York high school jamboree to honor Bill Pate, the football town’s unforgettable coach
Coach always called him “Big Rook.”
Tony Poag first heard that nickname in the fall of 1986, when he was a freshman on the York varsity football team. The lineman would achieve football greatness at York and beyond: He’d be a part of York’s sole state championship football team in 1986. He’d go on to play football at Hampton University. And when he wasn’t bullying people on the offensive or defensive lines in high school, he was kicking field goals as “the only 270-pound kicker in South Carolina.”
And yet, when asked what he remembers about his high school head football coach, he comes back to “Big Rook” and of other memories from his freshman year, when his coach threw him “right into the fire,” expecting Poag to deliver the world.
“I didn’t understand it at first,” Poag told The Herald. “But as you get older, you understand why he was so tough on you. It’s because he saw something that others didn’t see, or even you didn’t see.”
York leaders are making sure that Bill Pate’s impact will be seen forever.
York Comprehensive High School will host its inaugural “Bill Pate White Rose Memorial Football Classic” on Aug. 12, the Friday before the start of the high school football regular season. Fans on hand will see eight teams gather at the Cougar Den for some preseason football action. Laurens and Fort Mill are slated to play at 6 p.m. Providence and Blythewood will play at 7 p.m. Clover and Providence Day will play at 8 p.m. And Clinton and York will play at 9 p.m.
The jamboree is being put on for a variety of reasons, York coach Dean Boyd said on Wednesday. Among those reasons is to grow this into “the best preseason jamboree in the Carolinas” and to honor a coach who Boyd’s hometown community won’t forget.
“He’s just got so many connections to this community,” Boyd said. ”When I decided I was going to do this, I raised $13,000 in one afternoon. And it’s because of his name. So that tells you what he means to this community and what he means to the coaches in this state.”
Pate made you believe in your community and yourself
Look around the York cafeteria on Wednesday, during the football classic media day, and you saw Pate’s impact everywhere.
Dwayne Hartsoe was there. The athletic director and head basketball coach at Fort Mill played for Pate on the York baseball team when he was in high school, and Pate gave Hartsoe his first job in South Carolina coaching. Brian Lane from Clover was there, and his boss, Bailey Jackson, is Pate’s nephew. Most of the coaches there knew Pate, including Clinton coach Corey Fountain, who is from the same Lamar hometown that Pate was. Almost all of the sponsors of the event — the ones who helped fund the jamboree — are former Pate players. (And some are even York state champions.) Pate’s wife, Carolyn, and his daughter, Karen, were in attendance, too.
“He’s a legend, man,” Hartsoe told The Herald on Wednesday. “He would take me to Lamar, to his hometown. We’d go there to play golf, and we didn’t pay for anything. People knew who he was. They’d feed us. They’d invite him into their homes. He was just a legend.”
Stories of Pate flow by the gallon in York. The coach, who died at age 88 on Christmas Eve, won over his community’s affection by unabashedly being his hard-nosed, tough, disciplined self — wringing the most out of his players and his coaches and his teams and his communities. It’s what made him a successful high school football and baseball and American Legion baseball coach for four decades, and it’s what helped earn him membership into the South Carolina Football Coaches Hall of Fame.
Matt Harper played three years under Pate, including in that 1986 championship season. The former fullback said Pate was a no-nonsense coach who separated “the guys just wanting to wear a jersey from the guys eager to create a winning program” as soon as he arrived. (JR Boyd, an assistant under Pate, corroborated the story: 3A York fielded a remarkably slim team of 19 players in Pate’s first year.)
Harper also said that Pate “made you believe in yourself, your team and your community” and that he taught that poor performance has “tiring consequences” — in football and in life.
“If your game preparation was not up to par at the beginning of the week, the practice field lights would come on, the gates to the field would be locked to keep everyone (else) out, including parents,” Harper wrote to The Herald in an email earlier this week. “Coach Pate may eventually leave, but the assistant coaches and players would still be there. At some point well after 9-10 p.m., when everyone thought they might die, we would go home. The next day of practice would come around, and we would look like a completely new team.
“This was one of the most important lessons I personally learned: When you think you do not have any more to give and you are exhausted, there is a lot more in the tank.”
Chris Stephenson, who played as a tight end and defensive end all four years under Pate and was a senior during that 1986 season, shared similar stories. Stephenson still lives in York, and every once in a while he said he gets stopped at the grocery store and gets congratulated and thanked for bringing a championship to York all those 36 years ago.
He chuckled when recalling one of the first things Pate did when he was at York.
“At that time, we had three mascots that came about in the early ‘70s,” Stephenson said. That mishmash of mascots was a result of multiple schools condensing into York Comprehensive High School. “In football, we were the Green Dragons. In basketball, we were the Blue Devils. And in baseball, we were the Red Cardinals. And — this is just typical of his mentality, his no-nonsense style — Coach Pate was like, ‘This is crazy. We got one school with three mascots. This makes no sense.’
“So he was very instrumental in his first year changing our mascot to the Cougars, which is what we are today.”
A football champion in a football town
Pate coached football and baseball all over South Carolina, spending a bulk of his career at Timmonsville and Lake View. He only spent seven seasons at York — from 1983 to 1989 — and yet the community easily and pridefully calls back to the days of “Coach Pate” to this day.
Why?
“The York program was suffering at the time that he came in, and he brought in discipline,” Boyd said. “He was hard to play for, now. He wasn’t an easy man. ... People say, ‘Gosh, he was only in this place for (seven) years, and he made that big a difference?’ Yeah he did. Because he was at the right place, at the right time, getting things done the right way.”
Dean’s brother, JR, has an idea of why he was so significant in his seven years, too. He was an assistant under Pate before assuming the York job and then building a legacy of his own in Lamar.
JR has endless stories of Pate. Some reflect Pate’s military background, of how he’d drape an American flag over the fence before every practice and kick out players who didn’t work as hard as he demanded. Some reflect Pate’s ferocity, like when he yelled at an umpire one time on the baseball diamond. (“I’ve been thrown out of more games than you’ve umpired!” JR Boyd recalled Pate saying to an umpire once. The memory makes him laugh to this day.)
But JR Boyd knows why, ultimately, York will never forget him. In a town that loves its football — one with a highway named after a former football coach (Tommy Oates Highway) — Pate turned a football team into a football champion.
“It’s always been a football town, and they’ve always come close,” JR Boyd said, “but they won one with Coach Pate. ... He was a great guy, and no matter what sport he coached, he was a winner.”
And he made the people and communities around him winners, too.
Bill Pate White Rose Football Classic
When: Aug. 12, 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Where: York Comprehensive High School
Tickets: $8 on https://gofan.co
Other notes: Before the games, each school will compete in a Tailgate Cook-Off. The 1986 York state championship football team will also be inducted into the YCHS Hall of Fame after the second game.
This story was originally published July 20, 2022 at 4:55 PM.
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