Introduction
By Carl Dubois
At its core the life of Charles Vicknair is a love story. Instead of arriving wrapped in lace, it presents itself in leather. The football, not the pink Valentine’s Day heart, is the lasting icon.
Like all love stories, this one is filled with drama — in this case, tension and conflict most often played out on a field of grass, in practice and in more formal competition. There are pages with X’s and O’s, but rather than signifying hugs and kisses, they symbolize Buccaneers, Broncos, Cowboys, Gators, Golden Tornados, Rams and Saints. They represent the good guys and the bad guys, the individual match-ups and assignments designed to work in unison to succeed against the other team’s strategy.
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Every love story finds obstacles that threaten to block the path of the protagonists in their quest, and there is no shortage of such roadblocks here. A coach learns, then relearns again and again, his goal is essentially the same as that of the people around him, but there is nothing approaching a consensus on the right path for getting there. Coaching is often about making adjustments, at halftime and during a game with no more timeouts or breaks. Those unwilling to compromise, to roll with the changes, can be left behind. Charles Vicknair wasn’t that kind of coach. He embraced change — perhaps too frequently, even his most ardent supporters said then and now.
His story, as presented here, contains few of the obvious trappings we’re accustomed to in the genre of the love story, but the essential component is easy to spot. It’s tucked inside details that at first glance don’t seem to fit the definitions ingrained in us by more stereotypical narratives of passion and romance.
In the master bedroom of the house there is a trunk filled with love letters, but not in the traditional sense. They are the hundreds of sheets of plays he drew, notes he scribbled at coaching clinics, the handwritten proof of Vicknair’s love of the game and his love of learning.
In the memories of others, there are the terms of endearment: nicknames, pet names. He rattled them off like a roll call, and he was more likely to give you a name of his choosing rather than call you by the one on your birth certificate.
June Bug. Pahds. Pancho. Bootsie.
He could remember the name he gave you. It wasn’t a given he could recall the name your parents gave you. Charles Vicknair reserved the naming rights to his world and the people in it.
Love? It’s there in the consistency of the man who met his 89-year-old mother for coffee every day at 6 a.m. It’s there in the effort to be home each night in time for family dinner together. It’s in the sameness of commitment to players in the 1990s as in the 1960s, so much so from one generation to another they use almost verbatim phrases and sentences to describe the side of Vicknair that was, in fact, unchanged.
To put his longevity into perspective, consider he began coaching at what is now called S.P. Arnett Middle School in Westlake in 1964, two years before Joe Paterno became head coach at Penn State. Vicknair began his last season, cut short by his sudden death, in 2008, years after the first questions about the inevitability of JoePa’s retirement.
Vicknair’s story here isn’t about statistics. His won-lost record in 25 seasons as a head coach was unspectacular, although the highlight remains one of the golden seasons in Southwest Louisiana prep football history. A 14-game winning streak and a 14-1 season in 1980 at Barbe High School in Lake Charles, La., a season that ended with a bittersweet trip to the state championship game, was the standard of excellence at that school a decade into the 21st century. Coach Vic, as he was known by many, wouldn’t return to a state championship game as a participant until 2007, when his career came full circle as an assistant coach at Westlake.
He spent 16 seasons as a high school assistant, four as a college assistant at his alma mater.
But that’s just football. We promised you a love story. Peel away the shoulder pads, the grass and mud stains, the sweat and blood and the real and choreographed machismo of amateur football, and the more than four decades of Vicknair’s coaching career reveal the slow, steady hand of love of the game, of tough love, of a love that isn’t always fully understood until years later.
A father makes his son do the work, whatever form that work takes, knowing he is preparing him for manhood. A father who also happens to be a coach and teacher has many sons, and when the light of recognition comes on for them as adults, they find meaning they couldn’t grasp as teenagers.
They get it.
Coaches, who often scrape by on wages shockingly low when calculated by the number of hours they devote to the job, find there is a bonus waiting for them at unexpected times. Former players come back or call or write to say thanks. Some do it eloquently, and some have to mask it behind the comfortable language and rituals of coach-player dynamics years after they’ve raised children themselves, but too many players to count let their coach know they finally understand.
Football coaches — especially those who came of age in the 1950s and ’60s — have never been known for having the vocabulary of group therapy. In their world an “I love you” from man to man is more socially acceptable as a punch line in beer commercials or movie titles. Otherwise, it is too touchy-feely for many coaches, so the manifestations of “Thank you” and “You’re welcome” and expressions of gratitude in the same area code as the heart are frequently taken in trade: a simple gesture, a favor for a favor, and the silent recognition that a brief reunion or conversation 15 or 20 years later is the way some men work these things out between each other. The coach knows the visit from his former assistant carries meaning beyond the simple swapping of new ideas and the strategy du jour. He knows nobody forced the former player to come and see or e-mail him. The message is tucked inside the ritual, just as it was years before during two-a-days, during punishment laps, during nauseating drills that seemed conjured by a dictator rather than a loving father figure. In these moments of sometimes awkward, always sincere “thanks,” coaches receive a bonus check they will never cash, one they will carry with them through the next season because it reminds them that maybe all the frustrations, the defeats both big and small, are ultimately worth it.
