Kicking off more than a season

A coach's racial slur at a high school football game set off angry scrimmages in Wildwood. But changes hold out hope for revived spirit for the team and the town.

By JOCELYN WIENER, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published August 25, 2002

[Times photos: Stephen J. Coddington] Wildwood High School’s new head football coach, Robert Lindsey, left, pats TJ Heath, a senior defensive tackle, on the helmet during practice.

The football field at Wildwood High School sits empty, quiet and waiting. Overhead, clouds smear the sky in gray watercolor hues, nothing quite black, nothing quite white. It is 3:40 on the first afternoon of the football season, and the Wildwood Wildcats should be 10 minutes into practice.

Instead, they are huddled in the field house while outside raindrops fall in heavy bursts and thunder rumbles and growls not too far away. A few of the boys suggest that this would make good football-playing weather, but the team's new head coach, 34-year-old Robert Lindsey, is taking no chances with lightning. The job he has assumed is hard enough as it is.

If the town of Wildwood could tell its history, it might not pay too much attention to what happened Nov. 5, 1999, a Friday evening when the Wildcats lost a playoff game 18-19 to their rivals, the South Sumter Raiders.

It might not place much emphasis on the moment tackle Cliffton Peeples threw an elbow pad down in disgust, prompting then-head coach Gary Hughes to insist that assistant coach Randy Hepburn bar the door to the field house. The words Hughes then spat at Peeples, words that gained national attention -- "Where the hell do you get this s-- acting like a street n--- from?" as Hepburn remembers them -- might not have combined to represent so much.

That moment is seared into the country's understanding of Wildwood. But for many residents of the town, the wound has finally been sutured after three years. This month, with coach Lindsey heading the team and a new principal, Richard Hampton, leading the school, they say it is time to bury the past.

Getting down to business, Robert Lindsey keeps a close eye on his players’ development. “We’re going to do some marvelous stuff this year,” he told the team on the first day of practice.

Wildwood exists in contradictions. Moss drips from wide trees, but the sense of romance it might bring to the horizon is truncated by crisscrossing power lines. Fields and pastures are severed by rust-colored railroad tracks that once made the town a transportation hub. Located at the intersection of Interstate 75, the Florida Turnpike, Highway 44 and U.S. 301, Wildwood is still the point at which Florida converges, but it is also the place where it moves apart.

Main Street is a few blocks of pawn shops in drab colors and restaurants with fading hand-lettered signs. A high concentration of the estimated 3,924 people who live there come from low-income families; nearly half of the 536 students at the high school receive free lunches. Though many residents say they consider the community a tight-knit, welcoming place where everyone knows everyone else, they also say entertainment options are limited, especially for the young. In such a context, high school football can achieve transcendent importance.

Traditionally, Wildwood has been "a football town." Until a few years ago, Friday night games filled the bleachers, home and away. The Wildcats made it to the state championships in 1964, 1970, 1984 and 1985. They routinely took home district titles, getting to the playoffs in the first three of Hughes' five years as coach. "The town breathed football," says Levi Solomon, a long-term resident who has had three children graduate from Wildwood High School and has two currently enrolled.

Given this legacy, the beginning of a new season, under a new coach and a new principal, has become for many a chance to heal, rebuild and symbolize something besides an angry outburst that never should have happened.

Setting the rules

While the storm outside musters its fury, Lindsey positions himself in the middle of the dimly lit, air-conditioned field house and begins to speak. In a deep voice that emanates from his imposing football player's body, the coach lays down the ground rules for the players. They will not barge into his office if he is in a meeting. They will form a new Wildwood tradition together, jogging to and from the gate before and after every practice. They will act appropriately around the three girls who are to take care of equipment and water.

"These three ladies are our managers," he tells the more than 30 boys who are leaning forward on benches or craning their necks up to look at him from positions on the floor. "You will treat them as such. Treat these ladies with respect. You understand that?"

"Yessir," they answer.

"You understand that?!"

"YESSIR!"

"You owe us something, people," Lindsey tells them. "Those uniforms you're getting, you've got to earn them."

