CHAPTER 19

Out of Coaching

AT SOME TIME DURING EVERY coaching stop I made, I’d sit around with the other coaches and we’d wonder what we would be doing if we weren’t coaches. “What’s the real world like?” we’d ask one another.

That conversation became reality for me after that disastrous 1997 season. I found myself struggling to stay in the league.

My contract with the Eagles was about to run out in March, I didn’t have any offers to stay in coaching, and I had a wife and a young child. Talk about dancing on the edge of the volcano! I could feel the heat.

By March of 1998, I started to think, What next? I felt if I wanted to coach, I needed to have some enthusiasm and passion, but I was losing mine. Part of that could be attributed to always having to fight for a job and, more times than not, missing out on the opportunity—even when I felt like I was the most qualified candidate.

Two head coaches and two coordinators told me they could not interview me because I was white during a period when a big push was taking place to hire minorities in the NFL.

The Rooney Rule wasn’t instituted in the NFL until the 2003 season. Once implemented, the rule required NFL teams to interview ethnic-minority candidates for head coaching and senior football operation jobs. Still, an initiative to get minorities into the coaching ranks had already begun. My wish for sports and all of society is that one day people are looked at for who they are and what they have accomplished and not because of their skin color or sex.

As a result of these hurdles, I decided to look for job opportunities outside of coaching.

When I talked to Dad about the prospect of leaving coaching, he didn’t immediately jump on board to the idea. Instead, he did like he always did. He questioned me. He didn’t want me to make an emotional decision and get out for the wrong reasons—just because I couldn’t get a job. In the back of Dad’s mind, he probably also thought about how he’d given up on his Broadway dream way too soon. Having that regret made him probe to try and find out whether I truly wanted to leave coaching. Surrendering a dream could lead to heartache, something he understood. On the other hand, he understood from our talks over the years about the grind of coaching and the toll that living a coach’s life takes on your family life.

Ironically (or maybe not so ironically), both of my sisters had been coaches, as well. After Margie played volleyball at FSU, she became the head coach at Clemson for three years. My younger sister, Ann Marie, played volleyball at Clemson and went on to coach at Colorado State before becoming the head coach at Jacksonville University. Both subsequently left the profession.

When Don Shula first heard I planned on becoming a coach, he passed along the following wisdom: “The day you think you know it all is the day you should retire.”

I thought about what Coach Shula told me while I pondered leaving the profession. I never felt like I knew everything about football. Retirement came my way anyway. Like Shula, my mother instilled in me at an early age the desire to be a life-long learner, which turned out to be a good thing, since I needed to find a new career outside of coaching.

Just when I really got busy looking for something else outside of coaching, God began to talk.

Jeff Fordham, who played with me at Fork Union and went on to play at LSU, lived in Atlanta and was best friends with an old Miami acquaintance, Pat Flood. I had played baseball and basketball against Pat in grammar school and high school. Jeff put me in contact with him. In addition to being CEO and president of HomeBanc Mortgage Corporation, Pat was a salesman. I should be clear here: calling him a salesman would have been like calling Superman a police officer. I mean, Pat could sell ice to Eskimos. And he sold me on HomeBanc. He told me he had followed my career and that he was looking for leaders, not just mortgage people. The offer that followed felt too good to be true. The company would buy my house, give me a six-figure salary, and move me to Tampa. Pat would teach me the business.

Since I felt like a drowning man looking for a lifeboat. I thought, Why not try this? I can always go back to coaching. I bought into what Pat Flood was selling!

After training at HomeBanc, I went to work in Tampa. That had been the plan. They bought my house in Cincinnati, I planted roots in Tampa, and I never went back to coaching.

When people ask how and why I left coaching, I tell them I tried to stay in coaching, but God put Pat into my life because he had other plans for me.

I do know that if I would have stayed in Cincinnati with Dick LeBeau and remained in coaching, my life would have been completely different today.

The coaching profession is a selfish profession, particularly where family is concerned. You get promoted or fired, and you move on to the next stop. The coach goes to work with people he or she probably knows or has coached with in the past. The family is left to uproot from friends and support mechanisms, as well as from people you count on every day, like doctors, dentists, barbers, and hairdressers. I think it’s a lot like the military personnel way of life.

