Curry hired the first female coach in CF

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With all of the talk about female coaches breaking new ground, Carol White was the first. She coached special teams at GT and I wish we could call upon her again because she sounds like a savant.


Carol White made coaching history at Georgia Tech, but her CFB legacy was only beginning


Carol White walked into Bill Curry’s office for an interview in August 1985, ready to explain her many theories on kicking, punting and snapping instruction to the Georgia Tech head coach.
But Curry surprised her, cutting her off.
“Tell me about yourself,” he said.
He told White he wouldn’t have brought her in for the interview if he didn’t already know she knew kicking and the physics behind it. He did not need to hear about her special teams background or the way her brain worked, though he would soon find out she was something of a human computer for the game’s third phase, calculating the speed and trajectory not just of a kicked football but of the players on the field providing coverage, too. After a decade and a half coaching high school football, White could watch tape, analyze tendencies, and identify strengths and weaknesses in any phase of the game, armed only with pencil, paper and 16mm film.
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“I learned later that there were probably 100 people who wanted that job,” White told The Athletic in a recent interview. “It wasn’t promised to me. It was their choice about what could make the team better. It was about my ability to take in large amounts of detail and digest it quickly, and in the presence of famous people, I just say what I’m thinking. I’m a New Englander, not a Southern belle. If you want to ask me a question, I’m going to give you a very truthful answer.”
White passed Curry’s test. She was hired and assigned to the kickers, punters and long snappers, a position she held for two seasons before Curry left for Alabama. New Georgia Tech coach Bobby Ross retained her and expanded her role, as she became a volunteer coach and the program’s kicking specialist for the 1987 and ’88 seasons. She moved over to an academic faculty position at Georgia Tech in February 1989 — which freed her from NCAA rules that limited how and when she could work directly with prospective and current players, by far her favorite part of the job — and eventually paved her own way to spend the next two decades running kicking camps to train a generation of teenage specialists working to earn college scholarships.
Nearly three decades since she became what is believed to be Division I’s first female football coach, White’s impact on the sport remains hidden beneath the surface. When Michigan announced the hire of a female graduate assistant earlier this year, the school incorrectly believed she was the first at a Power 5 institution.
Those who had worked alongside White at Georgia Tech knew otherwise, though. As did every Auburn head coach from Pat Dye through Gene Chizik who had enlisted White to run Auburn’s summer kicking camp. In some ways, Carol White is major college football’s best-kept secret, even though her imprint on the game should not be.
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“Almost nobody knew,” said Curry. “Nobody besides us heard her talk about her craft.”
White’s football career began essentially by accident.
A Vermont native who initially aspired to be a lawyer, White eventually attended Southern Miss on a music scholarship. After graduating in 1970, she was hired as a librarian at Monroe High School in Albany, Ga, in its first year of racial integration, becoming the first White faculty member at the school.
On the way in for her first day, she stopped by the football field. The next day, she showed up again, this time to watch practice, and was asked by head coach Winfred Benson to help out.
White began with statistics work and eventually moved into a scouting role. She drove around to other high school programs to see how coaches ran their practices; her gender provided cover to opposing coaches who wouldn’t guess that she worked in their conference.
Her responsibilities continued to grow over the years. She eventually coached linebackers and then the entire defense for more than a decade. Willie Thomas took over as Monroe head coach in 1979 and asked her to add special teams to her plate, noting her strong math and science background could help with the principles of projectile motion involved in kicking a football. So, she looked up the best in the business — legendary instructor Doc Storey — and invited herself down to Fort Lauderdale to learn from him.
White considers Storey as integral to the science of kicking as James Naismith is to the sport of basketball. Storey told her that she someday would inherit his universe of athletes, which proved true. And he taught her the theories she still teaches to this day.
“What he was teaching was geometry and physics to kids who are still in high school,” White said. “I realized that we could teach it even more effectively if we had people who were really teachers — not just athletes, not just coaches — that we could teach these children something that they could maximize.”
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She wanted to teach skills to athletes while they were young. She wanted to help instill leadership qualities in those kids. And she wanted to teach coaches that special teams were important and that there were measurable ways to improve.

