Coach Natalie Randolph

FAN HOUSE
Article written by Michelle Smith, 6.7.2010, Senior College Sports Writer

Natalie Randolph knew it would be a "big deal" when she accepted the job as the head football coach at Coolidge High School in Washington D.C. She'd already had a taste of the attention and media coverage when she became an assistant coach on the football team at H.D. Woodson High two years before.

"Big deal" doesn't do this justice.

Randolph, 30, joins a handful of women serving as high school football coaches at any level. As for head coaches, it is believed there are only two -- Randolph and Debbie Vance, at Lehman High in the Bronx.

The press conference announcing that Randolph would take the job was packed with more than three dozen cameras. The D.C. mayor, Adrian Fenty, showed up, delaying the proceedings by a couple of hours, and declared it "Natalie Randolph Day."

Randolph made national television appearances on "Good Morning America" and the "Early Show," interviews on CNN and MSNBC. There were stories in The Washington Post and The New York Times and USA Today. There is interest in turning her story into a book, but she's not taking that one too seriously ... not yet, anyway.

"I haven't even coached a game yet," Randolph said. That won't happen for several months still. Three months have passed since the series of events that turned this petite, soft-spoken science teacher into a national story.

In that time, Randolph has hired a staff of seven assistant coaches -- if you can say hired since all are volunteers. One is D.C. legend Bob Headen, who retired after 25 years as the head football coach at Woodson, where he won eight championships and sent a handful of players into the NFL. She has run her first spring conditioning and practice sessions, including seven-on-seven scrimmages.

She has sold herself -- her history as a college athlete and her six years of experience in women's professional football -- to alumni, local businesses, parents and to the young men on her team who came to quiz her on X's and O's the day after she was offered the job.

She has set in motion strict standards for behavior and academic achievement and swiftly doled out penalties to those who fall short. She has done interviews and speaking engagements, shopped for equipment and tried to drum up funding to recondition helmets and pads. And she has taught six periods a day to 135 students at Coolidge in environmental science and biology.

Final exams are coming up. Randolph gets to school before 8 a.m. and is trying to get out the door by 9:30 p.m. Her assistants are taking turns staying with her to walk her to her car after dark. But summer vacation can't come soon enough. "It's been absolutely nuts," Randolph said.

Randolph still isn't entirely sure how she got here. She was not looking for this opportunity. In fact, school officials -- including the principal and the school's managing partners -- came looking for her.

Quite literally, in fact.
Coolidge assistant principal Vernard Howard came upstairs to the teacher's lounge to give Randolph the heads-up that her name had come up in a meeting
"We had interviewed 10 candidates or so and we were growing frustrated," Howard said. "We had offered one guy the job and he was using it to get a raise at his other job. Somebody in the meeting said we should check out Natalie, see if she wanted to interview for the position. Everybody's eyebrows rose."

Howard said he excused himself from the table and went to find Randolph to tell her that her name was in the conversation. Was she interested? Randolph said, "No way."

"I told her I thought she would be a great coach," Howard said. "And she looked like she was considering it, so I sent a text message down to the principal and they called Natalie's name over the loudspeaker and told her to come downstairs and the rest is history." Well, it turned into history anyway.

Randolph went back to her class after that first meeting to prepare a presentation for her interview. She broke the segments of the program into separate boxes and put together an organizational chart. She told the committee that she would not be anybody's guinea pig and that if she took the job, she was going to do things her way. Howard said the committee was "blown away" by her presentation and her vision for the program. They offered her the job on the spot.

And when she accepted, she came back to class and her students clapped. "That really touched me," Randolph said. "The kids have been so great. They made me cards and posters."

Not everybody was on board. At least not a first. A group of players came to her classroom to express their concerns and make sure for themselves that she knew football. "I told them, 'I'm going to do everything I can to make sure you succeed, but it's not going to be easy. You are going to have to do your work and I'm not going to put you out here and set you up for failure,' " Randolph said.

Only one player has told her of his intention to transfer to another school at the end of the year. Still, Howard said that initially, the administration "caught heat."

"But at that press conference, everybody became instant Natalie supporters. The people who told us 'Damn you to hell for doing this' kind of changed. But the season hasn't started yet and that's when the reaction is really going to come."

Randolph knows that and she's glad to have Headen by her side. His status in the D.C. high school sports community -- including the eight football titles and 500 wins as a basketball coach -- brings her both experience and credibility. When Headen heard Randolph was taking the job, he told mutual friends to tell her to call, that he would be willing to come out of retirement for a couple of years to help her get the program off the ground.

