McNulty had just been named head football coach at Charlotte Latin, where Grier was the quarterback.
The new coach, a Yankee from Meadville, Pa., had a few football camp obligations back home and invited his new quarterback to stay at his house and attend the camps so that he could learn the triple option offense the coach would install at Latin.
“I had never been out of North Carolina except for going to Myrtle Beach a few times,” says Grier, now the head coach at Davidson Day. “And here I am, in an orange Ford Fiesta, going 25 miles an hour on the highway with the four-way flashers on while my new coach is driving and drawing up plays.”
McNulty eventually pulled into the truck stop, where he found an old fire hose, stretched it out in theparking lot and made markings on the hose showing the various gaps and proper spacing of players in the offense.
“The first time I ran the option was at a rest stop in West Virginia,” says Grier, who will lead his Davidson Day team against his alma mater and former coach Friday at 7 p.m. at Latin.
It will be a game with some important benchmarks, especially for the Patriots, who are 8-0 but have yet to play any team that carries with it an apt local measuring stick. For Davidson Day football, the only game circled on the schedule since last summer has been this one.
“That’s the big pitch for them,” says McNulty. “This is their Super Bowl. They get to see how theystack up.” Grier agrees.
“For them, this is just another game,” he says. “For us, it is our Super Bowl. We aspire to be like Charlotte Latin. Our goal is not to be the world’s tallest midget.”
The seeds for Grier’s lofty aspirations were first planted in that summer of ’85 when he began seeing former players rave about McNulty, usually mentioning character traits like loyalty, dedication and sacrifice. They were talking about football. But they weren’t really talking about football.
The Patriots coach calls his summer in Pennsylvania a quarterback boot camp, complete with ankle weights, daily wake up calls and more life lessons than he can count. The handbook on how to run a high school football program was permanently, albeit subconsciously, etched into the then-17-year-old Grier’s head that summer.
The secret to success wasn’t about mastering a new offense in a truck stop parking lot in the middle of West Virginia. It was about the passion for football this new coach had, his desire to teach, his level of commitment and his hope of making a difference in teenagers’ lives.
“Right then and there, I knew how special it was to be in the presence of someone like Mac,” says Grier.
So as the blueprint for success was unrolled at Davidson Day after Grier’s hiring last year, there was no surprise at all that it bore such an uncanny resemblance to the one McNulty unleashed 25 years ago at Charlotte Latin.
“From day one, we didn’t want to build a team; we wanted to build a program,” says Grier. “God willing, I’ll have kids come back and tell me about college, and their jobs, and their families long after they’ve left Davidson Day. That’s my vision. That’s what Mac instilled in me.”
Of course, there’s another quirky connection that binds the beginning of the McNulty era at Latin to the launching of the Grier era at Davidson Day. In Friday’s game, the key player on the field will be a quarterback named Grier. In this case, it’s sophomore signal-caller Will Grier, Chad’s son, who grew up idolizing Latin players when his dad was quarterback coach there in the mid-1990s.
“When you watch them, when you look at them in uniform, the way they walk, the way they handle themselves on the field, they look exactly the same,” says McNulty. “It’s like a mini Chad Grier on the field.”
Will Grier has thrown for 2,762 yards and 41 touchdowns this season. McNulty says Will is as good as his father, who went on to quarterback at East Carolina.
“You will see him in the SEC, or Big 10, or Big 12, or anywhere he wants to go,” says McNulty. “He’s that good.”
McNulty says Will has benefited from the teaching of his father. Chad Grier says everything he’s taught his son is a fraction of what McNulty taught him.
“I’m humbled to be around him,” says Chad Grier, of his former coach. “I feel blessed.”
