Jamey DuBose: ‘Every place I go I feel like I’m brought to win a championship’

Central High School football Coach Jamey DuBose knows what it takes to get an Alabama High School Athletic Association state championship game — and he knows what it takes to win it.

He has won two as a head coach and two more as an assistant — all of them at Prattville High. Six times teams he has coached have been in the big-school title game. He is 90-35 in 10 seasons as a head coach.

Not too shabby for a guy who is starting his 23rd season Friday night in Montgomery against traditional state power Hoover High, a state championship factory.

Recently, DuBose, entering his third year at Central and looking for his first title with the Red Devils, sat down with Ledger-Enquirer senior reporter Chuck Williams and photographer Mike Haskey to talk a little football.

Here are excerpts of that interview edited for length and clarity.

Q: State football championships in Alabama grow on trees, right?

A: No. It’s hard to come by, but they’re great to have.

Q: You’ve been coaching 22 years, and you’ve been in six state championship games?

A: All that’s come probably in the last 12 years. We got hot, we got a great scenario, it all fit together, and did well. ... I won two as a head coach, and played for one, and got knocked out in the second round one year.

Q: There are coaches in Alabama who go their whole careers and never get into that game.

A: Absolutely. I’ve got some good friends that coach, and that are excellent football coaches — great football coaches, probably way better than myself — and they’ve never gotten to the game. And, you know, here at Central, I know just the two years I’ve been here, we’ve been knocking on the door, and they’ve knocked on the door for years here, just hadn’t quite gotten over that barrier. It takes a lot of luck and it takes timing and it takes injury-free, and those are things that are hard to come by in a football season.

Q: Who are some of the coaches who have molded you over the years?

A: I look back at my career and the coach that really molded me was Rush Probst, who was an excellent Xs and Os guy. I mean, you get on the board, he’s probably one of the best guys I’ve ever been around, offensively. Spence McCracken I was with at Opelika. Spence McCracken is one of the best guys as far as running a program that I’ve been around. I was really excited every day to learn a lot of things. A lot of things that we do still relate back to him and (former Prattville Coach) Bill Clark.

Bill Clark was an excellent football coach, also. Bill and I were friends, and there were a lot of decisions made at a Country’s Barbecue at Prattville, Ala., over about a two- or three-year stretch. ...

Jamie Riggs, I go back, is why I coach football. Jamie Riggs was my high school football coach, and he just retired at T.R. Miller.

Q: Your cousin, Mike DuBose, was a head coach at the University of Alabama, right?

A: Yep. He’s still in Opp right now, he’s volunteering, coaching back in the hometown, and I still talk to him periodically.

Q: You’re opening up this year with Hoover, probably the top program in the state of Alabama.

A: It’s the Champion’s Challenge, which the Alabama High School Athletic Association puts on ... and they extended the invitation to us to play Hoover, and I think it’s great for our program.

Q: Hoover could be a team you have to beat for the state championship.

A: Oh, absolutely, and if we come up, which we’re going to win the game, hopefully, we’re going to try to anyway, and if we’re fortunate enough to win the game, then we know that we got to continue to get better because they’re going to climb to us. Whereas if we don’t win it, we hope to get to where they are by the end of the season.

Q: You’ve had four-star and five-star players, you’ve got a junior who’s one of the top 50 players in the country for the class of ’18. What’s your obligation as a head coach to these four- and five-star kids that are going to sign with a top-flight school like Auburn, Alabama, Michigan, or others?

A: To keep them grounded and to make sure they understand hard work is what got them where they’re at, and they’ve got to go continue to work every day to climb. I have to be, sometimes, the voice that they don’t want to hear. They’re getting enough pats on the back. They’re getting enough, “Hey, you’re great.” ... In one day, I know (Alabama’s) Nick Saban called my phone, (Michigan’s) Jim Harbaugh called my phone. I mean, it was just going crazy wanting to talk to one certain kid in one day’s time, and I would have to get him down here to talk to them. I’ve had Coach Saban, who has called me to say hello from the White House when Alabama was up there, just to tell so and so, he said, to be watching the news tonight, because that’s where he wants him to be next year.

Q: You’ll tell a kid who’s a wide receiver, “Hey, Alabama’s eight deep with five-stars at wideout,” right?

A: I will let him know, because I want him to know going in what his competition to win a job is. ... I had a quarterback one time who was Mr. Football in the state of Alabama. He chose to go to Vanderbilt, and they told him up front, “You’re going to redshirt your first year.” That was Larry Smith, that came out of Prattville. He was fine with redshirting. ... Then again, I’ve had some that I look in the eye and said, “Do you want to try to play your first year?” “Yes, I do.” “Well, like you said, they’re eight deep at that position, it’s going to be tough now, you’re going to have to know going in, but you’ve got an offer over here from this school, they just lost six wideouts. You may have an opportunity to go into play quick.”

Q: If you’ve got a kid who, say, is a solid student, he says he wants to be an engineer, and Georgia Tech’s recruiting him, what do you tell that kid?

