Bren Shepard/The Tifton Gazette
CNHI
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On Tuesday Jay Walls resigned from his position as the head football coach of the Tift County Blue Devils, and with that, not only did an era end for Tift County but we also lost a great coach and man.
Not many people will argue that maybe it was time for a change. After all, three straight seasons of missing the state playoffs in South Georgia is not acceptable. Heck, the last two years we were in a region of five teams and couldn’t make the playoffs. We won only one region game over those two years; granted, it was over the Lowndes High Vikings, but that is still not doing enough to make it in Region 1-AAAAA.
Over the course of the season many people in the community began to question whether Walls was the man for the job. Some people even decided to boo at the games and bring signs to put the team down. Many referred to Walls as a “bad coach.” Are you kidding me? I’m a class of 2008 graduate from Tift County High School so I know the last three years have been hard to watch for Blue Devil fans, but if you call Jay Walls a bad coach you must not remember what the program was like before him. I mean, everyone remembers that Tift County was terrible for the better part of a decade. Right?
Wait? Don’t tell me, you forgot that Tift County stunk from the season after reaching the state title game in 1997 until Walls arrived in 2005. Oh, you did? Let me refresh your memory.
From the 1998 season through the 2004 season the Tift County Blue Devils went 23-48. Just to clarify, they won 23 games over seven seasons while losing 48. Over the next three years under coach Walls the Blue Devils went 25-11. So over 10 seasons, 1998-2007, over half of the Blue Devil wins are credited to teams coached by Jay Walls, who was only present for the last three years of that stretch. In three years he won more games than the program could manage in seven.
Bad coach, right?
Need more convincing? Over that seven-year stretch before Walls arrived, Tift went to the playoffs only once. That was in 2002. The Blue Devils faced Starr’s Mill in that game, losing 41-7.
Coach Walls took his team to the playoffs in his first season. In that game, the Blue Devils hit the road to face Stephenson and lost by only a field goal. Stephenson would go on to the semifinals that season. The next year, that “bad coach” had the community “devil-walking” all the way to the Georgia Dome.
That was in 2006, when Tift County won their first region title since 1983. The Blue Devils didn’t even win a region title in 1997 when they went to the state championship.
That team was coached by Charlie Winslette. He is still actively coaching and is closing in on 300 wins for his career. He is the third-winningest coach in Tift County history, behind Walls, and a guy named Gene Brodie. Brodie won 131 games as the head coach of the Blue Devils, led the team to a state championship (his second state title, he also led Central High School in Macon to the title before joining Tift County) and even got some stadium around here named after him.
Brodie Field ring a bell?
So, Walls finds himself sandwiched between a potential 300-game winner and a two-time state champion as the second-winningest coach in school history.
Sounds like a bad coach to me.
We will overlook that for now though, to look at the man who stood on the home sideline of Brodie Field for seven years.
This is my first job as a journalist. I have always loved sports and writing, so when I started here I thought it would be a dream job. So far, it has been.
Writing articles has been fun, laying out pages has been fun (well, once I got a few tips from Steve Carter it became fun) and going to a game almost every day has been fun. I knew I would enjoy those things, no surprise.
What worried me though, was having to sit down with coaches, one-on-one, and try to not sound stupid to men who coach sports for a living.
The first couple times I sat down with a coach I was so nervous I could barely breathe. Hitting the “call” button on my phone to set up an interview took several minutes of reassurance from myself that the world was not going to end if I hit the button. That part was not fun.
All that changed after the first time I sat down with Jay Walls.
I came to know the man that so many in the community adore. He was polite, welcoming and always made time for me when I needed to talk with him. Sure, I would still get nervous sometimes. I think he could sense it when I did though, and would drop a simple one-liner that would give us each a chuckle and immediately break the tension and get me back on track. He always began every interview with a firm handshake and by saying, “good to see you.” He probably has no idea how easy that made things for me.
The main thing I liked about him, though, was the fact that you could tell he cared more about the kids on his team than anything else. You could tell there was nothing he wanted more than to see them succeed, on and off the field. That’s what coaching is all about, but you’ll find most coaches only want success for themselves.
It’s a shame to see Walls go, but I hope wherever he ends up he has great success. I also hope that whomever the Blue Devils bring in to replace him will be successful and will be able to get Tift County to the elite-status that is expected in this part of the state.
One thing that I can say for sure; I will always remember him as a true Blue Devil, a great coach and an even better man.
