**Seriously. Stay updated about staying updated - at Central Georgia’s most updating sports coverage home - by following on Facebook and/or Twitter.**

By Michael A. Lough

The Sports Report

centralgasports@gmail.com

On the outside, people pay attention to the record, the championships, those who played and went on to bigger and more attention-getting accomplishments.

Those folks will talk about, in Central Georgia for example, the likes of Robert Davis or Conrad Nix or Dan Pitts, icons at a school.

But the world of high schools sports, in reality, is about coaches like Edgar Hatcher.

And in Macon, the Hatcher Coaching Tree started growing in the late 1960s, and spread to just south of Forysth to all around Macon and currently to Birmingham and College Station, Texas, extending along the way from football to baseball to wrestling, and with kin in baseball and softball and girls basketball.

Edgar Hatcher’s record as a football coach is 108-116-2, 48.2 percent, a fairly pedestrian number that doesn’t accurately portray a career that wasn’t pedestrian.

One needn’t have legendary numbers to be fairly legendary.

Hatcher worked with or against quite a class of Hall of Famers: Billy Henderson, Duck Richardson, Davis, Nix, Pitts, Gene Brodie, Alvin Copeland, as well as notables and local names from the past like Tom Simonton, Billy Beale Sr., Stan Gann, Dean Brown, Lloyd Bohannon.

And that’s just in football. Hatcher was the last boys basketball head coach at Willingham before it became Southwest, and along the way, he coached baseball and wrestling and had a hand in other sports as well as holding athletics director titles.

Hatcher’s final season as high school varsity coach was in 1993, and it was unforgettable but not very memorable, an 0-10 season at Southwest.

“I was already thinking of leaving, but it was their call,” he said. “They fired me. There’s only two kinds of coaches: those who’ve been fired, and those who are gonna be. I’d been thinking about it all year.”

Hatcher had started changing from coach to family man, with young’ns Chris, Wendy, and Katie. While they learned and played their way up the Mount de Sales chain, Edgar worked in south Macon at Southwest.

“The biggest thing was I got to go watch not only Chris play, I got to watch Katie and Wendy play,” he said of that final season and job change. “My family came a whole lot ahead of coaching.”

He spent the next few years almost as a consultant, teaming with longtime buddy Eddie Ashley.

“I went to Miller, then I helped them start Weaver,” he said. “They would ask me to go to different schools for a year to help. Eddie Ashley and I, when they started Weaver, he would teach one day and I would teach the next. We really enjoyed that. He coached baseball and we both helped with football, and I helped him with baseball. Next year, they built Westside.”

Westside’s first year of full varsity football, and first year of region competition, was 1998. Chris was about four years removed from a record-setting career as quarterback at Valdosta State, and embarking on, naturally, a coaching career that’s still cruising along. He is in his ninth year as head coach at Samford, and will be in the middle of an unofficial Hatcher family reunion on Saturday when his Bulldogs visit Mercer at Five Star Stadium.

And there’ll be folks representing the Hatchers, the Hammonds, and the Turners, among others, as well as friends connected to a Hatcher, father or son, over the last four or five decades.

Chris, for his part, expects some familiar grub for his taste buds: a Nu-Way dog and burger, and pounds of Fincher’s Bar-Que, extra Brunswick stew during the visit.

The familiar tastes and smells of Macon, and of a football family. Here’s part of that family’s story, in their words.

From college to coaching

Edgar Hatcher graduated from Mount de Sales in 1964, and headed to Florida State for baseball and basketball. He thought.

“Didn’t make either one of ‘em,” said the quarterback, guard, and shortstop. “Was a great intramural player.”

Baseball was his best sport, football his favorite. That still stands. Baseball was his favorite to play, football his favorite to coach.

He returned home and was quickly hired by Billy Henderson at Willingham. His stint with one of Georgia’s legends lasted only two years, as integration led to the end of Willingham and the start of Southwest.

After four years at Willingham and Southwest – two under Henderson, two under Billy Beale Sr. – he looked into a vacancy at Monroe Academy. Lloyd Bohannon, father of current Kennesaw State head coach and Macon native Brian Bohannnon, was expected to get the job, but took a spot at Clarke Central.

“I didn’t know much about the school, didn’t know anything about ‘em, to be honest with you,” Hatcher said. “But it was a good fit. We won two state championships. We were good every year.”

It helped that the Mustangs had one Jeff Harper, who grew up in Macon and went on to be part of Georgia’s 1980 national championship team and then spent a few years in the NFL and USFL. Harper remains etched in Georgia lore as one of the players carrying head coach Vince Dooley in a statue on Georgia’s campus.

