Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 19, 1993 TAG: 9303190237
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B7 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: RAY COX STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
BOBCATS' LOSS BIG AS SHULL RESIGNS
The football sideline at Radford High School will be more sedate next year.The high school's wrestling mats will be rolled out with a little less of a flourish.
Bobcats sports, which just hasn't been the same lately, has taken a left hook to the chin. Again.
Rufus "Buddy" Shull has turned in his whistle.
After 23 years of haranguing hesitating heavyweights, after 23 years of skewering wearers of black and white striped shirts, after 23 years of keeping more than the bag of footballs pumped, Shull, 45, has submitted his resignation.
Officially speaking, the Radford School Board paid him for being an assistant football coach, the head wrestling coach and an intermediate school teacher. He will keep teaching. It's the coaching he's giving up.
And Radford athletics is losing a piece of its heart.
Norman Lineburg, the Bobcats' football coach, took the news hard.
"To tell you the truth, I don't even want to think about it," he said.
Lineburg hopes that Shull, who has been with him 18 years, will reconsider. That maybe when Shull gets back from the beach in early August he again will hanker to put on some cleats and some shorts and walk out onto the grassless Radford practice field and go to work.
Lineburg would take him back at mid-season. Or next year. Or the year after that. But Shull says his mind is made up.
"It's time to get out of it," he said.
Shull has taken a part-time sales job with Eleven West Inc. He will work there after school, at night and during the summers. Shull will specialize in the team-equipment end of the business. Certainly there's more money in that part-time job than the one from which Shull is walking away. Shorter hours, too.
But will it be as much fun?
"I know Buddy doesn't want to get out of coaching," one of his pals said. "I know he doesn't."
The rub is, coaching isn't as much of a rush anymore. A 1-9 record in football, like Radford's in 1992, is a bummer. Especially after you're one or two plays away from competing for the Group AA Division 3 title, as the Bobcats were two years ago.
Shull won't say, but his friends say he is quitting because he's fed up with the politics of playing a Group AA schedule when you're a Group A-sized school.
Shull was 22 when he was hired as an assistant football coach at Floyd County, where he had gone to school. Two weeks before practice, he was told he was going to be the head man, the big cheese.
"You must be crazy," he said.
They wouldn't take no for an answer.
Five years of being an almost almost hopeless underdog at Floyd County (which was way out of its league in the Group AA New River District in those days), five years of memorable games. One was when the Buffaloes tied then-mighty Radford, recent winner of two straight state titles. Lineburg liked the way Shull coached, so much he hired him shortly thereafter.
Over the years, Shull was coach of baseball and track, the indoor and outdoor varieties. Wrestling got his best efforts for eight years. Football was his sport, though.
"I'm telling you, he's good," Lineburg said. "He was the same thing as another head coach."
And good luck finding another one, he would say.