And so these tough guys, whose walls are adorned with framed posters of John Wayne and Vince Lombardi and the most popular sayings and images of those iconic tough guys ... well, they say “I love you, man” in whatever manner they can muster. Charles Vicknair, 66, died Sept. 20, 2008, the morning after helping coach Westlake High School to a victory against nearby Sam Houston High. When months of grieving and remembering became a year, then longer, former players and assistants of Coach Vic kept looking for ways to say it — to his memory, to the world, to his family, and to the next generation, and to the next.
He coached for 44 full football seasons and part of a 45th, all in Louisiana, all on high school campuses except for his four years as an assistant at McNeese State University in Lake Charles. That city in Southwest Louisiana was never more than a 15-minute drive from the office, yet he made an impact that stretches wide.
It wasn’t always about football, even when it appeared to be. Long after Vicknair’s death, and decades after he coached at Barbe, one of his players at the South Lake Charles school found himself teaching seminars in the business world and making his point with words and lessons that came from Coach Vic.
Coaches often find themselves locked in battles with academicians and administrators who lament and counter what they see as too much emphasis on sports in schools, but the coaches with a player’s long-range interests at heart understand it’s often not as simple as outsiders see it. They find out there are benefits to participation in athletics that can give a teenager much-needed structure and discipline and the experience of being a part of something larger than one person. At times, meeting the minimum requirements for playing sports in school is dismissed as just getting by to serve the team and its goals, but coaches discover there are students whose lives are at risk for veering off into any of a number of ill-fated directions without a regular routine, without constant monitoring and without the sense of belonging they derive from being part of a team. Sometimes, their mere participation in a team sport is the difference between becoming an adult with a set of skills that allows them to function in the structure of society rather than becoming a statistic and a cautionary tale about what can happen when young people fall through the cracks.
It’s in that context that many coaches will take the heat for doing everything they can to keep a player on a team rather than cut him loose and increase the odds of him continuing down a path with consequences that can permanently alter one’s destiny. The former Sam Houston High School player who commissioned the research and writing of this story, a man who credits Vicknair with laying the foundation for his successes as a businessman and as a family man, decided to memorialize his long-ago coach by creating the Web site CoachVicknair.com. He said Vicknair turned his life around.
Others helped persuade the American Press, the newspaper of record throughout Vicknair’s career, to name an award for Coach Vic. Longtime Westlake assistant coach Jamie Schiro was recognized as the first winner of the Charles Vicknair Award, now presented annually to the top assistant in the Lake Charles area. Other finalists were DeQuincy’s W.A. Ashworth, St. Louis Catholic’s Wayne Cespiva, Barbe’s Mike Cutrera and DeRidder’s Mitch Mills.
Schiro first went to Westlake as a student assistant in 1978-79 and was offensive coordinator in 2008, when he won the award. Cespiva, who coached with Vicknair at Barbe, was named the second recipient of the award Dec. 26, 2009.
Former colleagues, friendly rivals and friends of Vicknair also began exploring other ways to pay lasting tribute to him.
Those and other gestures are a testament to the longtime and consistent influence of a coach who never won a state championship and was rarely in the spotlight. Those he helped to find their way know the far reach he had upon Southwest Louisiana football and the young men who populate its history and its future.
“He molded a lot of people’s lives,” said Kirby Bruchhaus, whose coaching career began as a student teacher under Vicknair’s employ and crested at McNeese State as defensive coordinator and, briefly, head coach. “He molded my life, and I would have never had the opportunity to get where I got into the coaching field without him. I’ll just be indebted to him for all my life, and it didn’t start with me, and it didn’t stop with me.”
Jimmy Shaver, an assistant to Vicknair at Barbe before taking his place as head coach in 1982, talked about the extent of Vicknair’s influence.
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JIMMY SHAVER
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“He had a big impact on our community and all the coaches in this area,” Shaver said before the first anniversary of Vicknair’s death. “Some of them might not have been directly under him, but somebody on their staff has been or they worked with somebody before that was under Vic, so all of us (were affected by him). I can’t think of anybody that hasn’t been influenced somehow by him.”
Shaver’s long stay at Barbe and many Southwest Louisiana Coach of the Year awards earned him more frequent attention than Vicknair, but the former pupil said the mentor did not come and go without leaving his mark.