He is president and CEO of Capital City Stucco in metro Atlanta, and he remains in touch with his old head coach.

Hatcher became Northeast’s fourth head coach in eight seasons, taking over in 1977, following Daryl Jones, Jeff Slagle, and Don Fendley. He was there for three years, each a little better than the year before: 3-7, 4-6, 6-4, the latter the program’s first winning season.

Hatcher moved across town to Southwest to be head football coach and athletics director, Northeast choosing Copeland – who went on to have a fairly legendary career coaching girls basketball and track at Northeast and having a hand in the boys basketball explosion in Macon in the 1970s and 80s – for the AD job.

“He’s one of the best girls basketball coaches that ever lived,” said Hatcher.

Southwest had three winning seasons in its first eight before Hatcher tok over, after Beale, Jimmy Hammond, and Gary Whitman. The Patriots went 38-44 in his first eight seasons. Then Bibb County finished construction on new Southeast High, which meant redrawing attendance zones, which meant a hit for Southwest, itself less than two decades old.

Players left. Coaches left.

“It was going to be a real good year,” Hatcher said of 1988. “You put both of us together, and we were really good. Split us, and neither one of us was very good.”

Assistant Jimmy Hammond, who had already coached at Southwest and Monroe Academy, left Hatcher’s Southwest staff to start things at Southeast.

That school played only from 1988-2002, going only 42-111 under coaches Hammond and Jimmy Stewart. And since that split in 1988, Southwest went from being one of the nation’s largest high schools to one of less than 1,000 students, losing half of its enrollment when Southeast was built.

And the Patriots haven’t been successful on the field, managing only five winning seasons since that split, starting with 8-3 in 1989, a year after Southeast started.

Working to reverse that is a Southwest alum and one of Hatcher’s favorite former players, Joe Dupree. He was the Macon Telegraph’s Middle Georgia Player fo the year in 1989, that 8-3 season.

Each Monday during the fall is a little bit of a reunion, when the Macon Touchdown meets. Dupree is a regular visitor, moreso the past two seasons when son Chase Dupree earns player of the week honors. Hatcher sits a table of regulars that includes another favorite, former Northeast player and head coach Bruce Mullen, as well as Barney Hester.

And regularly, the speakers who are coaches with some old-school to them pay homage to Hatcher, from his time serving high school kids to being Chris’s father.

Hatcher almost frowns while shrugging off such praise. And to Chris, he’s just dad the coach.

The seed was planted early

Chris Hatcher was all of about 4 when his dad took over at Northeast in 1977. Amid a week of preparation for a trip home for business, he hopped on board for a trip down Memory Lane, sparked by the simple inquiry of his first memory of being a coach’s kid.

Chris: “You’re gonna laugh. It’s gonna be crazy. He was coaching at Northeast. If you remember, on the old practice field on that bank, ‘Raiders’ was embedded into that mound, I remember painting that with spray paint. That’s about the first thing I remember.”

Edgar: “It’s still there. It was beautiful. I remember us all doing it and everybody really liked it.”

The son then remembers one year when Southwest beat a ranked Perry team.

Chris: “On the way out, the buses rocked, they were throwing rocks at the buses. I remember my dad standing up and telling everybody to put their helmets on. One of the players grabbed me and threw me under the seat as we’re riding out. You remember crazy stuff.”

Then came an encounter of sorts with a legend.

“On a Saturday morning, I’m at the Willingham ‘B’ gym. I’m back there folding jerseys, we were washing all the clothes. There was a phone in the equipment room. My dad wasn’t in there. The phone rang. It was Erk Russell, he wanted to talk to my dad. I’m like, ‘There’s no way this is Erk Russell.’ I got my dad. It was Erk Russell.”

Chris was, in reality, a manager and little do-it-all wherever Edgar worked, as is usually the case for a sports-hungry kid of a coach. Of course, in Chris’s mind, he was so very much more than that.

Chris: “I was a Northeast Raider and a Southwest Patriot long before I was a Cavalier.

“My dad would be having a staff meeting in there with all the coaches and I’d be back there having to mix up (stuff) plus Gatorade, washing the clothes. ‘I need to be in that meeting.’ I felt like I was on the staff. I couldn’t be but 8, 9, 10 years old, but I was like, ‘How are they meeting without me? I’m the guy that makes this thing go.’”

The memories keep flowing during a longer-than-expect visit of the past. He remembers Edgar driving a pickup truck and picking up players to take to practice – he’d sit on a player’s lap up front, because, of course, he was also budding transportation coordinator – and then drop them all off on the way home.