While they wait for the storm to pass, the players talk. Fifteen-year-old Ryan Harrison, a smallish sophomore in a blue No. 12 jersey, notes excitedly that the town will be celebrating 75 years of Wildcat Pride.

Ryan was the best friend of former coach Hughes' son. They were seventh-graders riding the bus together when the incident happened. "It was just a shock," he remembers, but he tried not to let it change how he feels about Hughes. "It just came out." But Ryan also recognizes that the team suffered in the aftermath.

"Because of the way the community reacted, the program has been hurt in the past few years," he says. As evidence, he pulls over Demetrius Knight, a 16-year-old junior with long, frizzy hair.

Demetrius is one of many black athletes who refused to play while Hughes was coaching. He says he would have participated on the team, even though Hughes' comment bothered him a lot, but his parents forbade his playing, as was the case with several other athletes. Some boys threatened to leave the high school, although only Peeples ultimately dropped out in response.

After the incident, Hughes and his pastor, the Rev. Ted Strawbridge, went door-to-door in the black community, inviting people to attend a barbecue where they might attempt to have a dialogue, to reconcile. Some members of the black community took offense. A barbecue, they said, represented just another stereotype. Others opened up to the men, sharing personally devastating experiences with racial prejudice and explaining why one word still struck so deep.

The NAACP took a case against Hughes to the school board. Ultimately, the board members refused to fire Hughes. He was not a racist, they insisted. He was a man who made a mistake.

Randy Hepburn, the assistant coach who was in the room at the time of the outburst, had quit that same Friday evening. He and some members of the black community stood outside football games, protesting Hughes' presence.

Wherever fault ultimately lay, it was clear the team suffered from declining numbers and declining morale. Hughes stayed on for two more seasons; during that time many members of the black community stayed away.

Some black youths, such as 18-year-old Sam Woods, did continue to play under Hughes. But, as Woods recalls, "he was a good coach, but nobody wanted to listen to him." With participation down, their game faltering and a sour taste in many of their parents' mouths, the players watched the stands at games become progressively emptier.

Now, as they hover in the back door of the field house, the players and their assistant coaches scan the horizon for lightning bolts. Most speculate that practice will be canceled. But no one goes home. The team's record last year was two wins and eight losses. This was a bitter pill to swallow for a team once considered among the best in the state. This year, they tell each other with confident bravado, they're going to win the championship. Ten and zero, they say, or at the very least, 8 and 2.

Tensions were exposed

Wildwood High School is almost evenly divided between black and white. The football team reflects this diversity, although it generally counts significantly more black players than white. Race in Wildwood, as in the rest of the United States, is not a new issue.

Some two-thirds of the residents are white, the other third black. This is a place where the phrase "on the other side of the tracks" is invoked not symbolically but practically. Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue runs alongside a rusty railroad track. Like many other streets named for the civil rights leader, the location strikes an ironic chord. On King's side of the tracks, wooden roofs sink into the hollows of small houses with boarded windows and peeling paint jobs. Old cars sit parked in bare little front yards. Interspersed, one finds a tidy lawn, a newer car. But nowhere along Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue does a white face appear.

T.H. Poole, president emeritus of the Florida NAACP, says Wildwood has not historically suffered from the headline-making racial strife that has characterized small communities nearby. But de facto segregation is still very much a reality, he says. If the town could speak, maybe it would not criticize or defend Hughes' comment but attempt to explain from where it came and why the reaction it elicited was so strong. As the Rev. Strawbridge describes it, "what happened between coach Hughes and that student exposed tensions that were there all along."

If Wildwood could write its history, it might not paint the aftermath in the terms dictated by the media frenzy that dragged it into the national consciousness. Because though voices at either end of the spectrum issued ultimatums, other voices in the community came forward to create a dialogue. Some, such as Strawbridge, contend that the resulting discussions about race were something very positive, indeed.

Ready to lead

By 5:30 p.m. the sky has lightened significantly. Two hours after practice was supposed to begin, the players jog onto the patchy grass. Coach Lindsey divides the boys into clusters: kickers and wide receivers with one assistant coach, running backs with another. Those who are injured or who have yet to complete their paperwork stand to the side, watching.

