(The following story originally appeared in the Spring 2011 NCCU NOW magazine)
Henry Frazier III knew he was taking on a pretty tough challenge when he left his head coaching job at Prairie View A&M to become NCCU’s new football coach.
But Frazier has spent most of his life overcoming obstacles. As an African American youngster raised in a single-parent household with two older sisters, he not only graduated from high school but became the first man in his family to finish college and even has a master’s degree.
He became quarterback at Bowie State and took the longtime CIAA doormat Bulldogs to a conference championship in 1989.
He took over a long-losing high school program at Central High in Capitol Heights, Md., and made it respectable before returning to Bowie as head coach and turning the program in the right direction again.
And in he went for the 2004 season as head coach at Prairie View A&M - which had just a few years earlier suffered through a record 80-game losing streak - and by 2009 had long-suffering fans crying tears of joy after a SWAC championship.
“I probably decided to be a coach when I was (at Fairmont Heights, Md.) in high school,” Frazier said. “My coach, Ralph Paden, would allow me to call plays. I had hurt my knee so I knew I wasn’t going to go to one of the bigger schools, but I knew I wanted to coach football. He told me I’d have to get a college degree to coach.
“I went to Bowie because they were losing. I went there on the tail end of a 32-game losing streak. I had a chance to go to Delaware State, Morehouse or Howard. I was thinking more toward Delaware State, and then Dave Dolch who had been recruiting me there got the head job at Bowie. He got me sold on the idea of making history there and turning around a program, and I’ve been doing that for the last 25 years, I guess.”
Frazier, whose father died when his son was seven, did have some positive family male role models, but says his surrogate father is Paden. He said he has never made a career decision without talking to the old coach, a member of the Maryland football coaches’ Hall of Fame who is now retired.
“Actually I saw him running through the hallway one day being chased by some people, and he wasn’t a perfect angel,” Paden said of his protégé. “I said ‘Look, man, I want you to take some of that energy and come out and play football. I’ll give you the ball and let them see if they can catch you.’ And he took me up on it. We made him the JV quarterback, and he hasn’t failed at anything since.
“He was a leader before he got out on the football field, even if his direction wasn’t always good. But he’s a natural leader. People always flock to him, and once he got on the field kids gravitated toward his leadership.”
Frazier wasn’t only a quarterback in high school but also a point guard and catcher, the positions where the smart guy has to make decisions and communicate and lead by example.
Also a member of the high school golf team and a former youth marbles champion, his mother Bessie Harris said she sent him to the local Boys’ and Girls’ club to get him into sports and keep him out of trouble.
“Sports were what he had to do - that’s what got him through as a young man,” said Harris, recently retired after a long career in the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. “He was a good little boy. I put rules down that they had to abide by. You always brag about your children, but all of mine turned out to be excellent adults.
“I was not a football fan, but he got into it when he was little. He would get a new electric football game every year. My grandfather (John Turner) would buy him every team. One time I told him to take the trash out and he decided he was going to play a little football. My patience was a little short so I stepped on his football game and broke it, but I had to replace it.”
Fortunately for the game, mama’s stadium destruction didn’t kill his interest in football.
“When I was recruiting him he really came out of a winning program with a very supportive high school coach,” said Dolch, who coincidentally was the first white head coach in black college football and is now athletic director at Manchester Valley High in Carroll County, Md. “He was one of those guys where the first time you saw him on the field you might not think he was a great runner or a great passer, but the bottom line is he was a great leader.
“I felt like he was the guy driving our bus and turning our program around, and those other guys on the team would have followed him off a cliff. His leadership has been what made him such a winner.”
And Frazier said he’s fully aware nobody at NCCU is expecting any less.
“People are expecting me to win at Central and I expect to win,” he said. “When you go through your career you may not always want to go to the underdog. But nobody’s going to be harder on me than I am on myself.
“I told my players in a meeting they have a clean slate. I don’t care what they did last year, they have the opportunity to impress me, and that’s a good position to be in. But if you rest on your laurels because you thought you did well last year, you’re going to lose your position.
“I want to connect with them because they want to become college-educated men and because they want to win football championships.”
