news-record.com

Raised on a dairy farm in Virginia, Neal Hatcher knew what a good day’s work felt like. Even after becoming Grimsley’s athletics director in 2000, he could most often be found out on the Whirlies’ athletics fields, tending his kingdom with a tractor, mower, blower or just a little elbow grease.

“Incredibly hard worker. He never stopped,” current Whirlies athletics director Lewis Newman said.

“You have to be a blue-collar AD, quite frankly,” said Bob Sawyer, Hatcher’s longtime predecessor at Grimsley. “It’s an administrative job, but you’ve got to get out there in the field.”

Hatcher, who also coached football at Grimsley, Glenn and Asheboro, died early Wednesday morning from kidney failure. He is survived by his wife, Debbie, and two children, Nicholas and Suzanne.

Hatcher came to Grimsley in the mid-1980s as an assistant to head football coach Jeff Smouse. It was there he met Todd Shuping, who would later become his assistant at Glenn and one of his closest friends.

“He was always the ultimate teacher – not Xs and Os so much, but life, how to deal with people, how to be a leader,” said Shuping, whom Hatcher later hired as head coach at Grimsley and who is now at Providence Grove in Climax. “He had all the good qualities you look for.”

Sawyer retired from Grimsley in 1999 after more than 30 years at the school, and he said picking Hatcher as his successor was an easy decision.

“He didn’t take a rule and try to break it down to see how he could use it to his advantage,” Sawyer said. “He made decisions based on what was good for the program and good for the youth.”

Page athletics director Rusty Lee said people were often surprised to see he and Hatcher sitting together during Page-Grimsley games.

“We loved beating each other,” Lee said, “but we were great friends before and after.”

Never moreso than one rainy morning just before the Page-Grimsley football game in 1999, when Lee got an unexpected phone call from Hatcher.

“I’ve got your billy goat over here,” Hatcher said.

Lee, who thought he was referring to the Billy Goat brand of lawn equipment, told him that couldn’t be, he had just seen it in the garage.

No, Hatcher insisted. Just come over. So Lee drove to Grimsley, where he found that some Page students, vying for the practical joke of the year, had painted a pair of goats red and released them inside Jamieson Stadium. The rain had turned them both pink. Lee and Hatcher stood doubled over under an umbrella and cried laughing as they tried to remember which page of the AD manual included the proper response to this situation.

“Sometimes you get in this job and you take yourself way too seriously,” Lee said. “He never got to a point where he couldn’t laugh.”

Contact Tom Keller at 373-7034 or tom.keller@news-record.com.