I've retired!
It was an odd feeling for Greg Hunter this week as the longtime Groves football coach wasn’t on hand when the Rebels started their summer weight training program.
After 30 years coaching and teaching at his alma mater, Hunter retired at the end of the school year.
“It is kind of strange not being out there,” Hunter said. “But it doesn’t really feel like I retired yet because my wife is keeping me busy with a lot of jobs.”
Hunter stayed busy with a lot of jobs in his career at Groves, wearing an array of different hats.
He started out coaching the baseball team in 1984, after a four-year stint at Savannah Christian Middle School. He also began working as an assistant with the Rebels football squad in 1984.
But coaching was just a part of what Hunter meant to the Garden City campus. He was instrumental in organizing fundraisers and soliciting donations for the Rebels’ weight room — and he even made sure drivers coming down Highway 21 would notice the building by setting up lights to illuminate the black metal “G” on top of the building. He spent a lot of his free time helping maintain the Rebel football and baseball fields and even served as a Rebel wrestling coach.
“Mark Toomey asked me to help out with that,” Hunter said with a laugh. “And the only thing I knew about wrestling at the time came from watching WWF.”
If he wasn’t coaching, Hunter was often behind the wheel — driving the bus for teams he didn’t even coach on road trips.
Kevin Brown, the former Groves baseball coach who is now the athletic director at Woodville Tompkins High, has been close with Hunter for more than 26 years — and he said there aren’t many like his friend out there any more.
“Greg isn’t the type to seek accolades for the things he has done,” Brown said. “He grew up in Garden City and still lives there today. He played football and baseball at Groves and married his high school sweetheart. Both of his sons graduated from Groves. It’s really a testament to Greg, he bleeds Black and Gold. He had a vested interest in his alma mater. Win, lose or draw — through thick and thin — you could count on him.”
Hunter played baseball and was a linebacker/center during his glory days at Groves in the 1970s. As a junior, he was a member of the last Groves team to win a regional football title. He graduated in 1976. He spent some time at Georgia Southern — and decided to transfer to pursue his dream of playing football at Georgia. After a year on the Bulldog freshman team, Hunter decided to stop playing football and concentrate on getting his degree.
Four years later, he was back roaming the familiar halls at his alma mater.
“It was like a reunion every day, coming back home,” said Hunter, who had his No. 63 retired last fall in a ceremony attended by his wife, Leesa, and sons Gordon and Jesse. “I started out working with some of my former teachers. Then I worked with some of my former classmates, and after a while some of my former students started teaching with me. It was a unique situation, and it’s a small world.”
Hunter says he’ll remember his playing days — and then serving as an assistant on a Rebel team coached by Karl DeMasi that reached the state playoffs for the first time since 1974 in 2003. Hunter said the kids suckered him into shaving his head that year with several of his fellow coaches during the run to the playoffs.
“Greg was a dedicated coach and an excellent defensive coordinator,” DeMasi said. “He was working 24/7 during the season and was the kind of coach who knew his football. He was the program at Groves.”
In the last couple years, the Rebel program has struggled — playing above its enrollment classification in Class AAAAA (the team will compete at the Class AA level this fall). But Hunter kept the program afloat despite suffering through a 1-19 record.
“You can learn a lot about a person during times like that,” said Tim Brown, an assistant football coach and now the AD at Groves (and no relation to Kevin Brown). “But Greg was solid as a rock. When things could have spun out of control, he held those kids together and taught them how to handle adversity.”
Hunter was a calming presence on the sideline and worked hard to recruit players as the team’s numbers dwindled with the opening of New Hampstead High.
“Our kids are smart, they understood the situation,” Hunter said. “But they never got scared playing much bigger teams. They never quit and they rose to the occasion.”
Hunter said he hopes to stay involved with his Rebel roots, even in retirement.
“I told coach (Tim) Brown I don’t want to interfere with the new coach, but if they need any help with anything — taking videos, keeping stats — I can help out anyway they need me,” said Hunter, 56. “I’m going to miss the structure of having to be somewhere at a certain time, but I’m going to miss the kids more than anything.”
