KEEP YOUR HEAD DOWN AND FOLLOW THROUGH

BY: Michael A. Aun, FIC, LUTCF, CSP, CPAE Speaker Hall of Fame

One of my mentors in high school was a teacher and coach by the name of Carl Stegall. Coach Stegall was invited to Lexington High School in the sixties by principal Joe Bedenbaugh to teach and to head up the Wildcat basketball program.

Like all coaches and teachers in that day, he did double duty. In addition to heading up the varsity basketball program, he and Coach Bobby Whitehead were the guys who coached our junior varsity and "B" teams in football. They also handled the responsibilities of the Wildcat track team in addition to being full time schoolteachers.

Coach Stegall came to Lexington, SC over the concerns and objections of his colleagues. "It's a football town," they all warned him. After all, Lexington High School was known primarily for its prowess on the gridiron and the baseball diamond, not the hardwood.

"My thinking was simple," said Stegall at a 1984 banquet honoring Coaches J.W. Ingram and E. T. "Charge" Driggers. "If they have great football players, then they are bound to have great basketball players too. A great athlete is a great athlete."

Coach Stegall built a solid foundation on which the late Ken Long constructed an even better program. Long was Stegall's underling in the early years and took over the program when Stegall headed back upstate to McDuffie High School after leaving Lexington.

I was doing my level best one-day to keep from falling asleep in Jim Shirley's algebra class. Let the record reflect the truth; I was in the half of the class that made the top half possible.

Mr. Shirley and I had an understanding. If I did not snore too loud he would not toss me out on my heels. He knew that I was not going to end up as a rocket scientist at NASA. However, he would be proud of the fact that I do give regular speeches to the good folks who work at NASA as well as scores of their contractors. Go figure. Can't pass algebra yet I can speak to the geeks who build the space shuttle.

One May afternoon during Mr. Shirley's algebra period, Coach Stegall stuck his head in the classroom and asked if he could speak to me for a second. Satisfied that I had already napped long enough and anxious to put a stop to my snoring, Mr. Shirley readily agreed to let me take a "leave of absence" from his class.

In the hall, Coach Stegall asked me if I wanted to be a kicker. Kick what?" I asked incredulously. "A football," he said.

Are you kidding me? I could barely walk and chew gum at the same time. "We need a place kicker and kickoff guy," Stegall said, "and I figure you can do it."

I got to thinking. This might get me out of some of Coach E.T. "Charge" Driggers dreaded "head-on's," a Wildcat ritual that was practiced with the regularity of the rising sun.

Back in those days, nobody kicked soccer style. We were all kicking Lou Groza-style, straight on. Coach Stegall showed me a trick. If you tie a long shoestring around the first cleat on your kicking foot, cross the string and pull it around your ankle, it allowed you to kick with your toe tied up. We found we could consistently get an extra twenty to thirty yards out of a kick.

I got so good at kicking that we were actually kicking extra points back when everybody was running them. This was the sixties mind you. Nobody kicked the point after touchdown. And nobody had the leg to get a kickoff into the end zone. But I did, and this allowed me to have whatever little notoriety that was going to come my way in my otherwise mediocre athletic career.

By the time I was a junior, I was handling the varsity kicking chores and playing linebacker and offensive line (center, guard and tackle). By my senior year, I had moved to fullback where I was used more as a blocker than a runner. Coach Ingram accused me of running in one place too long.

We were playing Mid Carolina one Friday night and I got tackled by their big defensive end. Actually, he picked me up by the shoulder pads, slung me around in mid-air and some poor fool happened to be running by at the time. My right leg hit the unsuspecting player in the head, breaking my right fibula.

Coach Ingram wasn't big on wasting money on x-rays in those days, so he just taped it up and put me back in the game. I ran around on a taped broken fibula for a week. The next week we were playing at Strom Thurmond High School in Johnston. I stepped in a hole before the game and broke it in five places this time. So much for my football career.

Coach Ingram had nominated me for the 1966 Shrine Bowl Team that year but my football playing days had come to an end. Still, some of my fondest memories of my high school days were the afternoons that Coach Carl Stegall worked with me.

Just like in life, his advice was solid: "Keep your head down when you approach the ball and follow through. After you kick the ball, reach down and grab a blade of grass. The crowd will let you know if the ball went through the uprights."

Interesting philosophy… keep your head down and follow through. Funny how that works in real life too. He was right about the crowd too. The do let you know!