The three managers -- freshman Akawana Sesler and sophomores Jennifer Douglas and Joanna Albrecht -- stand in the middle of the field with two younger boys, chatting and running to move cones, pick up equipment, retrieve errant footballs. After passing and drilling separately, the clusters move back together, and Lindsey calls out instructions.

"Ready, go!" he shouts, and the first line of blue and white jerseys begins to scissor kick forward, then back. One of the heavier boys falls. "Finish up!" the coach encourages him, and the boy scrambles to his feet and continues.

The team moves on to talk strategy, and every player is riveted as Lindsey pulls out an initial group to demonstrate plays. They stand in formation, a medley of sizes and colors, every butt up, every body tense, every helmeted head staring intently forward. Together with the new principal and the new coach, the players are ready to lead the town into a new phase of history.

When principal James Catlett retired last spring, Gary Hughes also resigned, moving his family to another town, with fewer ghosts. When Catlett left, Richard Hampton moved to the helm. Hampton has worked at Wildwood for 14 years, teaching at-risk students, offering business education, and serving as occupational specialist curriculum coordinator, assistant principal and girls basketball coach. He never would have considered an administrative position a few years earlier. But students and faculty members attribute an almost palpable increase in enthusiasm to the energy and ideas he brings with him.

Hampton is wary of discussing what happened between Hughes and Peeples. It was an isolated incident, he says, and now he wants to look toward the positive. Under Hampton's counsel, the student government has been able to represent its constituents' demands: the right to wear sleeveless shirts, two lunch periods when one wasn't enough time for the cafeteria to feed the entire student body.

Hampton says his key focus as principal will be to embrace communication. With students. With parents. With the town of Wildwood. This year, says Hampton, will be about "welcoming the community back to Wildwood High School."

As part of his strategy, Hampton has worked especially hard on the football program. Football's success sets the tone for the rest of the sports teams during the year, he says. Hampton ordered a new path built around the field, to provide easier access for fans. He purchased new bleachers. And, most significantly, he hired Lindsey.

Coming together

By 6:15, the sky has darkened again, thunder rolls nearer, and the rain increases its intensity. The boys are running laps around the field. When one struggles, two others run back to flank him and help him finish. When another boy has trouble, Lindsey leads the team in applauding and cheering him on. "Don't ever let anyone finish alone," he tells his players.

"I like this new coach," 19-year-old Andrew Still says as he watches from the sideline. "He's committed, but he's got a tender side." Still's father is a guidance counselor at the school, and Still helps Lindsey teach punting. When two of the players started to push each other earlier, Still says, Lindsey calmly interrupted the dispute. "Come on," he told them, "we're all family."

Lindsey has known he wanted to be a football coach since high school. After graduating from the University of Central Florida with a degree in physical education, he spent 10 years working as an assistant coach, nine of them in his native St. Cloud, before coming to Wildwood. To encourage a sense of the boys' ownership of their program, he has had them rip up the carpet to renovate the field house.

"If your child believes in something, you don't have no choice but to believe in it," he says.

Just before 6:30, Lindsey calls the boys into a huddle. They crouch in the middle of the field. Lindsey instructs them to make sure they are each touching someone else. And then he begins his speech.

"Overall, fellows, I think we had an excellent first day. An excellent first day. I think we took our first step toward recovering and showing people what Wildcats can do. We're going to do some marvelous stuff this year, and it's going to happen within this group, right here."

Drenched with sweat and rain, the boys jog back to their field house. Friday will be the team's first step toward a comeback, an away game against Ocala. Lindsey and his players plan to rally community support by wearing jerseys and talking up the program.

Former assistant coach Randy Hepburn walked off the Wildwood football field on that other Friday night nearly three years ago. He has not returned to watch another Wildcat game. This first evening of practice, he looks around the field house, at boys lifting weights and talking excitedly. On Aug. 30, he'll be in the stands watching. Definitely.

"Football," he says, echoing a sentiment expressed by players, teachers, parents and school administrators. "Football could bring this whole town together."

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