therealbulldogs
09-29-2003, 11:49 PM
This is an article on Bandera's retired head football coach. I read it in the paper when it was published but I just found the online version and thought that I would post it on here. I don't remember how old it is and I know that it is pretty long, but it is definately worth reading.
Thanks, Mike...
To a certain extent, Mike Williamson is one of those guys you talk to for three hours and then think, "Wow, that was a great interview." Then, you go back and look at the quotes, try to write a story that gets across the vitality of the man and feel like you've failed.
The point is, sometimes it's not so much the things Mike says as it is the way he says them. In that way, he's a lot like Jim Wacker, who coached Texas Lutheran and Southwest Texas State football teams to national championships when I was growing up in Seguin.
Another thing Mike does well is roll. Tell him a story and it reminds him of a similar story. He's versatile and it shows in his approach to football and to people. In that way, he reminds of me another successful football coach I got to know pretty well - Westlake's Ron Schroeder. Ron, however, keeps a little more distance.
After only nine months here, I don't know Mike as well as many people, but I know I like him. It's hard not to. Covering the Bandera Bulldog football team this year was privilege I enjoyed. He gives you as much time as you need to interview - win or lose. He's candid. I know I speak for many people in Bandera and elsewhere, when I say simply, "Thanks, Mike. We wish you the best."
-Philip Billnitzer, Managing Editor
(The following is the text of the story written prior to Mike's final days as BISD Athletic Director.) Most of the time when a football coach goes to clean his office for the last time, it is because there was no other choice. The losses were too many, the wins too few. He gets a few pats on the back from close friends and other coaches, but many are glad to see him go.
Not so with Mike Williamson - who never put wins and losses at the top of his priority list anyway. He leaves after winning his first state championship. The pats on the back are many and, most important to him, he still has his five aces.
"Whenever anybody has called and asked me how I'm doing during the last 10 years, I've told them, 'I'm doing great because I've got five aces - my wife, my three kids and the fact that I live in Bandera,' " Williamson said.
With Williamson, it's always about kids and relationships. Incidentally, he's compiled a pretty good won-loss record along the way. He was 79-37-1 at Bandera and 144-75-43 overall as a head coach. His playoff record at Bandera, helped by a 6-0 run to the state title last year, was 13-4.
Part of why he is stepping down is at age 55 is to be a good kid. His mother, Vera, and his father, Lloyd, are 80 and 85 and he plans to make the 105-mile trip to Crystal City as often as necessary to help, particularly his father who has suffered a series of strokes and who is legally blind.
"It's not a a burden, it's an opportunity," Williamson said. "I'm doing it because I want to, not because I have to."
He'll be keeping up more with his own kids - Walker, 20; Taylor, 18; and K.K., 14. Walker attends Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos.
Williamson will also try to make more time for his wife of 23 years, Sherrie, a teacher at Bandera Middle School. She said she has already begun to see a little difference in his behavior. By fall, she expects to see even more when Williamson won't be jotting down plays as they come to him.
Sherrie was immediately attracted to her husband's way of treating other people when they met.
"He's sincere," she said. "What you see is what you get with Mike."
Don't expect him to take a trip much beyond Carrizo Springs anytime soon.
"I never travelled," Williamson said. "I've never much wanted to and never had the time. I wouldn't know how to travel."
His wife confirms it.
"He hates to be away from home," she said.
Kids to Williamson are not just his children, they are any of the hundreds of kids who he has come in contact with since he began coaching 33 years ago.
"When it gets down to it, all you really have time for when you are a coach is your family and the kids so you better really enjoy them both," he said.
A trainer at Texas A&I University, where Williamson was a fullback on the 1969 National Championship Team, asked him what he really cared about in life. After hearing Williamson answer athletics and people, trainer Ron Hunt suggested he might make a pretty good coach.
"That and being around a coach like Gil Steinke, a man who is the coaching Hall of Fame, influenced my decision," Williamson said. "I was fortunate because I got to know coaches on a personal level. Before that, I was just kind of drifting around taking courses."