And Chris has that typical youthful memory that he’ll never lose.

“One thing I thought was always cool is after every win, the coaches went to Shakey’s out there off of Eisenhower. We got these Shakey’s pizzas after the game. A good ol’ Shakey’s pizza, man, there was nothing like it. When you won – I’m sure the coaches were having some adult beverages in there. But there was nothing like a victory Shakey’s pizza back in the day.”

Chasin’ baseballs

Edgar and Eddie Ashley were great friends as well as co-workers at different places. Ashley was a baseball guy first, and he had a little Hatcher to contend with as well during baseball season at Southwest.

Chris: “That’s where old Milt Cuyler played. Around that field is a swamp down there, an old creek, a swamp. To get like a free Coke, candy bars, all the stuff, when they hit foul balls, I’d go get foul balls. Most of the time they were wet, and I had to put ‘em in a bucket of corn meal to dry ‘em out.

“That’s what I did for Coach Ashley. I’d come out of there muddied. I was like a hound dog. I had to get the ball, man. Briars, I’d be cut to hell and back, just muddy to get those balls.”

Things changed when Ashley went to Southeast, and Edgar the football coach and AD took over baseball.

Chris: “We’re down there playing. Man, I must’ve been gone 3 innings looking for this foul ball. My dad goes, ‘Where ya been?’

‘I had to go get the foul ball.’

‘Man, don’t worry about that foul ball, we got plenty of balls.’ So, after the game, I’m, ‘Well, Daddy, Coach Ashley, man, he told me I had to find every foul ball.’ He said, ‘Yeah, I was the AD. He had a very low budget. Now, don’t even worry about those balls, we’ll just go buy some more.’ I still went and got ‘em. That was my job, man.”

Chasin’ balls was apparently in the blood

The Big Red Machine was years away from flexing muscles in the Major Leagues. But a few cogs in that machine were sharpening their skills in Macon at Luther Williams Field, when the Macon Peaches played in the South Atlantic League. In the 1950s and 60s.

Many of them, Hatcher remembers watching, except Johnny Bench, who joined the organization later.

Pete Rose? He dated the sister of Hatcher’s Mount de Sales teammate.

“He lived at the YMCA downtown,” Hatcher said.

But during those teen years, Hatcher got chasing baseballs going in the bloodstream, a trait that stayed in the family a few decades later.

Edgar: “When I was 12 or 13, me and my two brothers, my mother was on city council, so we got to go to games free. One of us stayed in the bullpen area, one of us stayed in the back, and one of us stayed in left field. We got close to 80 balls that summer.

“We were chasin’ balls. We sure got ‘em. Especially down the bleachers. That’s where the real fans were, the old railroad guys drinking beer.”

Eventually, the addition of some security interrupted the collecting process.

Edgar: “We had to crawl under the fence to get back in, and the (officer) was standing right there, and all those drunks in the bleachers were standing up: ‘You ain’t messing with them.’”

The young ‘ns no doubt made an impression each summer on those relief pitchers and catchers, too.

Edgar: “By the bullpen, we’d be, ‘gimme a ball, gimme a ball.’ Finally just to shut you up, they’d give us a ball. ‘Gimme another one, gimme another one.’ We went every night and had a ball.”

Like father, like son? Yes and no

Edgar and Chris were both undersized players, Chris able to turn that into an advantage, combined with years of being by the side of his dad and scores of coaches.

He went from not throwing the ball much at Mount de Sales under defense-minded head coach Mike Garvin – Edgar’s first cousin – to throwing the ball all over the place at Valdosta State. He passed for 11,363 yards and 121 touchdowns from 1991-94, setting 29 passing record along the way.

Throw in his brains – he was the Gulf South’s top student-athlete twice, among his academic honors – and lack of size, and high school coaching was next on his list.

Chris: “That’s what I always wanted to be. I still have a degree, I’m certified to teach K through 12 PE in Georgia. That was my goal, because I wanted to be like him.”

The chance to be on the staff at Central Florida was first, though.

“I was single. Why not try it? He said, ‘If I was you, I’d at least try.’ Now, going on 28 years, 24 as a head coach now. There are still days I think about it.”

Of course, well, in his mind, he’d already been coaching for years and years, even as a youngster in Catholic schools in Macon while Dad worked elsewhere.

Chris: “The coolest thing for me was when I went to St. Joseph’s – I was the water boy for Southwest – was Sister Mary Edwards was the principal. She actually taught my dad when he went to St. Joseph’s.

