by Lem Satterfield
Of all the things Bob Milloy has
learned during hisyears as a high school football coach, the most
tellingis his unwavering belief that he can win every game.
“I just tell kids, and I really believe this, and that is, that, ‘if you listen to us as a coaching
staff, and if you believe in us, that we’ll always be able to put you in position to win the game,”
said Milloy, in his seventh year at Good Counsel and his 38th coaching season
overall.
“It’s maybe the only thing that I’ve learned in all of these years is, ‘I promise you that you’ll
have an opportunity to win the game,'” Milloy said. “Whether we’re good enough to take advantage
of it, I’m not sure. But we think we have an opportunity to win every game, and, most of
the time, we do.”
Milloy’s mantra has bore itself out over his nearly 40 years coaching high school players, a
career that spans stints at Montgomery County public schools Walt Whitman,
Springbrook, Sherwood and now, Good Counsel, a private school which,
this year, was relocated from Wheaton to Olney.
Last night, Milloy, 63, earned career win No. 312 against 100 losses and a tie as his Falcons of
the
prestigious Washington Catholic Athletic Conference scored a 42-0
shutout over Baltimore’s visiting Cardinal Gibbons, last year’s
runner-up to Archbishop Spalding in the MIAA B Conference.
Wilde Lake’s Doug DuVall, a winner of five state titles, ranks second, alltime, in victories at 282-69.
Before taking over the Falcons, whose old Wheaton campus has been relocated this year
to Olney, Milloy dominated the public school ranks like no other coach, winning a state-high eight Class 4A championships.
Sherwood’s Al Thomas, and his assistant, Terry Changuris, have seperately
coached seven state championship teams. Thomas’ were at Senecat Valley and Damascus,
and Changuris’ were at Seneca Valley.
“I don’t think I could ever retire, to be honest with you. I don’t
think I could ever retire because I don’t know what I would do,” Milloy
said during a recent interview with Digital Sports, between bites of
lettuce from the salad he ate in Good Counsel’s faculty lunch room
about an hour before
Wednesday’s practice.
“Everybody has
something, you know, that you need to retire and occupy your time and I
do this 12 months a year,” Milloy said. “If I wasn’t coaching, I’m not
much of a golfer. Watching games, I get the clinic tapes from all over
the country and I can’t wait for the next season to start.”
During an hour-long interview, Malloy shared his thoughts on a number of things.
Milloy expressed both his frustration with and admiration for
DeMatha coach Bill McGregor (239-32-2 career), whose Stags are four-time defending
WCAC champs.
Milloy
said his Falcons have experienced victory against McGregor’s Stags only
once during his tenure at Good Counsel while having lost the past three
title games, in succession,
by 30-29, by 21-20, and, by 20-14, last year, on a score by the Stags’ Rodney McLeod in overtime.
Milloy called the late Augie Waibel, of Poly, “a class guy,” and called the recent
death of Dunbar’s Ben Eaton “a tremendous loss — a tremendouls loss for the kids of Baltimore.”
“I
roomed with Ben Eaton a while back when we coached one of the all-star games with the Big 33,”
Milloy said. “Just a wonderful guy.”
The state’s winningest coach calls his mentors former Gonzaga football coach, Maus Collins; former
Georgetown
Prep coach Jim Phegan; and former DeMatha football and basketball
coach, Morgan Wootten — the latter of whom gave Malloy his first job
when he was 23 as Wooten’s assistant in football at DeMatha in 1967
“I was a business major at Maryland. Morgan Wootten was the football coach
and A.D. at DeMatha, and Maus Colliins was the same thing at Carroll. They both offered me a job,”
Milloy recalled.
“So I went to DeMatha, and was there for three years coaching the JV. Morgan coached football and
basketball and was the AD,” Milloy said.
“The first night there, we talked about the trap for like four hours — stunts and everything.
I
thought I knew football, but I didn’t know anything,” Milloy said. “I
learned how to deal with parents, how to deal with kids. I learned
everything from coaching with Morgan, who could sell ice cubes to
Eskimos. “
Milloy caused a stir in 1970, when, at age, 26, and
with Wootten’s influence, he was named head coach at Walt Whitman, a
posh Bethesda school.
