Former East Central Community College football coach Willie “Tennie” Coats passed away this past week.
Coats is well known in the Decatur area, having coached at Decatur High School. He was also an assistant at East Central and later came back to Decatur as head coach of the ECCC football program.
Former East Central head coach Terry Underwood coached under Coats at Hattiesburg, Pearl River Community College and as an assistant at ECCC.
“He was really a fine coach, one of the best I have been around and I have been around some really good ones,” Underwood said. “I spent 15 years with him on and off. He was the epitome of an old-school football coach. His teams were always very disciplined, conditioned and hard nosed.”
Underwood said one of the things he enjoyed the most in coaching with Coats was his ability to turn around “down-trodden” programs.
“When we coached together, we had some good success pretty quick,” Coats said. “Most of the situations we went into, they were down trodden. He was able to turn them around quickly. He could get it down wherever he coached at. He was one heck of a football coach. But the traits he brought into a program built winning football programs.”
Coats was a head coach at Decatur High School before he was an assistant under Ken Pouncey at East Central.
One of his former players, Chris Harris, remembers Coats well. Harris was a quarterback for the Warriors in the 1975 and 76 seasons and Coats was his position coach.
“He coached me on both sides of the football,” Harris said. “He was adamant about you doing things the way it was supposed to be done. He was a hard-nosed coached that believed in hard work and playing hard. He was a great guy to play for. He loved to win and to work hard and did a great job everywhere he went. And I think he did a great job of developing young men and helping them recognize what was important. He was a good football coach and a good man. I respected him and thought a lot of him.”
After leaving East Central as an assistant, Coats helped turn Hattiesburg into a state power in the late 80s. Along with Underwood, Coats helped influence a young Tony Hughes, who is currently an assistant at Mississippi State and the former head coach at Jackson State University.
“He was a tremendous influence on my life,” Hughes said of Coats. “When I first got into coaching, I volunteered as a student coach and he allowed me to come out and coach at Hattiesburg. Years later, he hired me back at Hattiesburg and that was a real spring board to my career. He was very inspirational to me. He supported me and treated me like his own son. And I looked at him like a father figure in the coaching profession.”
Like most who knew Coats, Hughes said he remembers Coats as an intense, hard-working coach.
“He was extremely organized and very intense,” Hughes said. “He was a very smart coach and one of the pioneers of coaching in this state. He could have coached anywhere and on any level. He was an amazing motivator and would let you coach. Even as a student, he let me coach my position and didn’t stand over your shoulder. He allowed you to coach and grow and was very detailed in what he did.”
Underwood was on Coats’ staff when he came back to East Central in the mid 90s. It was there that Coats took East Central to one of its best stretches in school history, including a 10-1 season. Underwood said Coats never got away from his basic principles of playing hard-nosed football, even as the game was starting to evolve.
“He believed that you had to run the football and stop the run,” Underwood said. “And he thought you had to be very sound in the kicking game. That sounds like a cliché now but that’s what he believed won football games. He had a style that caused him to have a lot of success. He teams were going to be very physically tough and not going to beat yourselves. He harped on a lot of little things that people take for granted. I think those kind of things made him very successful. And he was able to get quality people on his staff. “