A: I tell him that’s where he needs to go.

... I always talk to them about the academic side, because at the end of the day, there’s a small percentage make it to the NFL. You’ve got to understand that.

Q: You talk about your obligation to your players. What’s your obligation to these coaches like Harbaugh, Saban, Malzahn?

A: One thing I’ve learned is to be honest with them about kids. If they’re on the borderline of making it grade-wise, we’ve got to tell them. I can’t have them come in and offer guys that may not make it, because nowadays you get 25 to sign. If they go in and they sign a guy and they don’t make it, then they lose that guy to JUCO, now they don’t have that guy.

Q: If you’ve got a kid who’s a head case, will you tell a college coach that?

A: Yes, I will because my name’s on the line, and my program’s on the line. That one kid may go and if he gets in trouble, and I don’t tell them, then that school’s not going to come back and recruit kids that may be on the way that are really good players. You understand where I’m going with that? We talk to our kids about that, too. I talk to them every day about their actions, about their social media, about what they do.

Q: You’ll disclose to a college coach a kid’s character issues?

A: ... I’ve got to be honest with them. My friendship, and the future players in this program, are more important to me than that one, because that one should have the right character if he wants to go to college, if he wants to do the right things. I’m going to tell you, guys that go through my program, we don’t have character issues. ... I’ve never had to just tell a coach, “No, he can’t do that,” or, “No, he’s not a good kid,” because if he does have character issues, he’s probably not going to make it through the three years of this program.

Q: Will you fight just as hard for a kid you’re trying to get a scholarship to Alabama State or North Alabama as the kid you’re trying to get to the University of Alabama?

A: Yes, because I have to fight more. Those colleges are harder to get those guys into, usually. Now, I will fight hard, like, for instance, right now, I’ve got a Karon Delince and I’ve got a Jaxton Carson who I think are as good as any football players I’ve had. They don’t have, right now, currently, an SEC offer because of the height issue. A Walter Pritchett last year, who was an excellent pass rusher, had 14 1/2 sacks last year, every SEC coach came in here, said, “We love his technique, we love his ability, we love his motor, but he’s not 6-foot-4. He’s 6-foot-2 1/2.” That’s the thing about college recruiting right now. If you don’t fit a speed or a height, sometimes you don’t make it in.

Q: Does that frustrate you?

A: Yes, it does. When I know I’ve got a Jaxton Carson or a Karon Delince, right now, that may be an inch or something short, but I know their heart, and I know their ability is as good or better than some of these guys going in the SEC — and that is a true fact — that’s the ones that I have to go to and I have to apologize and say, “When you get to wherever you’re going, play with a chip on your shoulder.”

Q: You were brought here specifically to win a championship. Is ...

A: Every place I go I feel like I’m brought to win a championship, because I just had ...

Q: That’s your record.

A: As a coach, that’s what I want to do, and as a coach, that’s what we’re paid to do. You ask Coach Saban about winning championships, he’s going to tell you that’s what the job is, and that’s what my job is. It’s just like the school administrators. Their job is to graduate more students. Their job is to get grades up, and my job is to win football games — not just win football games, but win championships.

Q: Pressure’s internal for you?

A: Yeah, every game is a big game to me. ... I was having a conversation with somebody this past week that games are no fun for me. ...

I love practice. I love going out and working with the guys, I love the opportunity to get better. The games, yeah, there’s a lot of tension, there’s a lot of stress, there’s a lot of this on the kids, and the kids are going to feed off you. ... I’ve learned that over my career. That’s why, when I go to games, I try to be low-key. I try to be just who I am, and let the kids be who they are, because, No. 1, if I’m tight, they’re tight. We want our guys to be relaxed, we want to be loose, so again, I think more or less the games, for me, are nerve-wracking because I want it to be perfect for our kids, and that’s what we try to emulate on a game day, once we get in there after school.

Q: Talk about facilities. Your practice facilities, your game facilities, are small college-type facilities. Is that what you have to have now?

A: I think that’s the understanding over here, is we think we’ve got something totally different, but if you go across the state, this is the third school I’ve been at that has indoor facilities. There was at Florence, they built them while I was there, and then also at Prattville we had indoor facilities there.

Q: Why do you need an indoor facility?

A: Well, these facilities are, like today, you’ve got weather. In the old school of things, everybody always went into the gym. I’ve had four kids over the last five years get concussions because they fell on the floor during football activities. You can’t practice football in a gym. You can’t. A basketball gym has a hardwood floor on it. You don’t play football on a hardwood floor. Slippery. It gets wet, sweat, and everything else. You’ve got bodies falling everywhere.

Q: It’s a football practice facility, right?

A: It is a multi-purpose facility that we will have a facilitator that will schedule things out as we need. ROTC’s going to use it. Band’s going to use it when needed. It’s going to be a weight room that’s going to be big enough and large enough not only for one sport, but two sports to go in at the same time. Right now, in our small one, our football team can’t even fit in it, because it was built years ago when probably there were 60 players, or 55, or 70 players. With 133, we now have to go in shifts in the weight room. ...