The idea to hire White came from Georgia Tech assistant coach John Guy, who was coaching the Yellow Jackets’ defensive ends and kickers. In April of 1985, legendary BYU coach LaVell Edwards had come to Georgia Tech to speak at its spring coaching clinic. Curry had instructed his assistants to make sure someone on staff introduced himself to every attendee. White had shown up to learn about Edwards’ offense, bringing along a video camera.
Guy met White that day and called her afterward urging her to apply for a job. She thought he was joking — or, at the very most, only interested in connecting with her because he wanted to recruit her players at Monroe High School.
The next day, Guy went to Curry with what he called “a really unusual idea”: hiring a female graduate assistant coach who specialized in special teams.
“I don’t know if we can manage it or not, but I’d feel guilty if I didn’t bring it up,” Guy told Curry.
The head coach was a bit taken aback by the idea. Guy insisted that Curry would understand why he felt so passionately about this once he talked to White. Guy, a former kicker himself, felt White had more advanced knowledge of soccer-style kicking than he did.
“So we brought her in, and I sat there,” Curry said. “I’d been around kickers my whole career because I was a long snapper. I’d been around some great kickers and some very troubled kickers, and I had spent quite a bit of time with them coaching because I felt like I understood them maybe better than other people.
“She was encyclopedic. I was stunned. I started thinking about how we could manage to get her on our side, because I felt like she could make a difference. I felt that from our very first meeting.”
White intended to stay in the office, at least initially, working on “pencil-and-paper things” as she put it, as she helped Curry evaluate his team. She buried her nose in her work and sat on the floor during staff meetings to stay out of the way.
None of the assistant coaches resisted her presence or took a stand against it, Guy said. He credited Curry’s upbringing in the greater Atlanta area for the head coach’s generally progressive approach to staffing, which extended to hiring a woman.
“With Bill Curry being, well, Bill Curry, there was only one way to be,” Guy said. “It wouldn’t have worked any other way or if it had been someone else. Bill Curry was the right guy.
“It was a perfect storm for Carol.”
White’s title was graduate assistant, but she said her role quickly became equal to that of the other assistants. She became solely responsible for the kicking game, which had become her forte after more than a decade of working in high school football and years spent learning from Storey.
“There’s no special size that makes you good,” White said. “Your body becomes a piece of equipment. You’re teaching each one in the unit how to assist the others in perfecting, rather than teaching one method for everybody.”
Meanwhile, Storey had created the first residential summer kicking camp in the southeast out of Auburn. White worked it and eventually was chosen by Dye to succeed Storey. She ran the Auburn camp for 25 years and also owned a separate company that handled speaking engagements and put on kicking clinics throughout the Southeast.
She did all of this while dealing with physical limitations due to severe rheumatoid arthritis, with which she was officially diagnosed in 1999. Though her doctors recommended she refrain from travel and football activities, she felt she needed to in order to pay her bills, adapting vehicles and using mobility devices to make it work. She said her body forced her off the road for good in 2018. She currently lives in an apartment in Athens, Ga., and still works with athletes and coaches from home.
The Auburn camp, perhaps the part of her career for which she is best known, comprised about 300 campers who spent a week living in dormitories. White said many of the kickers who attended the camp during her 25 years in charge went on to play some level of college football.

White next to the statue of Vince Dooley at the University of Georgia in 2019.
If White were to turn on a football game now, she’d do so with a blank piece of paper in front of her. She’d start, as she always does, by tracking possessions and the movement of individual players.
“I’m interested in what a mass of humans accomplishes just as if it were a skirmish in war,” White said. “And I am looking for the parts of the field that are underused. When Bill first gave me a real film to analyze, I did not just do the stats. I was looking at the relationships among the humans and what was lacking, and also the hang times for the football and how fast people were actually running. If I knew what their speed was.
“I see it as probability and statistics. I do not see live humans.”
White’s brain, her ability to see and remember details that others weren’t able to, was her weapon. She loved basketball — having reached six feet tall by age 12, she would have loved to play it but had no opportunities to do so in a pre-Title IX childhood — and has done statistical work in that sport, too. But she believes 11-on-11 football was, mathematically, much more intriguing. The sport is fortunate she felt that way.
Curry wishes he utilized White even more back then, setting her loose on phases of the game beyond special teams. Guy noted how much Georgia Tech players trusted her and how effective her methods of teaching the physics behind kicking were.
“She understood the shape of the football, she understood the soft spots of the football, and she understood she needed to know where they needed to hit the ball to get different results,” Guy said. “She understood the repetitiveness and the detail that went along with kicking the ball.”
White’s hiring at Georgia Tech did not usher in a wave of women coaching college football. She has mentored a small number of female coaches over the years and made introductions. But the American Football Coaches Association never did much to publicize her membership — which she says was denied when she was a high school assistant and finally granted when she was hired by the Yellow Jackets — and she herself focused more on the work itself than on trying to create a pipeline. She agreed to a select few media interviews during her time at Georgia Tech but didn’t want to be a distraction. Like all women who work in male-dominated professions, she struggled with wanting to acknowledge her boundary-breaking while hoping to be recognized simply for her work.
Today, White consults with about a dozen coaches working in all levels of college football, watching film and providing feedback by email. She sleeps four hours per night and wakes up each day at 2 a.m. in order to communicate with coaches who begin their days before dawn. She may be limited physically, but she still processes the game as fast as anyone. Thanks to a nudge from Curry back in 2015, she has also been writing her memoirs, documenting a most unexpected and impactful football life.
“A coach is a person who can take somebody on a field and make a problem go away,” Curry said. “Carol can do that, and she can do it every time. And most people just throw up their hands and say, ‘Bleeping kickers!’
“But it’s also the biggest play in the game, most of the time. The punt is the only 40-yard play every time you do it in football, and the place kick is the only play that can win or lose a game. The kids are so good now, and Carol is one of the reasons for that. I’ll bet you there have been some smart coaches that hung out at her camps and took notes, and her techniques are being taught today.
“Or, at least, I hope so.”

 

[thegtstunner08]

How did this get swept under the rug? Incredible!

 

[LaFlavor]

Absolutely amazing how under-the-radar this was. Really cool story.

 

[gambler]

If she's that successful in the coaching world, imagine how good of a pie she could've baked if she directed that feminine energy where it should have gone.