High School Football Clinic

By: Keith Mills

Richard Nixon was President of the United States when Gordy Combs joined Phil Albert's coaching staff at Towson University. To say he is a coaching veteran is a gross understatement.

Last Friday, Combs was sitting in the Chesapeake Room at the Sheraton Inner Harbor Hotel listening to David Wilkerson, the offensive coordinator at Northeast Mississippi Community College, talk about the spread offense. One day later, he sat in on a talk given by Louisville offensive coordinator Charlie Stubbs on the art of the play-action pass.

"When you stop coming to these things, you get lazy," said Combs, who is beginning his 17th year as Towson's coach and his 39th in the Tigers’ program after having been a player. "You never know what you may pick up. We do a lot of the same things as Dave does, and I just wanted to hear what he had to say."

Combs, longtime assistant Rich Bader, and a couple thousand high school coaches throughout the Mid-Atlantic region attended the Frank Glazier Mega Football Clinic, which ended its three-day run last Sunday.

"I've been coming to these things for 20 years," said Pete Hughes, now in his 12th year as coach at Long Reach High in Columbia. "You just try and get better. Every year you come and try and find out one or two things you can take back and use in your program."

Hughes, who began his coaching career as an assistant at Howard High, has been coaching for 25 years and spent part of Saturday morning listening to Dave Sollazzo, who is entering his ninth year as Maryland's defensive line coach. Sollazzo, defensive coordinator Chris Cosh and offensive coordinator James Franklin represented Ralph Friedgen's staff at the clinic. Sollazzo, one of the most animated and intense coaches in the country, remains one of the event’s most popular speakers.

"He is as advertised," Hughes said. "He's very intense. I go down and watch him in spring ball, and he brings that same intensity and focus to the classroom. We get a kick out of listening to him."

Hughes and his staff at Long Reach were among the hundreds of local coaches at the clinic. Others included Roger Wrenn and his staff at Baltimore Polytechnic, Dave Dolch from St. Paul's, Sean Murphy from Archbishop Curley, Donald Davis, Augie Miceli and Ed Holshue from Calvert Hall. Also present were Chuck Markiewicz and his staff from Arundel, which finished 13-1 last fall and lost to Quince Orchard in what was a classic Class 4A state championship game.

"Every time you go to one of these things you learn something," Markiewicz said. "If you're not doing these things, if you're not trying to get better, then you're not going to get better."

Markiewicz won a state championship at North County in 1994 by running the run-and-shoot offense before moving on to Arundel in 2001. Last Friday he listened to Herb Hand, offensive coordinator at Tulsa.

"We run some plays the same way they do, and we found a couple of different ways to coach it better,” Markiewicz said. “It makes it easy for the kids and makes it easy for us. And easy is always better when you're coaching kids."

Whether the college coach is Hand or Sollazzo, Markiewicz and local high school coaches have rarely found one who isn't willing to help.

"We've never had a situation where we've asked a college coach to help us and they haven't," Markiewicz said. "Sometimes they're a little secretive about things, but if you call them at their offense they do whatever they can to help us out."

Issue 3.8: February 21, 2008