“Everybody always went to the Mount de Sales game. Every Friday at 2 o’clock, man, on game day, Sister Edwards would let me out of school. My mom would come pick me up and drop me off at the Willingham ‘B’ gym. She let me out early every Friday so I could go get the Gatorade mixed up, get everything mixed up so we could play the game. That was pretty cool.”

That final year at Southwest, family became more of a priority for Edgar, more as time went on and family grew.

His schedule for years: Go to Birmingham and watch grandson Ty play a high school game on Friday, and then watch son Chris coach Samford a day later. Wherever. Edgar and Philip Sanders – his wife is aunt to Chris’s wife Lori – are still driving buddies.

Ty went to Samford, so that cut some of the travel down. But there are two Hatcher coaches at most every Samford game, one paid to be there and one who has paid over the years to be there.

Edgar offers thoughts if asked, and Chris will ask for one or two every now and then. In a world of meddling in sports between parents and kids, Chris didn’t have to deal with that.

Chris: “The way it should be. Perfect. Whatever the coach said. ‘That’s your coach. You do what he says.’ Really, the only time he ever said something about my play, I was playing in a basketball league at Unionville gym. I was out there, I was running my mouth, guarding a guy. ‘Shoot it, shoot it.’ And that guy was drilling it on me. After the game, my dad says, ‘You know I’d probably keep my mouth shut and let my play do my talking.’ That was it. ‘Yessir.’ And he was right.”

Both are offensive coaches, Chris perhaps a little moreso in a world where offense and scoring are prioritized. Few would consider either one shy in any form. Certainly officials, as far as Edgar’s concerned. Plenty of fussin’ but no cussin’.

Edgar: “He’s smarter than I am. He’s smarter, a better coach than I was. I was pretty bad on the sidelines. A lot of officials didn’t like me. In every sport. I never used cuss words, and I never heard him (cuss), so … I didn’t see any reason to cuss your players or the officials. Or anybody.”

Chris: “I don’t know. That’s a hard one. I would think, I would like to say I’m a little more laid back than him. He’s tougher than I am. I’ll give him that. He’s tougher than I am. He grew up in a tougher era than I did. He’s tougher.

“But I think our philosophies are the same. You’re right. He coached a different age group than I coach. You know how it is. You treat kindergarteners different than you treat eighth graders. From that standpoint … Our standards are lined up, are identical, but our methods to reach the standards are different, just because of the difference.”

Coaching is all over the place in this family

Edgar is the first Hatcher to turn coaching into a career, a lifestyle. But big family gatherings are almost a coach’s convention.

There’s Chris, who has coached at Central Florida, Kentucky, Valdosta State, Georgia Southern, Murray State, and Samford.

There’s nephew Keith, who has coached with Chris, left for the business world, was drawn back into coaching, worked with Chris at Valdosta State, Georgia Southern and Murray State, and is 62-44 in 10 seasons as a high school coach, eight at Mount de Sales (46-39) and two at ACE Charter (16-5).

Lynn Hatcher is Edgar’s sister in law, and coached basketball at Mount de Sales.

Jan Azar is one of the state’s high school girls basketball coaching legends, racking up state titles galore at Wesleyan and now turning Hebron Christian into the same thing. She is the daughter of Edgar’s late sister Jean.

Ricky and Michael Turner are the sons of Edgar’s sister Jean, Jan’s brothers. Ricky has been the athletics director at Blessed Trinity High since 2000, when the school opened, and was head football coach for 11 seasons with three playoff trips, going 50-46.

Michael has been an assistant coach in the Atlanta area.

Neice Katherine Smith led the softball program at Mount de Sales to a GHSA state title in 2019, a few decades after mom and coach Lynn pushed the Cavs to a GISA state title in 1995 in 2014.

And Ricky Turner Jr., is Chris’s offensive coordinator at Samford.

Edgar’s brother Ricky was a multi-sport standout at Mount de Sales in the late 1960s, and he, like brothers Duck and Fred did more playing – and playing well – than coaching. The same goes for nephews Ed and Bill.

First cousin Mike Garvin was the longtime head coach at Mount de Sales, coaching Chris and Keith, among others.

Grandson Ty is now an offensive analyst at Texas A&M.

No doubt Chris wasn’t the only person with odd-for-a-kid wants.

Chris: “I remember for Christmas one year, I didn’t want cleats or anything. I wanted coaching shoes. I’m serious. I wanted coaching shoes.”

Working with legends

Two names that inspire wistful thoughts among the older sports-watching residents of Macon are Billy Henderson and Duck Richardson.