He decided to give coaching a try for ten years and set out to be a head coach after five years. He coached at Orange Grove, Pearsall, Carrizo Springs, El Dorado, Devine, Laredo United and Uvalde before Bandera. A native of Crystal City, Williamson also calls Bandera home.
A pivotal period in his coaching came at El Dorado. After a poor first season, Williamson still vividly recalls what some people in El Dorado told him after a whipping in the season finale.
"They came up to me and said, 'Whatever you do coach, please don't leave. We know it looks bad, but we can tell these kids have actually been coached. Things are going the right direction,' " he said.
The next summer 41 boys, at a high school with a total population of about 110 students, turned out to play football and Williamson was feeling great heading into football season.
"We had practically every boy on that campus willing to go out and do whatever it took to play football," he said. "You know how many of those kids showed up for early workouts? 41. You know how many of them missed a practice during two-a-days - and I mean we used to work them hard - not a one.' "
Shortly thereafter, Williamson was hit by something that knocked him harder than any two-a-day workouts. At 30, Guillan-Barre Syndrome (GBS) struck.
"I didn't know at the time, but the doctor told me later that at one time, it was a coin flip whether I would live or die," Williamson said. "And, you talk about hurt, I mean...It hurt so bad, I couldn't believe it. I thought well, I might end up paralyzed for a while, how bad can that hurt? But it hurt, I mean..."
GBS often leaves as inexplicably as it comes. At its worst, he was reduced to 135 pounds, but today has little problems as a result of GBS. According to a web site on GBS, it afflicts about one out of every 100,000 persons.
"I remember when the doctor diagnosed it he told me the way it develops it can kill you, leave you partially paralyzed, totally paralyzed, paralyzed over half of your body or most of your functions can come back," Williamson said. "I told him, 'I'll take that last option.' "
Just a few short years eariler, he was a 6-1, 200-pound fullback at Texas A&I, now Texas A&M-Kingsville. In 1968, used primarily as a blocking back, he rushed 55 times for 300 yards and four touchdowns on a team that was the NAIA runnerup.
In 1969, the Javelinas won the NAIA National Championship and he rushed 113 times for 592 yards and five touchdowns. He caught three passes for 35 yards. The team was 21-3-0 with Williamson on the roster.
The same legs that carried him to greatness on the football field were unable to carry him at all only about eight years later. GBS causes the body's immune system to attack the nervous system and left Williamson almost completely paralyzed. He missed almost all of that second season in El Dorado that had started with such promise. He tried to raise his cane triumphantly near the end of the season's last game - and fell flat on his face on the football field. The kids surrounded him and discovered him laughing.
"What else could I do?" Williamson asked. "You've got to maintain a sense of humor."
That sense of humor is something Williamson still sees in his father, even after a series of strokes. The Williamson sense of humor is something that Colton Sells, a three year starter for the Bulldogs, enjoyed most about playing for him.
"He told a lot of stories. He can be hilarious," Sells, who will try to make the Texas A&M football team in the fall as a walk-on, said. "During those Saturday morning practices especially, he used to do all of these sound effects and make all these facial expressions. I can't do them. You just had to see them. And he would do that infamous 'boom' after every game."
The infamous boom is when Williamson yells "boom" on the bus after every game. An act of sponaeity the first time, he liked it so he made it a tradition - another Williamson trademark.
"You always know what Coach Williamson expects of you and what to expect of him," Sells said. "It's fun, but it's disciplined at the same time...One time, we had been jacking around too much and he made us run 20 wind sprints in the rain."
When he came to Bandera 10 years ago, Williamson never promised anyone a state title. He was always kid-orented, but his battle with GBS and life experiences had sharpened his priorities.
"Children have lifted me up through so many things," Williamson said. "They've elevated me. It's not outstanding knowledge of X's and O's, it's if you care about them, you get that back in return."
When Williamson interviews coaching candidates, he does not primarily concern himself with their schemes or their ambitions. He wants coaches who focus on kids first.
