THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, May 29, 1995 TAG: 9505290045
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY PERRY PARKS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: ELIZABETH CITY LENGTH: Long : 137 lines
Elizabeth City State University will be a different institution come Thursday.
For the first time in 46 years, Robert L. ``Bobby'' Vaughan won't be on the faculty rolls.
Vaughan, 67, the most successful basketball coach and perhaps the longest-tenured professor in ECSU history, retires this week after nearly a half-century of building programs and players at the school.
He has been cheered, exalted, honored and demoted during his tenure at the volatile university. But he has always been there.
The former coach, athletic director and department head has spent the last few years teaching a full load and restoring the school's early athletic records. His ``retirement'' will include scouting for the Virginia Beach-based Global Sports Management, continuing his civic work, and maybe getting back into flying.
``I've been into a little bit of everything all my life,'' Vaughan said at his Brookridge Terrace home, where he lives with Valerie, his wife of 44 years. ``I look forward to probably enjoying another 10 to 15 years of active work. . . . I've got a lot of little irons in the fire.''
Vaughan sat comfortably in a short-sleeved shirt and shorts that revealed muscles better-toned than those of most 30-year-olds. The walls leading to the basement were crammed with plaques and pictures, and more than 20 trophies sat in corner shelves downstairs.
Boxes of memorabilia recently carted across the street from campus rested on the black-and-white checkered floor.
``I don't know where I'm gonna put it,'' said Vaughan. ``The last thing I need is another plaque or certificate.''
Vaughan says he was ``in the right place at the right time,'' when then-ECSU President Sidney Williams hired him to organize a basketball program in 1949. He was 20, a Petersburg, Va., native with a bachelor's degree in education from Virginia State University. ECSU was still an all-black elementary teachers college.
Vaughan was drafted into the Army the following summer and served two years in Korea. Interested in a medical career, he considered not returning to ECSU but decided to stick around for a couple of years.
The years grew into decades. And while Vaughan collected advanced education and administration degrees from Columbia and Boston universities, he attracted duties at ECSU like a magnet.
In the 1950s, Vaughan helped add a secondary physical education program that expanded the school's academic horizons. He was made a full professor and became founding chairman of the Health and Physical Education Department in 1957, a position he held until 1978. Also in '57, he was named athletic director.
The last decade of Vaughan's ECSU stay has been punctuated by personality conflicts between the coach and Chancellor Jimmy R. Jenkins. After disagreements between the two, Vaughan stepped down as athletic director in 1985 and as basketball coach the following year.
By then, Vaughan had won 502 games and had advanced teams to national playoffs seven times. His titles include five Eastern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference championships, five Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association regular season championships and two CIAA tournament championships, and an NCAA Division II regional championship.
Vaughan's name is enshrined in five halls of fame, including Virginia State's and North Carolina's Sports Hall of Fame, where he was inducted in 1992. He has several conference coach of the year titles.
``He was a tremendous coach,'' said Alvin T. Kelley, a longtime ECSU football coach who also worked for years as Vaughan's assistant. ``He was always able to get the maximum out of his players.''
``He was a great teacher, a great coach on the court,'' said Kelley, who now works in the career planning and placement office. ``A lot of people enjoyed playing for him.''
Vaughan's contributions on the court and in the administrative offices earned him a permanent place on the campus: The athletic center he helped secure funding for bears his name.
He takes pride not only in his record and his championships, but also in the fact that over the years, nearly all of his athletes graduated.
``It wasn't a big deal then,'' Vaughan said. ``An athlete came to Elizabeth City State University, he had to go to school.''
The outspoken Vaughan has spread his energy beyond the campus walls. He has served on a host of local boards and was the first chairman of the Elizabeth City-Pasquotank Airport Authority.
He is vice chairman of the politically charged commission studying a possible merger of Elizabeth City and Pasquotank County. The group has faced opposition from black leaders who fear a reduction in voting power if the governments merge.
In a community that is no stranger to racial polarization, Vaughan is one of few individuals whose support transcends racial lines. Drafted by his church community to run for mayor four years ago, Vaughan lost the three-way election by only a dozen votes without actively campaigning. He didn't call for a runoff, he said, because he had promised not to.
``I have great admiration for Bobby Vaughan,'' said Elizabeth City lawyer L.P. ``Tony'' Hornthal Jr., who heads the Pasquotank County-Elizabeth City Governmental Study Commission exploring merger. ``I think he is a fellow of uncompromising integrity.
``Bobby is going to tell it like it is, from his point of view, whether you want to hear it or not,'' Hornthal said, adding that Vaughan ``steadfastly refuses to analyze problems on a racial basis.''
Vaughan, whose mayoral campaign was tripped up in part by a squabble with the ECSU administration, said he has no ambition now to get into politics.
``I'd just be too controversial,'' he said. ``Right now, I want to relax, do some things, travel.''
Vaughan said the community needs an ``interracial coalition to run as a group - not as black candidates, not as white candidates, but as committed candidates. . . . I'm not saying I wouldn't be inclined to work with a group like that.
``I think that the time has come that there has to be a meeting of people who want to move forward without casting reflections on the past.''
Vaughan said he has remained in civic life for the same reason he enjoyed coaching: ``The thrill of the chase.''
``Even though I had many frustrating days coaching, I truly enjoyed the challenge, the preparation, the matching of wits, the trying to establish youngsters,'' Vaughan said. ``I hear from all of them now. I'm flooded with Christmas cards and birthday cards.''
The coach continues tracking ECSU athletes as part of his new job. Recent ECSU basketball star Nate Higgs, working his way into the NBA through a professional summer league, called Vaughan from a hotel in Memphis on Thursday.
``He really helped me be the player that I was,'' said Higgs, who among other accomplishments was the CIAA player of the year in 1993 and who worked closely with Vaughan during his ECSU career. ``Even though he never coached me, it always seemed like he was my coach in a way.''
It's typical, Vaughan's friends and admirers say, for the coach to help anyone, whether they had contact through his official capacity or not.
``He's a person who has given of himself to a lot of people,'' Kelley said. ``This university's going to miss him an awful lot. The mold that he's cut out of, they don't make 'em like that anymore.'' ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo]
DREW C. WILSON
Staff
With 502 wins and seven trips to the national playoffs, Bobby
Vaughan is ECSU's most successful basketball coach.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE by CNB