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In Their Words is a weekly feature appearing Sundays in The Blade's sports section. Blade sports writer Zach Silka talked with BCSN host and color analyst Tom Cole, who was a two-sport athlete at Ohio Wesleyan and football coach before he moved on to sports broadcasting. He has coached at the University of Michigan, Adrian College, and St. John's Jesuit, Waite, and DeVilbiss high schools.

Simply known as "The Coach," Tom Cole has been involved with the game of football since the age of 8.

Before he was The Coach, Tom Cole was the quarterback. From the very beginning on his pee-wee football team through his college days, Cole was always the signal-caller on his team.

As a member of the first graduating class at St. John's in 1969, Cole quarterbacked the Titans all four years in high school.

After graduating from Ohio Wesleyan, where he started at quarterback his senior season and played on the basketball team, Cole signed with the Columbus Bucks, a minor-league affiliate of the Chicago Bears.

Following a short stint with the Bucks, Cole returned to Toledo to begin his teaching and coaching career. He started as an unpaid football assistant coach at St. John's in 1974 before accepting a teaching and coaching position at Waite and then moving on to his first head coaching position at DeVilbiss in 1980.

Cole later returned to St. John's, where he taught and worked as the offensive coordinator/quarterbacks coach for 16 years under Fred Beier. He then worked one year at the University of Michigan as a quarterbacks consultant under then-UM quarterbacks coach Cam Cameron, former coach of the Miami Dolphins.

Cole has spent the last 10 years in sports broadcasting, including four years at BCSN (broadcast on the Buckeye CableSystem, which is owned by Block Communications, Inc., the parent company of The Blade) where he hosts the Sports Rap and Rap on the Road" and co-hosts Rant & Rage every Thursday at 6 p.m. with Blade sports editor Frank Corsoe.

Although he said he's very happy with his role at BCSN, Cole also hasn't ruled out the possibility of one day returning to the coaching profession.

"MY MOM [Joanne], she was a terrific athlete, a much better athlete than I ever thought of being, but she was before Title IX. To tell you what kind of athlete she was, I was a pitcher in grade school and my mom was eight months pregnant out in our front yard with a catcher's mitt catching me on like a 90-degree day because I had a game coming up in a couple days. Some guy that knew our family was driving by and stopped to yell, 'Joanne, what are you doing?' And she just said, 'Well, the kid's got a game.' She could throw a football 40 yards and actually taught me how to throw a football. She could catch just as well as any college catcher. She could play basketball. Her brother was Lee Pete, who was the first great quarterback at the University of Toledo. He played quarterback for the Packers and the Lions for a while. My mom always liked the quarterback position because of that, so I think she was always grooming me to play quarterback.

"ST. JOHN'S JUST started out with a freshmen class, so we were kind of top dogs right from the get-go. What even made it more unique was our first football season we went undefeated. I got to appreciate that more later in life because you don't go undefeated very often in football. We had great guys on that team. The second year we went 6-4 playing a JV schedule. Then our junior year we played a full varsity schedule with no seniors. I never realized how important seniors were. I think we were 4-6 but we did well. It was hard. Then our senior year we went 6-4 and played in the Blue Division championship against St. Francis and lost. But to get there being a new school, I don't think it's ever been done in the history of the City League."

"I HAD SIGNED to go to Marshall and spent two or three weekends there. I really liked the players and coaches. On the way home from Marshall in Huntington, W. Va., my dad [Tom Sr.] and I stopped at a restaurant in Delaware, Ohio. It was just a little hamburger place called the L&K. We're in there eating and I had my letter jacket on from St. John's, and some guy came up and said, 'Hey where are you from?' It was the head coach of Ohio Wesleyan [Jack Fouts]. He had been sending me letters but I had never heard of Ohio Wesleyan. We started to talk and my dad liked him a lot. We took a tour of the campus and just really hit it off. So right from that stop, I switched from going to Marshall to Wesleyan. Then that next season, they had the airplane tragedy at Marshall, and all those kids that I had stayed with died. I knew them all and the coaches. If it hadn't been for that hamburger stop, I would have been there. It's funny how fate works sometimes. It's really kind of an eerie thing."

"MY FIRST JOB out of college was teaching seventh and eighth grade at St. Vincent DePaul. It was a great opportunity to get started as a teacher. In grade school, you have to teach everything. I was OK with history and English, but there are probably still some kids that are stunted in some fashion for having me as a teacher."

"I ALWAYS THOUGHT I was a better assistant than a head coach because all I wanted to do was call the plays and coordinate the offense. I didn't really want to do all the stuff head coaches have to do. I really wasn't that good at it. I enjoyed calling plays, coaching the quarterbacks, and doing the offense."

"WE HAD a great run [at St. John's]. We went to about six or seven Shoe Bowls and made the playoffs six or seven times. That was terrific. Fred Beier was my quarterback coach when I was at St. John's and then I worked under Fred the whole time I coached there. I've never met and worked with better people in my life than at St. John's."

"I'M ALWAYS giving nicknames. For me it was the Jerry Lucas way of remembering people because if I give them a nickname, I'll remember them the rest of my life."

"I was doing radio at Cumulus broadcasting [in 2002], and I did a show with Matt Melzak. Of course, all the people that called in I'd have nicknames for, so Matt Melzak said, 'Hey you give nicknames to everybody, so I'm giving you a nickname. From now on, I'm calling you The Coach,' and that's where it started."

"THE GREATEST EXPERIENCE of my life has been being married to my wife, Karen, for the past 32 years and my two kids, Clayton and Christy, are the best things that ever happened to me. But next in line would be BCSN. It's incredible and I appreciate the opportunity Allan Block, Nancy Duwve, and Veronica Pinciotti have given me. To be able to talk about great coaches, great teachers, great kids, great schools, it's unlike anything else I've ever experienced in the Toledo community. It's just a feel-good aspect of the community."

Contact Zach Silka at:
zsilka@theblade.com.

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