“He’s been a part of every community,” Shaver said. “He’s coached all over this area, from Sam Houston to St. Louis to LaGrange to Sulphur to here. He’s been all over. He knew way more people than I do, because he was pretty visible. I don’t think it went unnoticed.”
In many ways, Vicknair’s story represents thousands of high school coaches who let others pursue the dream of coaching in college or the NFL for the bulk of their careers. They let others chase better-paying jobs that in many cases don’t require any more of a time commitment from them. They let others become household names regionally and nationally.
They are content to be high school coaches and teachers, to be father figures to their players during the teenage years when the choices a quarterback or receiver or lineman make can affect the rest of their lives. Vicknair was one of those coaches, consistent in his approach, hopeful of making a difference when a young man’s future could be in the balance.
“The guy was one of the best offensive line coaches, one of the best coaches I’ve been around,” said Ed Orgeron, whose career includes stops at the University of Miami, USC, Ole Miss and with the New Orleans Saints before he became assistant head coach at the University of Tennessee. “I’ve been around some great guys.”
When Orgeron became a graduate assistant coach at McNeese State in 1985, he worked under the tutelage of Vicknair, who was in the last of his four years as a college assistant.
“The guy could have coached at any level he wanted to,” Orgeron said. “He could have coached in the NFL if he wanted to. That’s how good he was.”
This is a story told by those he prepared for the time when he’d be gone, whether family members who would outlive him or assistant coaches who would continue to work without him after he’d moved on to another school. This is a story told by the players he turned into men and the assistants he turned into head coaches. This is a story of the assistant coaches who see new ways of doing things come and go, but few methods that convince them to change from some of the basics they learned from Vicknair.
This is a story from the lips of those who see Charles Vicknair in the things they do, the organizational parameters he taught them that have become as natural and automatic to them as breathing.
“I’d never coached offense before,” Orgeron said, recalling his year with Vicknair, “so all the things I do today I learned from him. Like, I’m able to draw a blocking scheme and do everything because of something he taught me. He was fantastic.”
Orgeron played defensive line at Northwestern State and spent one year after that as a graduate assistant there. His year at McNeese was his first away from the familiar surroundings of his five years in Natchitoches, and he said Vicknair made it special.
“The guy treated me like gold,” Orgeron said. “He spent a lot of time on how to coach, what to do, how to prepare, mannerisms ... believe me, the guy was fantastic to me. He remained a good friend for me the whole time. You know how it is when you go to a new place, it’s your first time? The guy took me under his wing and treated me great. He was awesome.”
Some of Vicknair’s pupils didn’t stay in coaching, but they never forgot him.
“My father died at 53, the year before Charles Vicknair talked me into being a high school football coach with him at Sam Houston High School,” said Tom Brandow, who left the profession and is an educator at the Calcasieu Parish Elementary Alternative School in Southwest Louisiana.
“Through most of my adult life, Charles Vicknair was the closest thing that I had to a father,” Brandow said. “We didn’t always agree or see eye to eye, and we had vastly different lifestyles, but Coach Vic was what I thought a coach should be. He didn’t care that I played music in the offseason, or that my interests were different than his. Coach Vic loved football coaches, and I was honored to have had the experience to work for a man that has left a legacy among high school football in Southwest Louisiana that will never be equaled.”
Brandow is the first in this story to touch on what will be a recurring theme, and the first of many.
“Coach Vic often stated that he didn’t want to ever feel like we had lost a game because we had been outplayed or outcoached, which translated into long tedious hours of preparation, but looking back it was this attitude that sums up the man,” Brandow said. “Charles Vicknair was Charles Vicknair — honest, no hidden agendas, often not politically correct, and probably the worst speller in the history of the world. He was definitely one of the true giants as a coach but more importantly as a man.”
What follows, section by section, is a series of snapshots of Vicknair’s life and loves. It’s unlikely the reader will navigate all of it in one sitting, so this Web site features a link to each section for the sake of convenience. The story isn’t always in chronological order, so it doesn’t have to be read in any particular sequence, but if time and patience allow, it helps to start at the beginning and finish at the end.
That said, there really is no end. Just as it’s impossible for this story to tell everything about the coach and the person, it’s folly to consider this a complete record of his life. This Web site allows for readers to post comments, their recollections of the man, and to extend the story in an organic and personal way.
Like the impact Charles Vicknair had upon Southwest Louisiana, his story continues to be told.
I was very saddened to learn of Coach Vicknair’s death. Living in Mississippi I did not get the news until today. I was a graduate assistant with Coach Vicnair on the offensive line in his first year at McNeese. What a great person he was. He worked hard to be the best coach he could be and earned that respect from the players right away. His professionalism he brought to his job is carried with me in my professional life. I am glad to have experienced my time coaching with him.