No Experiments in Mr. Grobe’s Class
Jim Grobe didn’t set out to be college football coach.
“I really kind of saw myself as always being in high school,’’ Grobe. ” I never had thought much about college coaching. But I had half my masters in counseling and that’s really what I wanted to do. I really wanted to be a counselor and coach high school football.”
And Jim Grobe certainly never set out to make the $2.1 million a year he rakes in coaching football at Wake Forest. That was the figure revealed in Tuesday’s report in USA Today on the salaries of coaches throughout major-college football. He actually made $4.2 in the fiscal year of 2007-08, though the total was inflated by a deferred compensation package that vested that year, as well as a restructuring of his contract after Arkansas made the bulls rush at him in December of 2007.
“I thought I’d died and gone to heaven when I was coaching high school football and I was making a little less than $9,000 a year as a head coach and an Earth Science teacher that had five Earth Science classes a day,’’ Grobe said. “I thought I’d hit the lottery.’‘
The years were 1976-77, the place Liberty High School in rural Bedford, Va., located between Lynchburg and Roanoke. He wasn’t the only Earth Science teacher in the school.
“It was a required subject so had two sections,’’ Grobe said. “Ray Caldwell taught one section and I taught the other. And Ray’s nickname was Mr. Science. So he had all the nice spigots for water and the gas jets and they did the experiments that you would do on a Saturday morning TV show. I got more of the kids that were somewhat challenging to teach, to say the least. And they wouldn’t turn the gas on in my class. And I had a lot of good kids too, but I had some real knotheads. So it was kind of my job to ride herd on the knotheads.
“Anybody walking by, they were looking for smoke coming out. It was a hostile environment.’‘
His path into college coaching followed that of a former coach at Ferrum Junior College, Jerry Kirk, who took over as head coach at Emory and Henry and hired Grobe as an assistant. It was Jerry Kirk who gave him a lift up the coaching ladder after Sonny Randle, Grobe’s coach at Virginia, became head coach at Marshall.
“Coach Kirk came in one day and he said `Did you see where Sonny Randle got the Marshall job?’ Grobe recalled. “I said `No I didn’t know that.’ He said `Well you’re going to Marshall with Coach Randle.’ I said `No I’m not. I just worked a year for Coach Kirk. I’m not going to do that.’
“Well he actually dialed Marshall’s football office and got Coach on the phone and said `Here.’ He kind of just pushed me. He said `You’ve got to go. It’s a step up.’ ‘’
When Grobe wonders what might have been had Jerry Kirk never come calling, he thinks of another buddy from the old days named Doug Parcell, a teammate at Virginia.
“Doug’s older brother is Bill Parcells,’’ Grobe said. “We were in school together and his whole undergraduate career he wanted to be an elementary phys ed teacher and a high school football coach. And to this day that’s what he’s done. I think he’s finally retired from coaching but still teaching elementary school.
“But that’s what he wanted. He could have been with his brother and done all that stuff, but he wanted to do that.’’