The gift, the giver, and boys who play ball

 Some youth ballplayers didn’t have a ride to the field. So coaches would pick them up for practice and drive them home, only to find both cars in the driveway. “Some of them didn’t have the best family life, and we tried to give them through ball what they weren’t getting from home,” says Donna Womack, whose husband Eddie coached. “They were good athletes. You just take them under your wing.”

Years later, a man approached the Womacks at a restaurant. He had a son with him, about 8 years old. The man told his son, “This was my coach in Optimist Ball, and he taught me more about life and baseball than anyone I’ve ever known.”

Not all sports accomplishments are validated by statistics. Interpersonal skills, effort and determination can’t be numerically recorded in a coaching notebook. Neither can basic concern for a person’s well-being.

Eddie Womack coached people, not just athletes. For 35 years in Mount Holly schools, Little Leagues, Dixie Youth League baseball, Babe Ruth, fall ball. He also played football and baseball for Mount Holly High School and played both sports at Lenoir-Rhyne.

Around Mount Holly, he’s known as the man who has coached so many kids – and cared about so many kids.

But there is one statistic Womack knows: According to the NCAA, only about 2 percent of high school athletes receive a college scholarship. And, fewer than 2 percent of college athletes have the chance to turn pro.

Youth ball, or maybe high school ball, is all they get.

“That’s when you need these special coaches. It’s a gift. Coaching is a gift,” Donna says. “You have to have a passion for it.”

Eddie Womack first put on a players’ uniform in 1962, for pee-wee football. He played fullback and tailback for Mount Holly High from 1965 through 1967 and played baseball 1965 through 1968. He went to Lenoir-Ryne in 1968 and started coaching locally in 1971, when he assisted Coach Delmer Wiles with baseball and football at Mount Holly High. The next 30-plus years were a tour of youth leagues, one after the other, season after season.

This year, for his efforts, he’s inducted in the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame with the Community Service Award.

“I’m just a representative of people that have helped coach with me. You can’t do it by yourself,” he says. “It’s just in my blood. I just want to coach. Some people tell me I’m crazy and ask how I put up with the parents. I tell them, the parents don’t mess with me. I’m here to teach the kids to play ball.”

But family influences happen.

“I had a kid at East Gaston, and he was tall, and he said all he could do was pitch. His older brother played college ball, and I had a talk with him privately,” Womack says, “and I said, ‘Let me be honest with you. You don’t want to play baseball.’ I just had that feeling, and one day his brother came to watch him play. And I told him, ‘You’re not your brother. I have two sons. They’re not the same.’ Parents sometimes want kids to be something they’re not. It’s a crying shame.”

The Womacks’ sons are Kelly, who will be 43 in November, and Kent, who will turn 40 in January. Eddie Womack is 70. He and Donna have been married 45 years. “Ever since I’ve known him, he’s loved sports,” she says. “When we got married, he played softball and on the traveling league team and the wives would go. So we’ve always been in it, and around it, and he umpires, and he’s always been on a ballfield. He just loves the kids and what he does.

“It’s funny, because sometimes these big, tall guys will come up to him and say, ‘Hi, Coach,’ and they were like 8 or 9 when he coached them. It makes him feel good. The boys, they don’t forget what you taught them. He says he tries to teach them ball and the values of life. You can carry the values on through long after the games.”

So many stories:

“I had one kid, he was 13 or 14 and his parents separated right before ball started and he had a big chip on his shoulder because he thought everyone was looking at him,” Womack says, “because at that time, not a lot of people separated or got divorced. We were at a ballgame and I brought him in from the outfield to pitch, and me and another coach were walking back to the sideline laughing and he thought we were laughing at him and he hollered at us. And he’s about 6-foot and I’m about 5-foot-7 if you stretch me, and I said, ‘Don’t you ever holler at a coach again. All I want you to do is pitch.’ After he finished that inning he said, ‘I’m sorry, coach.’ And I said, ‘I love you buddy.’ He made All-Stars. I wanted him to enjoy the game of baseball.”

And:

“I had one team a few years ago, a guy called me up late on a Thursday night and says, ‘I got 14 boys who want to play ball this fall, and we’ll put them in a league.’ I said, first question, do they want to play ball? He said, ‘Yes. They didn’t make the travel team.’ I said, if they want to play, I’ll coach ‘em. So we played the fall league and went 7-2-1. One guy says, ‘How’d you get these boys to win? We couldn’t get them to win in rec ball. And I said, I’m not their daddy. Sometimes you need a change.”

Womack was in an accident in 2015. He drives a truck now, for Lanier Material Sales. Doctors want to put a metal plate in his back. Some days, he has trouble walking. But he wants to coach again. He lost his best friend at age 17, and his last words to him, before doctors operated on the friend’s brain, were, “We’ll throw the ball when you get out of the hospital.” He doesn’t question the Lord’s work, he says. “I know I’ll see him again.”

Meanwhile, he watches the kids play ball, tries to give them part of his gift before they’re grown.

He quotes a song by Trace Adkins:

“You’re gonna miss this/ You’re gonna want this back/ You’re gonna wish these days hadn’t gone by so fast/ These are some good times/ So take a good look around/ You may not know it now/ But you’re gonna miss this.”

One day, Donna says, Eddie left her a note.

It said, “Donna, thank you for always letting me do what I love to do.”