Hitting the road
Greg Echols will probably wake up every morning and slip on a green Spartans shirt. It’s more than habit. It’s been a way of life.
The retiring track and cross-country coach arrived in the Mountain Brook system not as a coach, but as a second-grader. His parents both taught in the system, and his grandmother taught at Crestline when it was a two-room schoolhouse — 94 years ago.
After graduating from MBHS and then the University of South Alabama, he returned as a teacher and coach at Brookwood Forest Elementary. He progressed to the junior high and then the high school and just completed 38 years of coaching track and cross- country this season, his 22nd year at the high school.
Most folks know that Mountain Brook High has more state championships than any other school in the state — 152 and counting. Echols’ teams picked up 46 of those blue state championship trophies. There are another 19 red runner-up trophies, including one in girls outdoor track in May.
In his career at the junior high and high school, he’s coached a whopping 68 state championship teams.
No wonder he’s in the Alabama High School Athletic Association Hall of Fame.
For Echols, 60, it seemed the right time to walk away. Part of it is the blessing of the Alabama retirement system and part of it is the curse of the daily grind. No matter how much you love to coach and teach young people, “Working six days a week for 38 years, I’m tired,” Echols said. “I still love kids, still love coaching, that part’s never changed. I’ve been a single father for 11 years, so I go home to a second job.”
But even though the time seems right, “It’s been a bigger struggle than I thought to stop. One of those things you pray about it, you feel like it’s the right timing, the right thing to do. And it just makes financial sense.”
Mountain Brook is a unique place. It is acknowledged as one of the top academic schools in the country and yet it has more state championships than any school in this sports-crazed state. Furthermore, those athletes that accomplish the state titles are not, by and large, elite college prospects.
Echols agrees that being a longtime Spartan — as many of the coaches at MBHS are — is an asset to understanding the Mountain Brook way.
“You understand the culture,” Echols said. “And like [boys basketball coach] Bucky [McMillan] and I have talked some, that you understand these kids do not necessarily play sports to get a college scholarship. They may get one and they may want to do sports in college, but that’s not why they do it. They do it because they love sports, they love the team, they love the camaraderie, they’re raised to work hard. It’s just the nature of Mountain Brook. They work hard at school — everything they do, they work hard.
“[You use] what you know in this community about how to get kids to dig down and find more.”
Still, Echols said some things have changed since he started coaching. Track has to compete with all the other sports, most of which have become year-round activities, and the internet and all the other distractions. As a coach, he said youngsters have so many “coaches,” including “gurus” and parents, that it’s not a given he can command their respect immediately.
“What does ‘coach’ mean? Every dad coaches T-ball, they coach baseball, they coach soccer. So here I come, and I’m ‘Coach’? After having 30 coaches in their lives, what makes me different? Every season I’ve got to earn their respect and belief in me because it’s not, ‘Oh, Coach Echols, he’s won so he knows what he’s doing.”
Through the years, he’s had one particular philosophy of coaching, what he calls “coaching kids’ hearts.”
“Kids’ hearts haven’t changed a bit,” Echols said. “They still want to have somebody care about them, they still want to have a purpose, they still want to feel like what they do makes a difference, matters.
“The idea that you’d take the time to talk to them about life, not just running, and they realize, ‘Hey, he cares about me.’ … They realize they’re in a safe place. I think that’s a huge part of our success.”
Recently retired Athletics Director Terry Cooper said Echols has been a tremendous asset at Mountain Brook.
“I feel that paramount in Greg’s success has been his focus and ability to emphasize the ‘team’ concept in a sport that many consider to be an individual sport,” Cooper said. “Greg has been able to take athletes of all abilities and motivate them to discover and accomplish things far above their potential. He has been able to identify in athletes something that they did not know they had and help them discover where it is that they can be most successful.
“The most important characteristic of Coach Echols is his love of kids and his desire that they learn through track the character values important in life.”
One of those character traits he espouses is that the only failure is not trying, and though he wants to win as much as anyone else, it’s not all about winning.
His final girls outdoor track team managed a runner-up spot, but he was immensely proud of the girls.
“Wow,” he laughs. “We weren’t real deep. We had a few quality athletes, but watching these kids come together … We probably should’ve been fifth. We had to have our best performance of the year in the final event, the 4x400 relay. We were three-quarters of a point behind Auburn and a quarter-point ahead of McGill. So we had to beat them both in the 4x4. And these girls have just found a way to get it done. And it was seniors, eighth-graders, just whatever it took, some kids have stepped up. Scored two girls in the long jump, we weren’t supposed to score anybody. Frances Patrick just had a phenomenal meet in the mile and 2-mile.
“It’s a team concept. We really don’t have that superstar, just blue-collar girls working their tail off. All of a sudden we look up and we’ve got enough points to get second. And that’s what makes it exciting for us. Everybody pitching in and doing their part.”
Ultimately, through all the trophies and numbers, the numbers that really matter are the number of students coaches like Echols reach in their career.
“I hope if I have a legacy, it’s that I’ve made a difference in kids’ lives,” Echols said. “That’s why I got into coaching. And as much as winning is great, that’s never what it’s been about to me. It’s been about making a difference. Making them better people when they get out of here.”