Hatcher worked early on with Henderson, and later was Richardson’s athletics director at Southwest. Quite the spectrum.

Edgar: “We got along real well. We were good friends. People didn’t realize how well we got along.”

Richardson had a phenomenally successful and mighty colorful - with most of the accompanying inferences – basketball career at Southwest, from his consistency and fashion style and extreme confidence and flexible interpretation of rules, all of which kept Hatcher on his athletics director toes.

Henderson and Hatcher were more similar, Hatcher the new coach learning from a growing legend and gaining trust.

**Hatcher at the Macon Touchdown Club.**

Edgar: “When I went to Willingham, Coach Henderson … the baseball coach had left and went to Lanier. (Henderson) had coached baseball before, that was his favorite sport. He let me be his assistant, and he let me coach third base, which nobody would’ve ever thought he would do. We took turns, and we ended up winning state. The first year I coached, we won a state championship in baseball at Willingham.”

He claims Robert Davis, who was fairly similar to Richardson in legendary status and other ways, as a good friend and the coach he wanted to beat the most. He listed former Northside head coach Danny Carpenter as perhaps the most underrated head football coach he dealt with.

Pressed, Hatcher listed his all-time assistant coaches, those who he’d hire if allowed to build his dream staff: Jimmy Hammond, Eddie Ashley, Albert Sharpe, Robert Hudson, Dennis Gorman, Jimmy stewart, Roy McWilliams, Dean Brown, Stan Gann, Richard Fendley, Tommy Seward.

Oh yeah, one more, upon further review.

“Chris. I got to have Chris in there.”

And wouldn’t that be fun to listen to?

Just family

For all of the accolades and appreciation and thanks Edgar gets, Chris never really thought of his dad’s impact way back when.

Chris: “As you get older, you go to different places and people say they played for my dad and what a great influence he was on them and how much they enjoyed playing for him. That puts it all in perspective. We all want to win, we all want to be champions and coach of the year. That’s fun. But it shows he had a tremendous impact on a lot of people. A lot of people that he coached, they needed a guy like my dad and his assistant coaches at the time when they were growing up, when you look back.

“I remember being at the Southwest gym in the summer, and you had Coach Hudson, Willie Goolsby, Albert Sharpe, all those coaches. They were all there. They’d be in there working out, making the players work out. I’m 10 years old and I’m in there working out with them. They were mentors to them. And that still sticks with me in my philosophy of coaching.”

Edgar has gone through a health battlefield, ranging from four bypasses to leukemia to neuropathy. During a visit last summer, he was just getting over a bout of pneumonia, and combined with everything else, wasn’t quite himself. His nerves were affected, and he grumbled about having to learn to write again at his age.

His memory was shaky, as was his balance. A few months later, Hatcher was back to himself, laughing and enjoying talking about the memories that were clearer again.

He went on a four-minute sales pitch about longtime friend and physician Dr. Charles Ogburn Jr, and assorted health incidents, and that Hatcher was no typical patient. Like how he’d drive himself to the ER after thinking he had a heart attack, which he had. One time, that’s what Ogburn told him to do.

Edgar: “I call Dr. Ogburn. … ‘I know you well enough to know you won’t call an ambulance, so go to the emergency room.’ I go to the emergency room, they laid me down, and the lady said, ‘You’re having a heart attack right now.’ I said, ‘We better do something about that.’

“I remember laying on the table, and all of a sudden, two really big black guys are there. ‘Do you know you coached both of our sons?’ I said, ‘I sure hope they liked me.’ They did. ‘All right.’”

As proud as the father is of the son’s football success, it’s another priority that sparks a twinkle in Dad’s eye, the legacy Edgar is happiest with.

“Chris’s family comes first. Family comes first, football comes second.”

Hatcher gets a little frisky when the topic of overcoaching and absurd hours is broached.

“They do it because the other guy does it. The guy at Oklahoma, (Bob) Stoops, he wanted his coaches to eat breakfast with their families, and he wanted ‘em through to eat supper with their families. He did it the right way, and he won.”

That Chris operates the same way makes the old man proud, something he’ll no doubt mention during this weekend’s Hatcherpalooza in Macon with Samford’s visit.

Edgar turned 77 in September, and the weekend will be a little longer, but the routine is the same: Watch Samford on Saturday, check up on Ty and Texas A&M, rest some on Sunday, and head to the Macon Touchdown Club on Monday.

Family, blood and otherwise, will be everywhere. Just how the root of the Hatcher Coaching Tree likes it.