lead teams with losing records, relying on volunteer staff with a shoestring budget. Most coaches, in short, are average leaders, leading average teams.
Mike Ayers is better than the average coach. He's led the Wofford team for the past 21 seasons. The year before he took over, the team won one game and lost 10. Ayers has notched 144 wins and 102 losses over more than two decades at the helm. Last year, the school finished second in the Southern Conference.
Ayers himself is modest, despite the fact that the local dry cleaner boasts a poster of his stoic visage gazing out over the town's main street. "Look, I'm just a football coach," he says. "It's important to keep the game in perspective--graduation first, championships second."
Roster of scholars. For the Wofford squad, graduation is a given. The team has a reputation among Southern Conference brethren as a bunch of nerds. Some 40 football team alumni have gone on to practice medicine. More than half the current team maintains a GPA above 3.0, despite a large number of science students whose courses include several hours of lab work in addition to practices each week. Led by a physics major at quarterback, the roster includes nuclear and civil engineering students and biology, chemistry, finance, and economics majors. More than a dozen players end up on the conference all-academic team each year. And some of the current players are reading mentors in local schools.
The college sits on 170 acres in the middle of downtown Spartanburg, a town where football is its own religion, with a trinity of teams from high school, college, and the pros. The Carolina Panthers hold their preseason training camp on the college's athletic fields. Jerry Richardson, a Wofford alumnus, owns the team, and the camp attracts fans from around the region to sit on the grassy hills overlooking the field to collect autographs and scope out their favorite stars before the season starts. When the team agreed to base its training camp here in 1995, the Panthers and the school invested heavily in three lush Bermuda grass fields that Ayers and his squad can use for the 49 weeks of the year when camp isn't in session.
Of course, coaching has little to do with the greenness of the grass. For Ayers, his drive comes from the blood. He played football when he was young, and he also went out for baseball, gymnastics, and wrestling. In his spare time, he earned a black belt in karate, struggles with a fishing addiction, and developed a knack for landscape painting.
Students and colleagues are effusive about the man, a devout Christian. "If Mike Ayers doesn't respect you," says Wofford President Benjamin Dunlap, "then you must be a scoundrel."
Ayers was the first in his family to go to college and at one time paid the rent by slinging bags of garbage onto a truck. It taught him the value of hard work and what he calls the "generational impact" that earning a college degree can have, not on just a person but on an entire family. He knows, too, that few if any of his players will go on to make a living in the game. "You learn a lot about yourself when you compete on the field, and that will make you a better doctor or teacher or engineer," Ayers says. "Great doctors and great football players have one thing in common besides their God-given talent--they work hard."
But Ayers, now 60, wasn't always as philosophical, about either life or the game he loves. His colleagues talk about a much different man who first took the reins of the Wofford football team 20 years ago. Once, in a fit of enthusiasm to motivate his team, Ayers got carried away in his pep talk, picking up a garbage can and bashing it repeatedly against his head during a pregame talk. A rivet cut his skin and blood streamed down his face, but he continued his spiel. The team tore out of the locker room and went on to victory. "Football is easy," NFL running back Bo Jackson once said, "if you're crazy as hell."
Over the years, Ayers has mellowed in his approach to coaching, colleagues say. "Maybe mellowed isn't the best word--he's just put things into more perspective," says Athletic Director Richard Johnson. He doesn't swear the way he used to, and he doesn't push his players to the breaking point in practices. Outside the office, it's not unusual to see kids of the coaching staff playing around the cubicles. That's a change, too, Ayers says. "We try to schedule things so that coaches aren't here until 2 in the morning--we coach hard but keep things in perspective." Ayers credits some of that to his rediscovered Christian faith, which has softened his temper and recast his ideas about the relative importance of the game. "When I accepted Christ, I accepted that life was not just about me," Ayers says. "That's a good approach to football as well. When the players learn that the game is not just about them, the team plays better."
Team of coaches. Of course, coaching is also a team sport. And Wofford has assembled a distinguished bunch. Seven out of 10 full-time coaches are former Wofford players, and three of the 10 work without pay. The director of football operations, Joe Lesesne, is a former Wofford College presi-dent and retired major general in the National Guard. Lee Hanning, the kicking coach, is in his mid-80s. He parachuted behind Utah Beach on D-Day with the 101st Airborne Division before fighting in the Battle of the Bulge. Hanning knew nothing about punting or field goals when he asked to help Ayers with the team in 1989. Since coming out of retirement years ago, Hanning has sent two of his punters into the NFL. "I coach with Mike Ayers for the same reason that the players play for him--the game is fun, and Ayers likes to win."
Being a winning football coach takes a surprising amount of work. In the past 10 years, computer and video technology have turned play-calling, planning, and postgame reviews into a technical exercise. High above the practice fields, atop 20-foot-tall platforms, assistants man video cameras to record plays and formations on the practice field. The coaching staff spends hours poring over the footage on a big-screen television in Ayers's office, then produces DVDs for individual players to study.
Ayers' offensive scheme, the Wingbone, is devilishly complicated. A formation that's been used by Wofford for decades, it requires the players to use their brains as much as their bodies to respond to changing defensive tactics. But in the end, after all the strategizing, coaching, and preparation, it's the players who have to execute the plan.