"We haven't had one bad year here in terms of the quality of the kids I've worked with," he said. "The young people here have renewed my faith in the direction this country is going."
Bulldog teams have been known for having versatile and complex offenses and, as anyone who followed the team's remarkable run through the playoffs knows, his coaching staff makes great adjustments during games. Still, he simplifies football to three simple rules.
"One, keep your pads lower than the other guy's," he said. "Two, your feet have to go and, three, you've got to have a lot of heart to make the first two things happen."
There was a time, shortly after Williamson had gained a coveted head coaching job in Devine, when he thought about leaving coaching. A friend in Carrizo Springs called and that changed his mind. Don Tate wanted him to coach. He took Williamson out on the practice field, secured him the right salary and took him away from Devine.
"Life is not fair," Williamson said. "Athletics is not fair. You have to deal with situations as they come along and not let them overwhelm you. You can't dwell on them. You have to move along to the next level."
Williamson speaks fondly of all of his coaches. He calls Bob Shearhart a great educator and said Brett Morris is one of the best people he's ever known. In Steve Kidd, he sees a tireless worker who cares about his students and has an exceptional ability to organize.
"When you talk about commitment, you're talking about Steve Kidd," Williamson said.
He recounted when Kidd's 12-year-old daughter Katie died of brain cancer. Kidd insisted on coaching the Bandera basketball team in the days between when she died and when the funeral was held in Kerrville. "I watched him coach that night and just crawled up in the stands and I cried," Williamson said.
Just a few months ago, Kidd stayed up all night after a basketball playoff game preparing materials for a coaching clinic on how to best use one-back and two-back offenses. They've been working together for almost 17 years.
"Ninety perecent of the success I've had do has to do with him," he said of Kidd.
Perhaps Williamson's outlook is best summed up by page one of his short BISD Athletic Director's policy book where it says, "Take care of the children and everything else will take care of itself."
Williamson tells his kids to reach out and give and expect nothing in return.
"I tell them when they do that, I'll know they are doing it because I'll get a little tingling feeling in my head...I've had a lot of those feelings over the years."
<small>[ October 03, 2003, 04:18 PM: Message edited by: therealbulldogs ]</small>
Thanks, Mike...
To a certain extent, Mike Williamson is one of those guys you talk to for three hours and then think, "Wow, that was a great interview." Then, you go back and look at the quotes, try to write a story that gets across the vitality of the man and feel like you've failed.
The point is, sometimes it's not so much the things Mike says as it is the way he says them. In that way, he's a lot like Jim Wacker, who coached Texas Lutheran and Southwest Texas State football teams to national championships when I was growing up in Seguin.
Another thing Mike does well is roll. Tell him a story and it reminds him of a similar story. He's versatile and it shows in his approach to football and to people. In that way, he reminds of me another successful football coach I got to know pretty well - Westlake's Ron Schroeder. Ron, however, keeps a little more distance.
After only nine months here, I don't know Mike as well as many people, but I know I like him. It's hard not to. Covering the Bandera Bulldog football team this year was privilege I enjoyed. He gives you as much time as you need to interview - win or lose. He's candid. I know I speak for many people in Bandera and elsewhere, when I say simply, "Thanks, Mike. We wish you the best."
-Philip Billnitzer, Managing Editor
(The following is the text of the story written prior to Mike's final days as BISD Athletic Director.) Most of the time when a football coach goes to clean his office for the last time, it is because there was no other choice. The losses were too many, the wins too few. He gets a few pats on the back from close friends and other coaches, but many are glad to see him go.
Not so with Mike Williamson - who never put wins and losses at the top of his priority list anyway. He leaves after winning his first state championship. The pats on the back are many and, most important to him, he still has his five aces.
"Whenever anybody has called and asked me how I'm doing during the last 10 years, I've told them, 'I'm doing great because I've got five aces - my wife, my three kids and the fact that I live in Bandera,' " Williamson said.
With Williamson, it's always about kids and relationships. Incidentally, he's compiled a pretty good won-loss record along the way. He was 79-37-1 at Bandera and 144-75-43 overall as a head coach. His playoff record at Bandera, helped by a 6-0 run to the state title last year, was 13-4.
