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New Mentor learns on the fly |
George Pope spent the last class period of his first day as Hopkins Middle School’s football coach preparing a short speech.Pope, at the time a 23-year-old fresh out of Johnson C. Smith University, wanted to tell his new players what kind of coach he would be.“I just wanted to tell them that I had heard about them, that I was going to turn things around,” Pope said. “I really just wanted them to be successful young men.”But Pope was so nervous when he faced the 50 boys in the school auditorium that the piece of paper containing his speech stayed folded in his pocket as he spoke off the cuff.Still, he has succeeded in becoming a good coach — without the formal certification recommended for high school coaches in a recent report by the National Association for Sport and Physical Education.
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