After family tragedy, high school football helps Hickory Grove Christian coach recover

Tad Baucom’s eyes seem to be focused on the Hickory Grove Christian football players exercising in the warmth of an early autumn afternoon.

“One year,” Baucom says, giving a hint that his mind at that moment is far away from the team he coaches.

“So much can happen in one year,” he adds quietly.

Baucom is back where he is comfortable, coaching high school football. Hickory Grove Christian is his eighth school in 42 years, but he didn’t intend to be here. His presence on the sun-swept east Charlotte field has a lot to do with what has happened in the past year. Hickory Grove opens the 2020 season Friday night at Asheville School.

“I was enjoying the heights of coaching,” Baucom, 64, says, recalling how he felt near the end of last season.

His 31st season as a coach in Union County, and his sixth at Sun Valley High, ended with Baucom serving as an assistant coach for the North Carolina team in the Shrine Bowl all-star game last December. It was, Baucom says, “such a fun experience.”

While that was going on, Baucom watched with pride as Sam Howell, who had quarterbacked his Sun Valley teams from 2015-18, was completing a stellar season and earning praise nationally in his freshman season at North Carolina.

Then it all changed. A few days before 2020 started, Baucom got a call from a doctor. A spot on his forehead was cancerous. He lifts the blue ballcap covering his head and shows the spot where he underwent Mohs surgery.

In the second week of January, Baucom had a new worry. His wife, Pam, who has walked the sidelines and kept statistics at her husband’s games for decades, suffered a health emergency. She needed abdominal surgery for a potentially life-threatening condition.

A few days later, Baucom decided he needed to take a break. He called a meeting of players and coaches at Sun Valley and announced his retirement. He had family members to care for, he said.

Pam had the surgery and recovered, but then COVID-19 struck. That set the stage for the toughest blow of all. On May 3, the second-oldest of his three daughters, Taylor, 31, died suddenly.

“I just sat on the front porch for days, in a rocking chair,” Baucom says. “Some of the time, I prayed. Some of the time, I just sat and thought.”

Friends came to visit — longtime friends from his coaching days and friends from Hickory Grove Baptist Church, where he and Pam have been members for more than 30 years, attending with Taylor and their other two daughters.

Tad Baucom says he felt lost. “It was God’s plan to call my daughter home, but it was so hard to understand,” he says.

While he sat and rocked, Baucom thought about how he had coached Taylor in softball, and how coaching brought a sense of peace to his life. As his friends from Hickory Grove Baptist visited, a thought entered his mind. “Maybe I should go back to coaching,” he thought. “Maybe it should be at Hickory Grove.”

In early May, that wasn’t possible. One of Baucom’s friends, former Parkwood High coach Lynn Coble, was directing the team at Hickory Grove Christian, which is affiliated with the church.

“But God had a plan,” Baucom says.

Coble decided to enter the ministry, and the job opened up. Baucom began asking close friends what they thought.

After Taylor’s funeral service, Baucom asked Howell, who was among the mourners.

“I think you should do it, coach,” Howell told him.

He went to Adam Hamilton, principal of Hickory Grove Christian’s high school. Hamilton was a childhood friend of the Baucoms. Once, he broke his thumb playing in their yard.

“We had hoped for a long time that Tad might want to do this one day,” Hamilton says. “We never could have imagined these circumstances, but we were very happy to get him.”

All of this has brought Baucom, with a career record of 180-133, to the football field along East W.T. Harris Boulevard. His squad is composed of 28 players, less than half the size at some of the larger schools where he has coached.

But the roster includes students who transferred from Butler and Mallard Creek high schools, plus, according to Hamilton, “just about every athletic kid” in the school of 230 students. Helping Baucom are some holdovers from Coble’s team, along with people like longtime Monroe High coach Tony Byrum and former Wingate University standout Eric Little.

Howell says Hickory Grove’s players are lucky.

“He’s one of the greatest men I’ve come across in my life,” Howell says. “The way he carries himself, his strong faith — he sets the example of how to live a Christian life.

“He treated me like I was one of his own, no matter the outcome on the field.”

Baucom says he and Pam, who plans to be on the sidelines when the Lions open their season Friday, feel like they’re “back home.”

“We’re where we need to be,” Tad Baucom says.

Hickory Grove Christian was 0-8 a year ago, but Hamilton says Coble “put the program back on the right track. He got things going again.”

Baucom, according to Hamilton, “will take that and fly with it.”

Howell says the Lions will be winners, no matter what their record.

“I’m so appreciative of what he’s done for me, and now there’s another group of young men that are going to benefit greatly from having him as their coach,” Howell said.

Steve Lyttle on Twitter: @slyttle