Leaving coaching afforded me more time with my family. In the spring of 1998 while in training for HomeBanc in Atlanta, Mary Gayle became pregnant. Our second child, Andrew Parker Phillips, surprised us by arriving early on January 5, 1999, which happened to be my birthday. What a birthday present, by far the best I ever received! With all that we had been through, we were truly blessed with God’s gift of our second child.

All felt right with the world, including my departure from the profession I loved.

I did manage to look in the rearview mirror and saw that I had been blessed with many great players and great coaches during my career. More important, they were all great people.

Thanks to those people, once in business, I found that coaching and recruiting had brought me a solid foundation for learning how to manage people in regard to process and strategy. I am convinced that many of my successes in business and life have been a result of my foundation of thoughts and processes that the coaching profession instilled in me for thirteen years.

Lou Holtz treated his position like he was the CEO of a business. Basically, he had ten guys sitting around the table, and each person had an obligation to execute their duties. He laid out the strategies, and each coach had a defined role in the organization. And he held you accountable.

Following Coach Holtz’s example, I intentionally surrounded myself with smarter people than myself when I got to HomeBanc. I laid out the strategy and tried to hold them accountable while I coached them through the process.

I knew I could push and lead people. I also needed help, because I had a recognizable deficiency of knowledge of the mortgage business, since I hadn’t come up through the ranks in the business. I got really lucky, with a particularly good operations person in Jo Wall.

Jo had started way back as a receptionist at Ryan Homes in Virginia and had grown her career, including a stint where she had worked for Fannie Mae. She knew the business backward and forward. Having Jo allowed me to concentrate on marketing, to get out and do what I do best. And that strategy worked.

Getting back on the golf course more frequently proved to be one of the nicer offshoots of becoming a businessman. I’d always enjoyed golf, and suddenly I found myself playing with customers and building relationships while out on the course. Such outings helped my business immeasurably. Having a football background helped me connect, too. There are a lot of people who enjoy talking football with somebody who has been on the inside of the sport.

In business—no matter what business you’re in—having the ability to close means everything. Fortunately, I’ve been a good closer, another quality I learned from Dad.

I think part of my ability to close came organically from watching Dad when I would accompany him to work. His engagement and his salesmanship when he talked with employees and prospective clients gave me a solid foundation for closing.

Of course, in football, recruiting is all about closing—finding ways to get parents and players to buy into what you were trying to sell. Also, in the off-season you have to go to booster and alumni functions. Those experiences afforded me the opportunity to meet leaders in the business world and learn from them.

I strongly believe that people do business with people whom they like. And if you can establish that you’re trustworthy and honest, then people will give you a chance.

Realtors and builders drive a bulk of the mortgage business. We marketed to them. We were a really top-notch marketing machine with excellent customer service. We built key relationships with many happy hours, drinks, and dinners. We did whatever we needed to do.

Being successful in business also brought out the competitor in me.

Coaching involves getting athletes to practice preparing them to perform on game day. I had been selling something every day. Business is the same way. You surround the players/employees with support and personnel to help them achieve. You give them sound game plans for success. Also, in this process, you care for, you motivate, and you nurture. Not only do you want to see the players or associates be successful on the field, but also you want to see them be as successful off the field, or away from the office and giving back to their local communities.

During my years in business, I’ve recruited, hired, motivated, developed strategy, and been a psychologist and counselor while trying to help the company be successful and helping my associates achieve their goals in life.

Early in my professional career, I developed a personal mission statement: “If I can help people get what they want in life… then I will get what I need.”

No doubt, I experienced a period of adjustment. Like the nature of the calendar. I did the same amount of work in business that I did while coaching, but the workload was spread out over a longer period of time.

When I coached, July and August were really busy, then the season started and my hours remained intense before easing up in January.

During the weeks, in the NFL, you are packed in on Monday through Thursday, with Friday and Saturday being very light days. In college, you were packed in from Sunday through Thursday, too. And you had to sandwich recruiting visits into the equation, too.

