In Lincoln, overcast is more of a feeling than a forecast, though the weather definitely matches the mood this September afternoon.
Chad Martin shuts the door of the office in the field house at Lincoln High School, buying a moment of quiet amid 43 boys playfully heading out of the adjoining locker room for football practice.
Easing down in a folding chair, he looks around. The room, Martin’s office for the last week or so, has a picture of Bear Bryant on one of the walls, but in this office, this town, the former University of Alabama coach isn’t the centerpiece.
There’s a bigger “Bear” on the other wall, one who’s made a bigger impact in these parts — Keith Howard, head football coach of Lincoln’s Golden Bears. A man who would’ve given the shirt off of his back to any of those boys outside, a man who wanted to give Christ to everyone he came in contact with, Martin said. “There’s no limit to what he would do for you.”
That was until a heart attack got him at halftime of the first game of the season Aug. 28.
Martin — Howard’s assistant coach and now head coach — is quiet for a moment, but that moment’s quickly broken by a player who bursts through the office door.
“Hey, Coach.”
“How are you?”
“I’m making it. I’m doing OK.”
The player lost his stepfather last week, Martin explains — right on the heels of coach Howard’s death. Two father figures in a week.
Player and coach hug. It’s a genuine one.
“Love you, boy.”
“Love you, too, Coach.”
He walks out, and Martin eases back down into the folding chair. “The way I coach has a lot to do with coach Howard.”
It’s not hard to understand why.
It was halftime of the Golden Bears first game — at Etowah High School in Attalla — and Martin and the boys were headed in to the locker room when Howard stopped him.
“He said, ‘I’m not feeling well — I’m going to go let the doctor check me out,’” Martin said.
Howard handed Martin his play charts.
“He never gave me his files — that was unusual,” Martin says now, but at the time, he didn’t think anything of it.
“Coach, I love you,” Howard said to Martin.
“Coach, I love you, too.”
That, unlike the file exchange, wasn’t an abnormal happening.
“We’re like a big family here — he’s always made it that way,” Martin said.
The next thing he knew, they were deep in the fourth quarter, the Golden Bears were winning big and the news came that changed everything.
“They came over the headset and said, ‘He’s gone,’” Martin said.
Howard — the man who’d played football at Lincoln before Martin, coached him and then coached with him — was gone.
But he wasn’t gone without leaving a blaze of God’s glory in his sphere of influence.
Rodney Prickett can attest to that.
Howard was like a man lit on fire, said Prickett, who likes simply to sit back and watch what happens when God gets hold of a man’s life.
“Some of my first memories of Keith involve knowing that he had gone through a hard time with a previous church experience and had quit going,” Prickett, pastor of Eastaboga Baptist Church, where Howard was a member, told the 2,000-plus people present at Howard’s Sept. 1 memorial service.
But some men in the church — Bill Chappell in particular — kept after him, calling him every Sunday for weeks until one day he showed up, and kept showing up, he and his wife, Lisa.
“If you have known Keith for years, you know that there were seasons where he pushed the limits and did not live as God would have him,” Prickett said. “But God would not let him stay away.”
Howard kept coming. Prickett would get to preaching, and Howard would get to rocking.
“When I preached hard, he rocked harder, and when I said something that spoke to his heart, I would think, ‘That man is going to pull the pew loose from the floor,’” Prickett said. “For the last several years, his passion for the things of the Lord has flourished.”
Then somewhere along the way, the pastor went through a hard time and needed a friend, and Howard “stepped up his game,” Prickett said.
It was on.
Howard’s calling to use his influence to tell people about Jesus was just as strong as Prickett’s calling to use his pulpit for that same mission, Prickett said. “He put a lot of guys who were believers in place around those kids.”
One of those was now-head coach Martin, a member of Mount Zion Baptist Church, Alexander City.
Another was Jason Grissom.
In 2004, Howard recruited Grissom, then student minister at Eastaboga, to help with strength training for the Golden Bears.
“I used to work as a trainer at a local Gold’s Gym, and he said they could really use someone to help with their weight program,” Grissom said. “That was another way for him to get me on campus not just to teach kids weights but also to have a lot of opportunities to pray with kids, counsel kids and share the gospel with kids.”