Part of why he is stepping down is at age 55 is to be a good kid. His mother, Vera, and his father, Lloyd, are 80 and 85 and he plans to make the 105-mile trip to Crystal City as often as necessary to help, particularly his father who has suffered a series of strokes and who is legally blind.
"It's not a a burden, it's an opportunity," Williamson said. "I'm doing it because I want to, not because I have to."
He'll be keeping up more with his own kids - Walker, 20; Taylor, 18; and K.K., 14. Walker attends Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos.
Williamson will also try to make more time for his wife of 23 years, Sherrie, a teacher at Bandera Middle School. She said she has already begun to see a little difference in his behavior. By fall, she expects to see even more when Williamson won't be jotting down plays as they come to him.
Sherrie was immediately attracted to her husband's way of treating other people when they met.
"He's sincere," she said. "What you see is what you get with Mike."
Don't expect him to take a trip much beyond Carrizo Springs anytime soon.
"I never travelled," Williamson said. "I've never much wanted to and never had the time. I wouldn't know how to travel."
His wife confirms it.
"He hates to be away from home," she said.
Kids to Williamson are not just his children, they are any of the hundreds of kids who he has come in contact with since he began coaching 33 years ago.
"When it gets down to it, all you really have time for when you are a coach is your family and the kids so you better really enjoy them both," he said.
A trainer at Texas A&I University, where Williamson was a fullback on the 1969 National Championship Team, asked him what he really cared about in life. After hearing Williamson answer athletics and people, trainer Ron Hunt suggested he might make a pretty good coach.
"That and being around a coach like Gil Steinke, a man who is the coaching Hall of Fame, influenced my decision," Williamson said. "I was fortunate because I got to know coaches on a personal level. Before that, I was just kind of drifting around taking courses."
He decided to give coaching a try for ten years and set out to be a head coach after five years. He coached at Orange Grove, Pearsall, Carrizo Springs, El Dorado, Devine, Laredo United and Uvalde before Bandera. A native of Crystal City, Williamson also calls Bandera home.
A pivotal period in his coaching came at El Dorado. After a poor first season, Williamson still vividly recalls what some people in El Dorado told him after a whipping in the season finale.
"They came up to me and said, 'Whatever you do coach, please don't leave. We know it looks bad, but we can tell these kids have actually been coached. Things are going the right direction,' " he said.
The next summer 41 boys, at a high school with a total population of about 110 students, turned out to play football and Williamson was feeling great heading into football season.
"We had practically every boy on that campus willing to go out and do whatever it took to play football," he said. "You know how many of those kids showed up for early workouts? 41. You know how many of them missed a practice during two-a-days - and I mean we used to work them hard - not a one.' "
Shortly thereafter, Williamson was hit by something that knocked him harder than any two-a-day workouts. At 30, Guillan-Barre Syndrome (GBS) struck.
"I didn't know at the time, but the doctor told me later that at one time, it was a coin flip whether I would live or die," Williamson said. "And, you talk about hurt, I mean...It hurt so bad, I couldn't believe it. I thought well, I might end up paralyzed for a while, how bad can that hurt? But it hurt, I mean..."
GBS often leaves as inexplicably as it comes. At its worst, he was reduced to 135 pounds, but today has little problems as a result of GBS. According to a web site on GBS, it afflicts about one out of every 100,000 persons.
"I remember when the doctor diagnosed it he told me the way it develops it can kill you, leave you partially paralyzed, totally paralyzed, paralyzed over half of your body or most of your functions can come back," Williamson said. "I told him, 'I'll take that last option.' "
Just a few short years eariler, he was a 6-1, 200-pound fullback at Texas A&I, now Texas A&M-Kingsville. In 1968, used primarily as a blocking back, he rushed 55 times for 300 yards and four touchdowns on a team that was the NAIA runnerup.
