It was the first day of school at Benton High and the algebra teacher was walking from his car to the school building. It was one of those hot, sticky August mornings that makes you sweat before you even close the car door.

As he walked through the wall of humidity, his senses were filled with some sounds and smells that were all too familiar. The whistles of a football practice. Shoulder pads and helmets colliding. The scent of the dew-covered grass mixed with sweat. He could have closed his eyes and still known exactly what was going on over his left shoulder.

But as he continued his walk to school, he knew he would have to look, if only for a moment. The investment of 23 years of his life was too strong to ignore.

But what he didn’t know was how it would hit him when he did look over. This was either going to go one way or the other.

Up until that point, it had all been window dressing. Now, football season was here. Now, it was for real.

With that backdrop, Reynolds Moore took that one look and let his emotion take it from there.

“I thought about it for a minute and took it all in,” Moore says, “and then I kept walking. That’s when I realized I was going to be fine.”

If there is a universal truth about coaching, it’s that it gets in your blood like few other jobs. No real explanation for it … it just does.

Wins are great, losses are terrible, outside influences never go away and the pay doesn’t exactly line up with the aggravation. It may seem like there’s an easy off ramp from being a coach; instead, it’s anything but.

This is the first year for Moore to be out of coaching. This is the second year out for Jason Brotherton, who coached at Haughton for 26 years before becoming assistant principal. Mike Greene coached at four schools over 28 years and has twice stepped away from the job, coaching until the end of the ’23 season.

“I don’t know if you ever totally get away from it,” Greene says. “I think you always miss it. Sometimes when I’m driving home, I think about how I could be at practice right now.”

“Everyone wonders what that first practice or first game will be like when you’re not coaching anymore,” Brotherton says. “There’s a lot of things I miss about coaching, but then there’s a long list of things I don’t miss about coaching also.”

None of the three went cold turkey from being on a high school campus and went off to sell life insurance. All three report to work every day at the same place where they lined the fields and wore those dreadful Bike coaching shorts.

They may not be in the deep end of the pool anymore, but they can always dip their toes in the water whenever they feel the urge.

Or not.

“I try to give (new) coach (Stephen) Dennis and his staff their space,” Moore says. “I want to give them a chance to build their own program their way and not feel like I’m looking over their shoulder. And look, Coach Dennis has said I’m welcome any time. I may go to more (games) next year and I may go to Senior Night for the guys I coached last year.”

“For me, it hasn’t been that bad,” Brotherton says. “I still know those kids (on the team) because I coached most of them. I’m at every game. I usually know the play we are about the run beforehand because I don’t think we have changed the signs since I coached. It’s just a little bit of a different role.”

To a man, the coaches will tell you that the thing they miss the most is the relationship with the players. “That’s the hardest thing,” Greene says. “You’re still around them (at school) but it’s not the same.”

Meanwhile, there are other adjustments to make. “You’d think going back to teaching full time would be like riding a bike,” Moore says. “I thought I’d be fine. But it took me several weeks to get back into the rhythm and the pacing of the school day in a classroom.”

But forget about the idea of a former coach sitting in the stands on a Friday night and watching the game like every other spectator.

“I can’t,” Greene says. “It’s too hard for me.”

Contact JJ at johnjamesmarshall@yahoo.com