They saw a lot of fruit.
A First Priority group got started. A Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) group got started.
And Howard used every possible moment to tell the team about Christ.
“The one thing every kid understood about coach Howard was that Christ was the most important thing in his life,” said Grissom, now pastor of Eureka Baptist Church, Lincoln. “They couldn’t be around him too long without it coming up in conversation.”
Howard ended every game with prayer, and ended every prayer with thanks to God for sending Christ to die on the cross for our sins.
“It was his sermon within his prayer,” Grissom said. “He was really aware of the moments that presented themselves that he could take advantage of to share the gospel. He understood like a lot of us should understand that it doesn’t matter the size of the seed, it just matters that we’re throwing the seed into the ground.
“He wanted there to be seed in every player’s heart, in every one of his prayers.”
And he wanted his boys to know what the love of Christ looks like.
According to Cortney Groce, a senior football player, he succeeded.
Groce knows what the love of Christ feels like. He knows what it looks like.
It’s unconditional.
And it looks like coach Howard.
“He was like a second father to me,” Groce said. “My stepdaddy died in ’06, so Coach was like a father figure for me.”
Groce wears a boot because of an injury, an injury that keeps him off the field but that didn’t keep Howard from loving him through it.
“He would always tell me, ‘Everything’s OK, we’re going to be alright,’ ” Groce said. “He was always trying to help someone get better.”
And Howard would give anyone anything they needed. He just lived his whole life that way, Martin said. He planted seeds.
And when the greatest test of all came — his death — all those seeds sprang to beautiful blooms.
That dark moment they learned of his death, two minutes before the finish of the game, the Golden Bears dropped to their knees on the sidelines in tears.
They were in the lead. The crowds in the stands were thinning as news of Howard’s death spread. The team could’ve just taken a knee there on the Etowah field and run the clock down.
“At that point,” Martin said, “right way, wrong way, who knows how to deal with that kind of news, that kind of pain?”
Then something extraordinary happened, he said — every player grabbed his helmet and finished the job.
“It was a testament to what they’ve been taught — how to be that strong leader.”
They won 26–7.
It wasn’t long after that the players were all together at the field house again — after coach Howard’s wake. And the questions started coming.
“They were asking, ‘How does a person really know they’re going to heaven?’ and other questions like that,” Grissom said. “One of the other chaplains got to explain to them and lead whoever wanted to pray a prayer to receive Christ to do so.”
The chaplain didn’t give any kind of altar call, but he asked whoever had prayed that prayer to sign a manila folder before they left.
“That was Coach’s trademark — he was always writing on manila folders and napkins, never normal paper,” Grissom said.
Forty players and and two coaches signed that folder.
The next evening, they convened again — a solemn night for something Howard never intended to be solemn. It was the first time the Golden Bears took the field in the high school’s newly renovated football stadium, which Howard had painstakingly worked on for a year.
And it wasn’t for a game — it was for his funeral.
The team members all sat together in Keith Howard Memorial Stadium — the school had made the decision over the weekend to dedicate it to him — and alongside players from 12 other high schools watched as the hearse made one last “victory lap” around the field.
On this night, Prickett said, the victory was about a lot more than football — a fact Howard would have been proud of.
“Let me speak to hurting hearts about the question that I know looms right at the surface — why?”
He was quick to tell the crowd gathered that he doesn’t know the mind of God, but part of the why, he had to guess, was “because God can use Keith’s passing to bring many sons and daughters to Himself.”
Forty-two the night before, to be exact, plus several more who have since made commitments at Eastaboga Baptist. And none of which are simply names on a manila folder — Grissom is serious on that point.
“We’re getting the ball rolling with discipleship,” he said. “We’re doing it through FCA, we’re mentoring these guys and we’ve delivered Bibles to them, too.”
It’s a blessing, Martin added, that there’s already a “family” in place recruited by Howard to bring these dozens of new believers along. Martin. Grissom. Another chaplain, Whitt Hibbs, pastor of Arbor Baptist Church, Pell City.
They’re going to encourage the boys to keep their head in the game — the spiritual one.
“Because of this, people are coming back to where they need to be with the Lord — to a serious faith,” Prickett said.
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