Barry Switzer: A high school coach pays tribute

We ran a 75th birthday tribute to Barry Switzer in the Friday Oklahoman. You can read it here, plus my column about Switzer, which is here.

But of the 75 tributes we collected, we omitted a very important element. High school coaches. We didn’t talk to any high school coaches from Switzer’s days, except Charley North, who eventually was hired by Switzer to join the OU staff.

But I received an email Friday from Ray Goldsby, who coached at a variety of Oklahoma high schools, most notably at Moore. I thought I would share Goldsby’s email with you:

“What a super article you had today concerning Coach Switzer’s 75th birthday. I have read and re-read it numerous times already this morning. I know you could not talk to everyone about what Coach Switzer means or has meant to them, but one category of people would be the high school coaches that coached during his time at OU. In my opinion, one of his great assets in recruiting was how he worked with the high school coaches. He never talked down to us. He was just like one of us or we were just like him in his eyes. We could and did go to OU many, many times to visit with he and his staff about drills, fundamentals, strategy, etc even though we were not running the wishbone offense, but was running their defense. Coach Switzer, Coach Bobby Proctor, Coach Warren Harper, Coach Merv Johnson, & Pete Martinelli, in the training and conditioning area, always welcomed us and other high school coaches at any time to come to OU to pick their brain. Another great trait of each of the coaches mentioned above was that they would come by our coaches office or practice just to say hello or see how we were doing even though we might not have one Division I recruit that they were interested in. Great man, great staff, & great times.”