Q: When somebody trusts their children with you, you have a lot of power over them. Some of these kids, you’re the most important male figure in their life, right?

A: I’m going to tell you this: the word “coach” to me means a lot, because if you do not take that word importantly, this, the game of football, is under attack from a lot of places right now. As a football coach, you can’t abuse that, because there’s people out there looking to get rid of football in this nation left and right, because of a lot of things out there.

Q: Due to the head injuries, right?

A: I think when all these head injuries occurred, we were not very smart on concussion issues, and we were not very smart, either, on the fact of making a helmet, how to take the absorption of hits and things like that. I think with this coming out, unfortunately, it was bad for a lot of people, but I think with that coming out, I think there’s been so many changes to what we do now ... even the officials are looking at kids on the fields now, and if an official deems that that hit was too big, they can send them out of the game.

Q: ... That’s changed since you started coaching.

A: Yes, it has. I can remember at one time, a guy would get a concussion, and we might talk them into, “All right, let me keep an eye on him,” and we’ll let it go. Now, when a guy goes out, it’s five to six days before they get back, at this point in time. ...

Q: That’s a long way from “he just got his bell rung.”

A: Correct. You don’t hear “he got his bell rung” anymore. I haven’t heard that in a long time. I remember getting a concussion in a ballgame, getting knocked out, coming out, my daddy come into the sideline and say, “Get that boy back out there on the field, ain’t nothing wrong with him.” I ran back out there and played, because there’s no athletic trainer, no doctor, nobody around anywhere — found later that night I had a concussion. I’m fine now, but who knows what that could have led into, over time. Fortunately, I can tell you this, we’re in a great place here, that we’ve got Hughston Clinic close by, we’ve got athletic trainers at our practices — as a coach, I don’t even have to deal with it. When it comes to an injury, I let them handle it. And if they tell me no, no means no. We move on from there.

Q: : Why the reason for just the explosion of interest? You referenced years ago the team might have 65, 66 guys; now you’ve got easily double that.

A: I think, No. 1 is, I work so hard to get kids out, and get them out of the hallways. That’s one thing I have always done, wherever I’ve been, is I’ve had large numbers. You can go check that. At Prattville, I dressed 140, 150. At Florence, when I went there, they were dressing 50 or 60, we dressed 125, 130 before I left. I like to get kids out. I do. Let them be a part of it. Does that mean that we’re not tough on them? No. We’ve still got discipline, we’ve still got the things we’ve got to do, we still try to build on character.

Q: Who you pull for on Saturday?

A: Central. I am a Central fan, and I tell people right now, my paycheck, the food on my table, comes out of here, so I am a Central fan. ... I’m not one way or the other. I’m not Alabama or Auburn. I enjoy watching college football, I enjoy being around college football, but I don’t pick it. I did graduate from Troy, so I will tell you, I cheer when the Trojans win every now and then.

Q: Do you find yourself pulling for your kids?

A: Yes. I’ll tell you this, I guess I should say this: Alabama and Auburn, if they’re playing somebody out of state, I’m going to cheer for Alabama and Auburn, in-state. I love them. I love for our in-state to win. Whoever’s in the national championship game, I’m going to cheer for that because I want the titles to be here in Alabama.

Q: ... Last question, then. You talk about football bringing the community together. When you came here, it was a tough situation, with Woodrow Lowe leaving the coaching job and you coming in. How have you been able to bring the community together?

A: That whole situation didn’t involve me. Me and Woodrow were friends before that, and me and Coach Lowe are friends now. I was a guy that in my lifetime — you can ask anybody who’s been around me as a coach — I said Phenix City’s a great place to go coach football. When I was at another school, when I was at Prattville and we played Phenix City, I used to think, look at the athletes all over the field. Everybody says, well, y’all had athletes too. Yeah, we did, but I thought Phenix City had great facilities in this stadium.

...

As far as all that, that was before my time and I don’t know anything about that, other than the fact that I’m going to coach football and I’m going to be for this community and these kids, and I’m going to work hard for them until my services aren’t needed anymore. Then I’ll respect whatever decision’s made, and I’ll go find another situation. Right now, I love this place, and I think this place is a gold mine. And I tell you what, (former Coach) Wayne Trawick, I hope to see him this afternoon. I see him at practices and everything else, he’s another legend that I love talking to and I still talk to him. There doesn’t a week go by that I don’t hardly talk to him, and he comes out to practice, so there’s legends in this town. Eddie Lowe, he’s a legend. He had a great career, not only here, but at the next level, so the list ... James Joseph recruits our school for a college (Alabama State University) right now. I mean, I could just keep going with names, and it’s an honor to be a part of that, and now I can say I’ve been a part, and I’ve got a part in what’s going on.

This story was originally published August 13, 2016 at 9:48 PM with the headline "Jamey DuBose: ‘Every place I go I feel like I’m brought to win a championship’."