Auburn’s Malzahn remains a high school coach at heart

Gus Malzahn has risen to the upper echelon of the college football coaching ranks, but he thinks about a loss in the 1994 Arkansas high school state championship game once a week.

He was a high school coach then and, for the most part, now.

“I’m a high school football coach at my core,” Malzahn, Auburn University’s football coach, told a gathering at the South Carolina Athletic Coaches Association All-Sports Clinic Sunday afternoon at the TD Convention Center in Greenville.

“That’s who I am. I just happen to be coaching college. When I first got into college coaching, I was trying to defend myself all the time. But now I take great pride in that.”

Malzahn told the coaches his story, his ascension from a long-time high school head coach to his success at Auburn.

“I started out at Hughes, Arkansas,” he said. “I never heard of where Hughes is. That’s how small it is. You can go there today. Cell phone service does not work. The Wal-Mart’s about 35 minutes away, so it’s out in the middle of nowhere.”

He motioned to a photo of himself and another coach up on the big screen.

“This picture kind of says it all,” Malzahn said. “That’s our staff — me and him.”

Nonetheless, Malzahn said it was a good place to be because he learned the value of hard work.

“You had to mow the grass,” he said. “You had to water the field. You cleaned toilets. You drove the bus. I was the head coach at this place, and I drove that big yellow bus, and I liked it. I also learned football. I was the head coach my second year, and I never got a chance to learn under someone, so I learned by making mistakes.”

In his fourth season at Hughes, Malzahn led the team to the state final. The result was a loss he said he still thinks about “because I didn’t do a very good job of coaching.”

Two years later, he left Hughes — “probably the poorest school in the state,” he said — for Shiloh Christian, “probably the richest.”

After five years at Shiloh, he went to Springdale High School, the largest school in Arkansas.

“We had great facilities,” Malzahn said. “We had field turf before field turf was popular, an indoor facility, a Jumbotron.”

In 2005, Springdale went 14-0 and finished No. 1 or 2 in most national polls. Having reached his goals at the high school level and with the school preparing for a split, Malzahn headed to Arkansas as offensive coordinator, beginning his rise at the college level.

“I grew up in Arkansas, and I was a Hog fan,” he said. “That was a big deal for me to be coaching there.”