LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- Bob Beatty retired as the Trinity High School football coach Thursday.
As Athletic Director Rob Saxton began the farewell news conference, he noted that Beatty’s 15 state championships in 21 seasons flashed as a more dominant stretch than Bill Belichick has delivered at New England, Nick Saban at Alabama or Dabo Swinney or Clemson.
True. True. And absolutely true.
Somebody asked Beatty about that.
Belichick? Saban? Swinney? What were his thoughts about being compared to the $8 million men?
If you expected Beatty to blush or ask for a more serious question, you don’t understand how Beatty blew into town from Missouri 21 years ago and turned the highest level of Kentucky high school football into a one-team race.
This is what Beatty said:
“Some people would call this arrogance. Some people would call it cocky. I just call it fact.
“I don’t compare myself to any of those guys. But if they want to get across the sideline from me, I’ll come out of retirement, and I’ll hang 60 on them.”
Anything else?
Just this: Over the four-plus decades I’ve written about sports in this town, I can’t name any coach who’s done a more relentlessly successful job than Beatty. Even in his retirement news conference, Beatty delivered a message that explained why kids were so eager to buckle their chinstraps and tighten their cleats to play for him. I told Beatty to hand me the shoulder pads. I’m ready to go.
Yes, Trinity has resources and a commitment to football that give the program advantages over most schools, especially the public schools, on the Shamrocks’ schedule.
Trinity will hire another superb coach and keep winning. But Trinity will not win the way Beatty won. The man will be remembered with Paulie Miller as the best this town has seen.
Beatty delivered video games numbers — 254 victories against 44 losses, an 85% winning percentage. He won a mythical national championship. He earned his way into the Kentucky Athletic Hall of Fame.
Snap after snap. Game after game. Year after year.
Beatty took a great program that Dennis Lampley built and made it elite. He booked games against teams from Tennessee, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Florida and Pennsylvania. Beatty would have played on Venus or Mars.
The man was comfortable throwing the football when the rest of the world was still fascinated by the triple option. Opposing coaches made cracks about the way Beatty used hand signals to call plays from the sidelines, and then they watched Trinity make the scoreboard tilt.
With all the formations, guys in motion and skilled execution Trinity showed, Beatty could have directed a college-level offense. He didn’t say that. I’m saying that.
The man was the offensive coordinator at William Jewell College, a Division II NAIA program in Missouri before he started his head coaching career in suburban Kansas City.
I asked if he ever considered returning to college football. He did not.
“Even at that level, recruiting was too dirty,” Beatty said. “Too many people were asking for something.”
Beatty does not believe in excuses. He also believed in the authority of the head coach. He said the reason he left Blue Springs High School for Trinity was the school administration changed in Missouri. He was told he could no longer tell players how they could cut their hair or ask them to remove earrings.
Beatty turned down Trinity the first time the school recruited him, because his daughter had a final year of high school to finish.
When Beatty accepted the job in 2000, he warned administrators he was coming to win games, not popularity contests. Beatty loved to joke that he’ll have to be cremated because he doesn’t have enough friends to carry his casket.
He asked his players and their parents to sacrifice, but he also sacrificed for them, working tirelessly at the Trinity complex.
Trinity President Dr. Rob Mullen said Beatty was the most low-maintenance coach on the school’s staff. When Trinity expanded and modernized its football stadium, Beatty said he needed to leave meeting early to get to practice.
The man has a game plan for everything. Beatty said that he and his wife, Jayne, started working on their retirement plan two years ago. They are returning to their Missouri roots.
It started when they purchased a home on the water at the Land of the Ozarks. The exclamation point came when Beatty added to the 14th state title he won against St. Xavier last season with a 15th state title that his Trinity team won against Male last month.
Listening to Bob and Jayne speak Thursday, odds are that Beatty is not finished with football. He does not golf. He considers fishing boring. He does hunt, but that isn’t something that will fascinate him for 12 months. Beatty will find a job scouting or assisting a program at some level of the game in Missouri.
Unless Belichick, Saban or Swinney want to line up against him.
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