“I got the job over about five Montgomery County veterans. That caused
a
lot of hard feelings,” Milloy said. “To this day, some of them are a
little miffed by it. Montgomery County coaches can be a real sorority.”
After debuting with a scoreless tie against Montgomery Blair, Milloy led Walt Whitman to a
6-4 record, the program’s first-ever winning season. One of the Vikings’ milestone wins
was in their fourth game, a 15-2 win over the now-defunct Robert E. Peary.
“Peary was No. 1 or No. 2 in the Washington Post, and they were rough and tough Twinbrook
Parkway kids who didn’t like losing,” Milloy recalled. “And Whitman’s kids
were a bunch of rich, country club guys.”
Ahead,
15-0, and “backed up” near the goal line, Milloy called for his QB to
take a safety. “They were really mad about that. A huge riot broke
out, and the police were called,”
Milloy said.
“Whitman’s kids were great, but off the field, you never saw them. They wouldn’t lift weights.
I really liked them, but they just had other things on their minds,” Milloy said. “So I guess that,
for the guys from Peary, it was embarrassing for them to lose to us, but they did. And we beat them the next year too.”
In
’74, Milloy “got a call” from Springbrook’s AD, another former DeMatha
assistant. “Their kids were different: Hard-nosed, Silver Spring kids
who were really gung-ho and wanted to play ball.”
Milloy’s
adversaries, however, were “great coaches,” such as Billy Jones of
Wheaton; Roy Lester of Richard Montgomery; Fred Shepherd of Churchill
and John Harvill of Gaithersburg.
Still, Milloy won six of his state-high eight Class 4A crowns over an 11-year span at Springbrook
of Montgomery County, being a champion in “1979, ’80 and ’81,” and three more times,
in -’85, ’88 and ’89.”
“The
thing that’s impressive about Springbrook is that we played for the 4A
state championship for five years in a row at Maryland,” said Milloy,
whose last titles were in ’95, and, ’96, at Sherwood.
“At Springbrook, we won the first one in ’85, then got beat by Harvill and Al Thomas, and then,
won the next two,” Milloy said. “The one year, in ’81, we overcame deficits in six games.”
Not one to rank one championship season over another, Milloy, admitted, however, “that first one is always special.”
“We
were 12-0, the No. 1 team in the area and because it was the
culmination of so much hard work,” said Milloy, whose ’79 team was
coming off of a 7-3 season —the coach’s worst record at Springbrook.
“My QB, Johnny Neville, was really awful the first couple of games,” Milloy said. “We almost benced
him, but, somehow, all of a sudden, things clicked.”
An Olney resident for 24 years, Milloy took the job at Sherwood in ’92 after the Warriors’
coach retired, and at the urging of his wife of 32 years, Sue.
“She said, ‘you have to apply for that job because your sons are going to be playing there,'”
said Milloy, whose son, Brendan, 28, is among his Good Counsel assistants, and Robbie, 26,
is an engineer living in Baltimore.
“I was in a real dilemma. I loved Springbrook,” said Milloy. “But family is No. 1. It’s the smartest
thing I ever did, because all seven of my coaches had kids there.”
Milloy
called his ’96 championship season “probably the most fun at Sherwood,”
adding, “we were No. 1 in the area, and the entire team was my son,
Brendan’s, senior class I knew all of the parents, and they were
certainly one of the better teams.”
That team produced tight end
Graham Manley, a three-time state champion wrestler who played at
Syracuse, and running back Tyree Foreman, who played for the University
of Virginia and now coaches the running backs at Temple.
Having
moved to Good Counsel for this, his seventh season, Milloy shares Route
108 with a new neighbor in Thomas, whose Sherwood Warriors “are two
miles down the street,” Milloy
said.
“Al’s
a brilliant coach, one of the toughest I’ve ever gone against,” said
Milloy. “Obviously, we’re squabbling over players, but it’s never come
to blows or anything. It’s tough, because if we don’t do right by the
kids, they’ll just go right down the street and play for him.”
A game between Sherwood and Good Counsel?
“That
would be fun to do. But I know I was in public schools for a lot of
years,” Milloy said. “We do have an advantage with the recruiting, ,
and I understand that. We can get kids from anywhere. It would be fun
to do, but it would probably never happen.”
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