The Coach Who Changed My Life

Bob Maudlin was an example of what to be and how to act.

A sign on the towel dispenser in the men teacher’s bathroom of a local school reads: “Your students may not remember your words, but they will always remember how they made them feel.”

For me, that small, hand-done sign is a reminder of the responsibility of teaching–and a reminder of how fortunate I was to have had Mr. Bob Mauldin as a teacher and coach.

In 1961 I was a young, foolish high school sophomore in North Carolina. Like many boys in our cotton mill town, I wanted to be a star athlete. I tried football, but was relegated to somewhere called ‘the scrubs.’ Baseball proved no better. A good fielder, I couldn’t hit a barn door with a bass fiddle.

Coach Mauldin was an assistant football coach. It was there that I met him and came under his influence. Seeing that football was not quite working out for me–and knowing the mind and spirit of a fifteen-year-old boy–he told me that he wanted me to come out for his wrestling team.

Being wanted by Coach Mauldin was too good to be true so, after the fall season, I went to the small room in the basement that had canvas mats tied together for wrestling practice. The timeframe was the Cuban Missile Crises and Coach was called up for active duty. That season we made do with a substitute coach. Fortunately, Coach Mauldin returned during my junior year.

Coach Mauldin had been the team manager of the wrestling team at Appalachian State, but his knowledge of wrestling was, well, limited. We had our team captain David for that and Coach had many books in our room.

Coach Mauldin took a bunch of mill-hill boys and made them champions. Like all great teachers, he shared his enthusiasm for wrestling but, most of all, he respected and loved us. Like the greatest teacher who ever lived, he molded us by giving us an example of what to be and how to act.

He believed in us, so we learned to believe in ourselves. Unlike so many coaches today, Coach Mauldin was not a screamer or pusher. It was his unconditional love that inspired us to do our best. His mild manner, while firm, was a model for how to act on and off the mat. We were not perfect (after all, we were teenage boys), but we worked at being someone he would approve of.

Eventually, he left coaching and became a principal of an all-kindergarten school. One of my cherished photographs is of Coach Mauldin, seated surrounded by a bunch of five-year-olds, with one sitting on his lap. It was taken when he was named principal of the year.

It speaks of Coach Mauldin, the teacher. In his seventy-eight years, he was that for children of all ages, wrestlers, wrestling officials in North Carolina, his Sunday School class, and all the ill people in hospitals and their homes whom he visited.

Coach Mauldin was a teacher to the core.

Bob Mauldin (photo, Independent Tribune)

A few years ago, many of his wrestlers gave him a tribute dinner. Almost one hundred came to honor the teacher who had changed so many lives. During the presentation, one of the Fox twins came forward to the microphone. As Danny Fox approached Coach Mauldin, he reached into his hip pocket and said to Coach, “Mr. Mauldin, when I was in Vietnam in 1969, you sent me this letter. I now give it back to you.”

So many of us–students, teachers, wrestlers, officials, or friends–received our letter from Coach Mauldin. In them were words of encouragement and inspiration embedded in his deep faith. In them, we read how he believed in us. In them was his love.

On March 21^st at 5:30 in the afternoon, this great man died. Even he couldn’t beat cancer; he leaves so many of us with his memory. We are better having known Coach Mauldin. Only one man ever changed water into wine, and Coach Mauldin knew Him well.

However, Coach changed children into adults by loving them all, unconditionally. It’s how he made us feel.

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This article was published previously in The Northern Virginia Daily.