Steve Belichick

Stephen Nickolas Belichick (January 7, 1919 - November 19, 2005) was an American football assistant coach and scout. He played and coached a year in the National Football League (NFL), but spent the majority of his coaching and scouting career in the college ranks. Most people are more familiar with his son Bill Belichick, who is currently the head coach of the New England Patriots.

Early life and education

Stephen Nickolas Belichick was born on January 7, 1919 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Ivan and Mary Barkovic Bilicic. (Later changed to Belichick) His parents moved from Croatia to the United States around 1897. In 1924 the family moved to Struthers, Ohio where Steve attended attended high school and played football.

Steve Belichick was a very good high school football player, fast and tough. He ran the 40-yard dash, the measure of speed in football, in about 4.6 seconds, which was fast for that era. Belichick started to gain some local fame as a high school football player. Years later he was voted into the hall of fame at Struthers High School, where he played fullback. While at Struthers High he met Mike Koma, who was the head football coach of the high school team. Koma was a man the young Belichick greatly admired. From the moment he met Koma he knew he wanted to be a football coach. But, Belichick was aware how hard times were and he did not think college was in the cards for him. However, Bill Edwards, the head coach of Western Reserve in Cleveland, became aware of a high school running back who he thought was very tough, had good hands and speed, and was dangerous in the open field. So in 1937, during the Great Depression, Edwards offered Belichick a football scholarship plus a job digging ditches and cutting foiliage, whatever it took-to pay whatever other costs there were.

Western Reserve, later Case Western Reserve, was an oasis for Steve, a very good college that opened the door to a very different America for him. He had grown up around men and women who had no choices in their lives, who worked in the hardest, most physically demanding jobs that the society had to offer. At Western Reserve many of the students were the sons and daughters of successful people, for whom it had always been a given that they would go to college and then choose the careers they wanted. The football program there did very well under Bill Edwards, going 49-5-2, in his six years there. Belichick repaid the coach who had given him an opportunity to attend college by listening more carefully, working harder, knowing more about what was going on than anyone else. In effect, he almost became like an assistant coach. Edwards ran the single wing, and in his particular version he ran most of his plays through the fullback, who handled the ball. It was a system that suited Steve's talent because he had very good feet and hands. "The best fullback I ever coached," Edwards once told Gordon Cobbledick of the "Cleveland Plain Dealer". [Cleveland Plains Dealer] It was high praise, indeed, because Edwards had also coached Ray Mack, a superlative athlete, who later played second base for the Cleveland Indians. Belichick was later inducted into the Case Reserve Athletic Club Hall of Fame.

Career

Steve Belichick graduated from Western Reserve in 1941. He had a goal of becoming a teacher and coach. In that same year Bill Edwards left Western Reserve to take a job as head coach of the Detroit Lions. Edwards called Belichick up and asked him to become his equipment manager. It was all very primitive: They practiced on the field of an abandoned grade school, and the lockers were for little kids. The equipment manager did not have a lot to do, except collect towels, the socks, and the jocks for the laundry. Because Edwards had little in the way of assistant coaches, Belichick, who knew the system well, almost as well as the coach, was soon helping to coach. The starting fullback for the Lions, Milt Piepul, who was a two-time All-American at Notre Dame, was not handling the ball very well and it soon became clear that Belichick handled the ball better, so he was soon playing fullback as well. Though he did not play in every game, he ended up with the team's best running average, 4.2 yards a carry. He scored three touchdowns that season. The most memorable one came on a 77-yard punt return against the Green Bay Packers. After the season was over he entered the United States Navy.

After leaving the Navy, he was more sure than ever that he wanted to coach. Bill Edwards told him of a job at Hiram College, a small liberal arts college about forty miles from Youngstown, which he ended up taking. Though he was no longer playing professional football, he was happy coaching at Hiram. In addition to football, he coached four other sports. He coached at Hiram for several years before leaving to become Bill Edwards' defensive coach at Vanderbilt. Edwards and Belichick did well at Vanderbilt, but it was never easy. The Southeastern Conference was a good if not great conference. Vanderbilt, having significantly tougher academic entrance requirements than many of its rivals, could not compete in recruiting the same athletes that the rest of the conference was attaining. Edwards and Belichick lasted four years there with a record of 21-19-2, which given Vanderbilt's stricter academic policies, was remarkable. Even so Edwards and his staff were fired and a hard lesson was learned in the Belichick family about the profession and politics involved in coaching.

Though Belichick was out of a job he was thought of highly by his players and peers which kept him from being unemployed for long. He had an absolute dedication to the craft of scouting. He had been blessed with great eyesight, 20/15. He could see clearly where other people had black areas. But it was more than just a gift of exceptional vision; it was the ability to use that vision, to be able, as a scout, to anticipate the play and read it. The key, he decided early on, was to watch the center, for the center almost always told you so much: whether it was a pass or run, and which way the play was going. Then your eye flashed accordingly to the flow of the play, out to the end and the offensive lineman on the side to which the center had tipped you, and you had to do all this quickly, almost before the play developed, because otherwise you would be too late, and then your eye would not see the entire play unfolding. Mac Robinson who played under Belichick thought he was "the best scout I've ever seen-the amount of detail and knowledge was unmatched. If Steve said something was going to happen in a game, then it was going to happen in a game." Other players agreed. "Best scout in the pre-computer age that football ever had," said Don Gleisner, who played defensive back at Vanderbilt and then played in the NFL. Future NFL Hall of Fame coach Bill Walsh thought that Belichick saw the game the way very few do, "Steve has superior intelligence and intellect, and he not only saw the game as very few scouts did, but as he was seeing it, he understood it as very few scouts do." Steve Belichick went on to coach at North Carolina for three years before moving on to Navy, where he coached from 1956-1989, until he retired.

Death and afterward

Steve Belichick passed away on November 19, 2005 from heart failure, though he was never a head coach, he was best known for his great ability to scout opponents and players.

References

The Education of a Coach by David Halberstam [David Halberstam] [http://www.allthingsbillbelichick.com/steveb.htm]