By Mike London
mike.london@salisburypost.com

CONCORD — Coach Bill Watts passed away on Friday at 92.

He was never a William — he was born Billy Brown Watts in Concord in 1932. Colleagues knew him as Bill, but to just about everyone else, he was simply “Coach,” the highest compliment students can give to an adult.

He’s one of those folks who taught and coached at both A.L. Brown and Concord. He also coached at Winecoff, back in the day, years before there was a Northwest Cabarrus.

He owned a master’s degree. He had successful stints as an athletic director and a baseball coach.

Football was his thing, and he coached that sport close to forever. When he was inducted into the Cabarrus Hall of Fame in 2014, he was credited with coaching for 46 years in Cabarrus County.

Besides football and life, Watts taught P.E. and health, some history and a lot of driver’s ed.

There are a lot of people on the road now who had Watts as their driver’s education teacher as the sun was rising on sleepy summer mornings. Watts instructed a parade of students in the fine art of parallel parking in tight rectangles lined off on the road in front of the A.L. Brown gym. Many barrels were dented and a few were crushed by nervous teens behind the wheel for the first time, but Watts was surprisingly patient for an intimidating-looking football coach.

He arrived at A.L. Brown as an assistant football coach in 1959.

Most of his coaching life was spent behind the scenes as an assistant coach, pushing linemen at practice, Monday through Thursday, so they could excel on Fridays. But from 1968 to 1970, for three autumns, Watts stepped into the bright spotlight as the head football coach at A.L. Brown.

Those were Western North Carolina High School Activities Association days for the Wonders. They were challenging days with full integration achieved by the fall of 1969, and with the city schools in the South Piedmont Conference overloaded with talent.

Watts had one of the school’s greatest ever in the backfield — Haskel Stanback — in the 1968 and 1969 seasons, but the nine-team SPC provided a tough environment in which to win. The league also included Boyden (Salisbury), Thomasville, Concord, Lexington, Asheboro, Statesville, Albemarle and a South Rowan team, which always regarded the A.L. Brown game as its biggest of the season.

The Wonders had no losses in their first seven games under Watts — five wins, two ties — but they finished 1968 with three straight setbacks, falling to Thomasville, South Rowan (for the first time ever) and Concord. The Wonders dropped from first place to fifth during those last three weeks.

The SPC moved to divisional play for 1969 and 1970. The Wonders were a respectable 6-4 overall and 5-3 in the league in 1969 (second place in the division behind Lexington), although the pattern of fast starts and shaky finishes continued.

Then the Wonders struggled offensively in 1970, got shut out four times and fell to 4-6 overall and 3-5 in the SPC. A valiant effort in a 13-11 effort loss to Concord ended the 1970 season — the 10th straight loss to the Spiders — and that also was Watts’ last game at the helm of the Wonders.

He stayed on as an assistant to help the next coach Will Campagna, and in 1971, the Wonders beat both Salisbury and Concord, finished 6-2 in the SPC and won a championship. Salisbury, which finished in a tie for first with the Wonders during the regular season, beat A.L. Brown in the playoffs.

Watts graduated from Mount Pleasant High in 1949.

He went on to Lenoir-Rhyne College to play football for coach Clarence Stasavich, a legendary mastermind of single wing football. Watts was a four-year letterman, a beast playing the position we now call middle linebacker. He served as a co-captain for the Bears in 1953, along with Bob Mauser, one of the locals from Hickory.

Those were good L-R teams. The 1951 Bears were 10-1 and beat California State in the Pythian Bowl played in Salisbury.

In 1952, the Bears won another North State Conference championship and didn’t lose a game until they fell at Tampa in the Cigar Bowl.

Those days at Lenoir-Rhyne prepared Wats for a long coaching career. He coached five players who reached the NFL.