Remembered as God’s servant and a football coach

by Christian Malone

Nick Hyder said a number of times that he did not want to be remembered as a football coach but as God’s servant. He did a fine job of being both.

Hyder was a great high school football coach, and a very devout Christian man, and was well-known for both.

Hyder’s coaching career was one matched by very few coaches in Georgia prep football history. Only seven coaches in the state have won 300 games. Hyder was one of them. Only three coaches have won seven state championships. Hyder is one of them.

He took the reigns of the ultra-successful Valdosta High football program, dealt with the intense pressure that comes with being the VHS coach, and kept the program among the nation’s elite.

For 22 years, Nick Hyder manned the reigns of the Valdosta High football program. During that time, he did his best to make sure his players were winners — on and off the field.

His best-known phrase was, “Never, never, never quit,” and Hyder never quit trying to develop both character and football skills in young men.

At any other program in Georgia, Hyder would have been The Man, but it took a few years until many of the Wildcat faithful embraced him. Coming in not long after fellow legend Wright Bazemore’s retirement was not easy.

But it was under Hyder that the Wildcat football dynasty experienced a renaissance in the 1980’s, returning to the perch on top of the high school football world it had occupied in Bazemore’s final 12 seasons.

From 1982 to 1992, the Wildcats won six state championships. And the three national championship trophies that Bazemore had won years earlier were joined by the ones Hyder’s teams won in 1984, 1986 and 1992. Valdosta was also national runner-up in 1982. Hyder was chosen the National Coach of the Year in 1984 and 1986.

In 1974, Hyder was the man chosen to continue the VHS dynasty. He made waves immediately, but not the kind local fans wanted. He kicked 15 players off the team for disciplinary reasons, and the Wildcats went 3-7. It would be the last time Hyder finished below .500.

A year later, Valdosta was 10-2. Three years later, VHS was back in the state championship game. The next year, 1978, Valdosta was state champions again.

The 1980s came, and Hyder’s Valdosta teams started adding trophies. State titles in 1982, 1984, 1986, and 1989, and two more in 1990 and 1992. The three national championships. From 1980 to 1992, Valdosta went 163-11, a .937 winning percentage.

From the first game of 1986 until the fourth game of 1993, beating Valdosta in the regular season was next to impossible. The Wildcats went 71-1-1 in that period of time. That one loss, to Colquitt County in 1989, was avenged three weeks later in the playoffs, en route to a state title.

In 1994, his next-to-last year as coach, Hyder took his team to the semifinals one last time. The opponent was Southwest DeKalb, which had 16 future Division I signees. On paper, Valdosta didn’t match up, but Nick Hyder’s teams historically never, never, never quit, and this one sure didn’t. Southwest DeKalb scored 38 points that night, but Valdosta scored 40 to stage the huge upset.

In 1996, Cleveland Field was renamed Cleveland Field at Bazemore-Hyder Stadium, honoring its two legends.

But to know Nick Hyder simply as a football coach would not be to know all there was to know of Nicholas Samuel Hyder. Hyder was also a fine man, one who never stopped trying to instill in his players the right values: God, family, country, friends, academics, Wildcats.

When Keith Watson played for rival Tift County, he hated Hyder and the VHS program because of their success against Tift. But something later led Watson to become a die-hard Wildcat fan: he met Nick Hyder the man, and was so blown away by that man that he wanted to be a fan of whatever team Hyder was coaching. Other men and women were not so much Wildcat fans as they were Hyder fans.

He was also, by reputation, a great preacher. When he came to Valdosta in 1974, one of the first things he did was to organize a local chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. He would always start each football practice with a devotion and prayer. He made sure that everyone knew that while football was very important, God would always be No. 1 in his life.

Nick Hyder’s career as Valdosta football coach ended at the same moment his life did. When Hyder suddenly died while eating lunch on May 16, 1996, it was the end of not just a coaching career and a fine life, but also an era. Men like Nick Hyder are never truly replaced.

His funeral was held at Bazemore-Hyder Stadium, on the 50-yard line of the field he had won so many games on. It was held there not for obvious reasons, but rather because it was the only place in town big enough to seat everyone that wanted to come to it. Thousands crowded the stadium to say good-bye to their coach.

In 1997, Hyder was posthumously inducted into the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame. In 2002, he was a member of the second class of the Georgia Athletic Coaches Association Hall of Fame inductees.

•••

Text Only