Editor’s Note: Dispatch sports editor Adam Minichino recently sat down with Former Oak Hill Academy coach Leroy Gregg to talk about how until recently he juggled duties as coach, father figure, teacher, parent, husband, and administrator for more than three decades.
WEST POINT — Leroy Gregg is a hugger.
It’s not something many men let slip easily, but if you know Gregg, it’s understandable the 35-year coaching veteran would say that about himself. After all, he is genuine. He has been in this “business,” as he calls it, for so long he doesn’t know another way.
Leroy Gregg also is loud.
You wouldn’t know it sitting across a table from him during a busy lunch rush at Cafe Ritz. If it was a football field or a basketball court — or any other sports-related setting — Gregg’s words would ring with clarity and silence any unneeded movement or chatter.
Those days of the gruff taskmaster, though, are coming to an end. On Friday, Gregg graded his final exam of the year as a biology/anatomy-physiology teacher at Oak Hill Academy. Earlier in the month, his Oak Hill Academy boys golf team competed in the Mississippi Association of Independent School Class AA State Championship in what could have been one of his final duties as a coach.
And while Gregg has signed a contract to teach at Oak Hill Academy for the 2011-12 school year, he won’t return as the school’s football coach, closing a chapter on a 35-year run that has seen him coach nearly every sport except soccer and baseball at five schools in the state of Mississippi.
In that time, Gregg has stopped too many times for fast food at restaurants like Wendy’s or Sonic. The eating habits, necessitated in large part by the long hours associated with his work as a coach, have contributed to the onset of high blood pressure and high cholesterol. Both conditions ultimately led Gregg and his wife of 35 years, Sherrelyn, to decide it was best for him to step away from coaching football.
But given a chance to reflect on how he has impacted the lives of thousands of student-athletes, including his two children, Gregg said the sacrifices he and his family have made and the countless hours working behind the scenes have been worth it.
“One of the things you have to have to be successful is a coach’s wife,” Gregg said. “I was blessed with an excellent coach’s wife. Sometimes you might come home and feel sorry for yourself, but she would immediately address it, and was usually right. Not always, but usually she was right. You have to have that partner.”
Gregg spent his first three years at Belzoni High School before spending his senior year at Eupora High. After graduating in 1971, Gregg went on Mississippi State, where he met Sherrelyn in 1974 on a blind date. As a football player, Gregg didn’t try to hide anything from the woman who would become his wife, especially his love for sports and his desire to go into coaching. She didn’t like sports growing up and found her passion in playing the piano. But the self-described “opposites” hit it off and will celebrate their 36th anniversary June 1.
“I tried to think back and I didn’t know anything different. I don’t remember it as a sacrifice,” said Sherrelyn, who is a teacher at the Amory Vocational Center. “When the children were little, we only had one car, and he had the car. That is the biggest sacrifice I can remember. We have had a lot of fun. I guess I don’t see it as a sacrifice because he coached both of our children, so we were always together at the school or at their ballgames. We had a good time.”
Gregg spent nine months in 1976 in his first job at Humphreys County High. He then worked as a teacher and a coach at Aberdeen High (1977-86), at Union High (1986-88), and Amory High (1989-2004) before moving to Oak Hill Academy in 2004. In addition to his work as head football coach the past three years, he has worked as athletic director and boys golf coach.
At Amory, Gregg coached his son, Sam, who is now offensive coordinator at the University of West Alabama, and his daughter, Mary Frances, who is an aeronautical engineer. He admits each child makes more than he and his wife combined, but making a fortune wasn’t his motivation for becoming a teacher, or a coach.
In that way, Gregg is like teachers and coaches everywhere. The time they work outside the traditional hours in a day often add up and stretch late into the night — even early in the next morning given the length of trips — or into the weekend.
Gregg and his family negotiated those pitfalls by making sports family events. Gregg coached his children in recreational and in summer leagues, and they would go with their father to practice or to games before they were ready to have him as their coach.
Even though Sherrelyn didn’t go to every game, she said her husband never brought the difficult parts of his job home with him. She said he never “moped” and that family members didn’t have to be quiet, or “walk around on tiptoes,” when their father returned home from a less-than-promising result.
“I really can’t complain,” Sherrelyn said. “Even though we had lots of fun and have lots of good memories, I won’t miss it.”
Sherrelyn’s comment reflects the unspoken baggage that goes with being a coach and the spouse of a coach. Gregg acknowledges as much as he wanted to become a coach, he “isn’t quite sure I knew what all my coaches did behind the scenes. I know I didn’t. The hours it takes to get a field looking good, or a gym floor.”
Job descriptions for coaches often don’t include in the fine print you will have to re-do a 10,000-square foot gym floor — by yourself. That’s what Gregg did when he was at Aberdeen High. He might not have known all of the finer points, but he got the job done.
But as much satisfaction Gregg felt from the peripheral tasks involved with his work, his main source of pride was impacting lives of teenagers.
“High school coaching is about trying to get something out of a child they don’t realize they have,” Gregg said. “When they see their improvement, they get excited, they get turned on and say, ‘Ooh, this stuff does work,’ and I can see how much better I am getting better. … Then the motivation part is easy. The coolest part of this job to me is getting something out of a kid they don’t realize is there. You don’t get that every time, especially when I think of all of the failures I have had as a coach where I didn’t get the best out of a kid and their life didn’t end up less than it could have been. That is one of the things you don’t have complete control over. You might preach to them about the importance of things, but you’re not always successful in their belief that there time is more important (doing the right things).”
Gregg said he tried to make sports more fun for younger student-athletes. He tried to do that because he learned early on middle school kids or freshmen and sophomores in high school typically didn’t know sports aren’t fun all of the time. He also realized he didn’t have to prove his methods or his strategies as much to girls as he did to guys.
“The only thing girls ever worried about is if they hit the weights were they going to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger,” Gregg said. “They’re a lot more trusting than guys.”
After 30 years as a basketball coach (22 with boys, eight with girls), Gregg said he had more success in terms of wins and losses with girls than he did with boys. He remembers when he coached the girls basketball team at Amory High and took over a program that had won four games the previous four years. As a “big goal setter,” according to Sherrelyn, Gregg he told the players the first season the goal for the season was to have double-figure wins.
“The girls said it was impossible,” Gregg said. “We won 12 that year. That changed their attitude.”
That connection is the basis of successful coaching. Gregg went to great lengths to develop those relationships. He said he was “driven by fear of failure,” which likely acc
Adam Minichino is the former Sports Editor for The Commercial Dispatch.
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