"I told her I would mentor her and I would coach the line," Headen said. "Look at her background. She went to a prestigious school (Virginia) and she earned a scholarship. She was not handed one. And she's got six years of professional football. She's got the experience.

"I knew no one would take her seriously, that no one would believe that a woman could do the job, but the thing I've always said is, 'Suppose Rosa (Parks) got off the bus.' I'm a coach that believes in a challenge and this is a historical challenge."

The old coach is already impressed with how his young protege -- all 5-foot-3, 130 pounds of her -- handles herself. "She's a fiery little woman," Headen said.

The first week of practice, Headen said, a couple of players came in late. Headen told Randolph that he would be the "buffer," smooth things over with the players in a good-cop, bad-cop arrangement. "She says to me, 'Coach, I got this', and she did more to them than I would have done to them," Headen said with a chuckle.

Randolph said that when she took the job she told the school administrators that winning would not be her first priority. She is committed to making sure her players succeed academically. The teacher in her is as strong as the coach. Players are turning in daily progress reports from teachers that show they are showing up to class and turning in their work. If not, they run. "I get there about 4:55 and if I see two or three guys running up the hill, I know why," Headen said.

She knows as well as anyone the value of a good education for the students in what has historically been a troubled school system in D.C.

Randolph grew up in D.C., but did not attend the public schools. She graduated from Sidwell Friends, a private school best known as the place where Malia and Sasha Obama go to school and where Chelsea Clinton went to school while her father was in the White House.

"I wasn't on the same level as my classmates in terms of socioeconomic status, but my parents put everything into Sidwell and then said, 'You're on your own for college,' " Randolph said.

She ended up at the University of Virginia as a walk-on on the track team, eventually earning a full scholarship, where she earned her degree in environmental science. An injury provided her a fifth year and a chance to earn her master's in education.

"Not because I wanted to teach, but because it was the only (master's program) I could cram into a year," Randolph said.

After graduation, she went to work with the D.C. Department of Public Works in outreach and education, but ended up quitting that job. And then she got a call from one of the teachers she worked with through Public Works. The teacher was leaving her job at H.G. Woodson High and wanted to know if Randolph wanted to take her place.

It was mid-October, Randolph didn't have a job, "and it sounded good." She heard from the Woodson principal the next day. "Can you start on Monday?" the principal asked.

Randolph had never taught before, but she showed up to class on Monday and walked into a room of students.
"It was a baptism by fire," Randolph said. "Woodson was a rough school and I was like 'Hey, I'm the new teacher.' "I came home the first week and thought, 'Oh my God, what did I get myself into?' " Randolph said. "But I grew to love it."

Randolph said her experience with football gave her a toughness that she needed. "I wouldn't have been able to do it those first few months if I hadn't played football," Randolph said.

Randolph grew up watching Redskins-Cowboys games on television. She wanted to play football in high school, but her father wouldn't let her try out because he was afraid she would get injured and damage her future in track and field. At Virginia, she would spend Sundays in her dorm room watching NFL games.
After graduation, her father called. He was a physical therapist treating one of the players from the D.C. Divas of the Independent Women's Football League. He thought the player might be able to help his daughter get a job.

But she wanted to talk about football. Randolph and her family went to a game. "And I said, 'Yeah, I have to do this.' " She was introduced to the coach and went to a team tryout the following weekend.

"If you ask any of my teammates, they didn't think I was going to make it," Randolph said. "They were like 'Who is this skinny girl?' But I was fast. But I couldn't catch anything."

And then there was the hitting.

"We don't grow up exerting our force against another person and it was very foreign," Randolph said. "It was an interesting experience, but once you learn how to do it, it's addictive."

Randolph hasn't played the past two years because of an ankle injury. She's not giving up on the possibility that she could play again. "But I can't do it now that I'm coaching," Randolph said.

Nor can she plan her wedding. Randolph is engaged to another football coach, Thomas Byrd, whom she met when she was on the staff at Woodson. No time to get married quite yet.

She needs to find funds to support her program. "There's no money," Randolph said. "We are starting from scratch." And doing it under an intense spotlight.

"When they hired me, I told them, 'You understand, I'm not a man and this is going to be a big deal,' " Randolph said. "But once I decide to do something, I'm going to do it right."

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