Once I began at HomeBanc, I continued to arrive to work early, and I still worked late, but all of my work wasn’t compacted into a six- or seven-month span.

I didn’t really think about it while I was coaching in college—and I probably would have been a nervous wreck if I had—but my livelihood depended to a large extent on the performances of kids who were eighteen to twenty-one. At the time, I think I just considered it part of the gig. I didn’t think about all the changes that were going on in a kid of that age. Succeeding in football was just a part of who they were, and their performances, the performances that affected my livelihood, could be altered by breaking up with a girlfriend, or having bad news from home.

The NFL brought a little different climate, which obviously was more business-like. The players were older, they were paid a lot of money, and they knew they were paid to perform, like a business. But when you cut to the chase, your livelihood still depended on young men and their performances during a sixty-minute game. Even the smart players make dumb decisions on the football field from time to time. Sometimes you’d shake your head and wonder why in the world a player had done something so stupid. But the game moves fast. Decisions have to be made in a split second. That kind of pressure makes for a lot of bad decisions. Coaches get blamed for those decisions, and, ultimately, those decisions can cost a coach his job.

Dealing with females in the workplace actually presented me one of the more difficult transitions when I left coaching. Coaches are dirty sailors. Once in the workplace, I had to alter my vocabulary. Instead of an F-bomb, you had to be more like Bobby Bowden. “Dad-gummit, why’d you do that?”

In addition, business had a different dress code. Early in my business career, you had to wear a suit and tie, whereas now, many companies and industries have turned to business casual as everyday dress. At Notre Dame, we wore shirts and ties during the season, then dressed down a little bit after the season. Coaches’ shirts were acceptable at LSU. And in the NFL, you threw on a pair of warmups and a sweatshirt and walked out the door. In the banking and finance world, you might have an occasional casual day here or there, but generally, you’re mandated to wear a coat and tie most days.

I don’t have any doubt that I would have had my share of successes in business if I had not coached first. But I do feel strongly that it would have been more difficult and certainly not as fulfilling.

Whether you’re a player, a coach, a businessman, or a parent, success comes down to coaching someone—helping someone be better than what they are, or to be the best they can be. In essence, most of my life has been centered around coaching in some shape or form.

I’ve realized that I received quality coaching early in my life, and a lot of the lessons I learned carried over. Going as far back as being on Carol City’s Little League All-Star team, I experienced top-shelf coaching from Ron Cussins and Dale Shields.

Those guys had me starting at second base and leading off, creating a situation for me that could have been overwhelming, since I was just eleven at the time (most of my teammates were twelve). In 1974, Carol City had a competitive Little League that had won several championships and one Junior Little League world championship. Coach Cussins and Coach Shields must have recognized some quality in me, because they told me to be a leader. They helped me build my leadership foundation. Then they guided me and ingrained in me some of the leadership basics that still hold true while doing what I do every day. Things you can control: be on time, stay late, get in front of the line, do little things, and have fun.

As a player, coach, or businessman, you usually don’t realize how the coaches and people around you have influenced you until you leave them. Only then can you gain a perspective—good or bad—based upon those influences and experiences.

Funny how a lot of the things I learned from coaches were the same things my dad tried to teach me. But sometimes a son just needs to hear a different voice from his father’s, because “he’s just Dad.”

It certainly goes both ways, too. When Trent, my older son, played YMCA eight-man football at eight years old, I tried to help him learn how to play quarterback. That became a frustrating experience for both of us, because it didn’t matter how many tips I gave him, or how good those tips were: what I said wasn’t sinking in. I wasn’t getting through to him. Finally, I asked him if he would listen if I brought Jon Gruden out to help him. Gruden coached the Tampa Bay Buccaneers at the time.

Trent’s response: “Sure!”

I proceeded to ask the next question: “Why would you listen to Jon Gruden?”

Trent didn’t hesitate with his answer. “Because he’s coached in the NFL.”

I continued. “Well, what did Dad do before he worked at HomeBanc?”

Trent answered, “You coached in the NFL.”

I moved to my conclusion. “So why don’t you listen to me?”

To him, the answer was simple: “Because you’re Dad!”

I guess some things a son can only hear from Dad, but only understand from others!