In 1969, the Javelinas won the NAIA National Championship and he rushed 113 times for 592 yards and five touchdowns. He caught three passes for 35 yards. The team was 21-3-0 with Williamson on the roster.
The same legs that carried him to greatness on the football field were unable to carry him at all only about eight years later. GBS causes the body's immune system to attack the nervous system and left Williamson almost completely paralyzed. He missed almost all of that second season in El Dorado that had started with such promise. He tried to raise his cane triumphantly near the end of the season's last game - and fell flat on his face on the football field. The kids surrounded him and discovered him laughing.
"What else could I do?" Williamson asked. "You've got to maintain a sense of humor."
That sense of humor is something Williamson still sees in his father, even after a series of strokes. The Williamson sense of humor is something that Colton Sells, a three year starter for the Bulldogs, enjoyed most about playing for him.
"He told a lot of stories. He can be hilarious," Sells, who will try to make the Texas A&M football team in the fall as a walk-on, said. "During those Saturday morning practices especially, he used to do all of these sound effects and make all these facial expressions. I can't do them. You just had to see them. And he would do that infamous 'boom' after every game."
The infamous boom is when Williamson yells "boom" on the bus after every game. An act of sponaeity the first time, he liked it so he made it a tradition - another Williamson trademark.
"You always know what Coach Williamson expects of you and what to expect of him," Sells said. "It's fun, but it's disciplined at the same time...One time, we had been jacking around too much and he made us run 20 wind sprints in the rain."
When he came to Bandera 10 years ago, Williamson never promised anyone a state title. He was always kid-orented, but his battle with GBS and life experiences had sharpened his priorities.
"Children have lifted me up through so many things," Williamson said. "They've elevated me. It's not outstanding knowledge of X's and O's, it's if you care about them, you get that back in return."
When Williamson interviews coaching candidates, he does not primarily concern himself with their schemes or their ambitions. He wants coaches who focus on kids first.
"We haven't had one bad year here in terms of the quality of the kids I've worked with," he said. "The young people here have renewed my faith in the direction this country is going."
Bulldog teams have been known for having versatile and complex offenses and, as anyone who followed the team's remarkable run through the playoffs knows, his coaching staff makes great adjustments during games. Still, he simplifies football to three simple rules.
"One, keep your pads lower than the other guy's," he said. "Two, your feet have to go and, three, you've got to have a lot of heart to make the first two things happen."
There was a time, shortly after Williamson had gained a coveted head coaching job in Devine, when he thought about leaving coaching. A friend in Carrizo Springs called and that changed his mind. Don Tate wanted him to coach. He took Williamson out on the practice field, secured him the right salary and took him away from Devine.
"Life is not fair," Williamson said. "Athletics is not fair. You have to deal with situations as they come along and not let them overwhelm you. You can't dwell on them. You have to move along to the next level."
Williamson speaks fondly of all of his coaches. He calls Bob Shearhart a great educator and said Brett Morris is one of the best people he's ever known. In Steve Kidd, he sees a tireless worker who cares about his students and has an exceptional ability to organize.
"When you talk about commitment, you're talking about Steve Kidd," Williamson said.
He recounted when Kidd's 12-year-old daughter Katie died of brain cancer. Kidd insisted on coaching the Bandera basketball team in the days between when she died and when the funeral was held in Kerrville. "I watched him coach that night and just crawled up in the stands and I cried," Williamson said.
Just a few months ago, Kidd stayed up all night after a basketball playoff game preparing materials for a coaching clinic on how to best use one-back and two-back offenses. They've been working together for almost 17 years.
"Ninety perecent of the success I've had do has to do with him," he said of Kidd.
Perhaps Williamson's outlook is best summed up by page one of his short BISD Athletic Director's policy book where it says, "Take care of the children and everything else will take care of itself."
Williamson tells his kids to reach out and give and expect nothing in return.
"I tell them when they do that, I'll know they are doing it because I'll get a little tingling feeling in my head...I've had a lot of those feelings over the years."
<small>[ October 03, 2003, 04:18 PM: Message edited by: therealbulldogs ]</small>