By CHRIS HOBBS
HobbsDailyReport.com
ELLENDALE – The second season away from high school football comes tonight for former Newton-Conover and Alexander Central head coach Nick Bazzle, and he says he’ll be fine.
He still loves the game – he always will – but his life is different now and yet in so many ways it is still the same, which is a good mixture that keeps him happy.
Former Newton-Conover and Alexander Central head football coach Nick Bazzle is enjoying retirement with his wife, Kim, and their two dogs — Macy (left) and Marley — and just recently found Macy after she went missing in Holden Beach while the family was on a vacation. “Marley is the good child,” Nick Bazzle said. “And Macy is the wayward child, the one that always gets in trouble.“/FACEBOOK PHOTO
Bazzle, 55, is living in a rural community in a corner of Alexander County about three miles from the Wilkes County line with 19 acres to tend to and some long lists he does his best to get to when he’s not out hunting.
“I’m about as retired as you could get,” Bazzle said Thursday. “But I wouldn’t say less busy. You’re supposed to be retired and relaxing and doing things you’ve never done before… and some of that I’ve done.
“I’m busy taking care of things I never got to take care of (while coaching). Everybody kids me about Kim (his wife) giving me a ‘honey do’ list.
“I haven’t gotten to hers… I’m still working on mine.”
From the time he was age 7, football was a part of Bazzle’s life – first in the East Lincoln area he grew up in, then as a high school player for the Mustangs and then as an assistant coach at his alma mater who one day got a phone call.
The caller asked Bazzle if he was interested in an open coaching position, and Bazzle remembers telling the caller he was happy coaching where he grew up.
When the caller asked if he’d at least make a visit, Bazzle said OK.
The caller was former Newton-Conover head football coach and athletic director Don Patrick.
It was the phone call that changed Bazzle’s life in many ways.
“He asked me to just come and talk with him,” Bazzle said. “I wasn’t there five minutes and I said ‘I got a decision to make.’
“It was the smartest decision I ever made in my life. He (Patrick) was that good of a salesman.”
Bazzle said he left East Lincoln not with a mindset he would eventually become head coach at Newton-Conover, but he knew he was going to learn things that even today – in retirement – stick with him.
“I didn’t go to Newton with the ambition to become (the) head coach (someday),” Bazzle said. “I went to learn from Coach Patrick and learn how to be a head coach someday. He is pretty much what I consider my coaching Dad.”
Bazzle enjoyed his work with the Red Devils – the job fit what he wanted and needed as a teacher and coach – and Newton-Conover won a lot of ballgames.
Bazzle remembers vividly the December day in 1998 when Patrick took him into his office.
Said Bazzle: “He said ‘Alright, boy, you better have your stuff together… this is it for me.’
“I got a lump in my throat and my heart was beating a thousand times a minute. It’s here… but the reality that I was about to get the opportunity of a lifetime, it was pretty overwhelming.”
With Bazzle as head coach, the Red Devils often overwhelmed opponents. They had some lean years but some big ones as well. In 2008, Bazzle’s 10th season as head coach, Newton-Conover went 15-1 and won a state 2A title. The next year, they fell in a state final (2AA) and finished 14-2.
Bazzle left the Red Devils and was head coach at Alexander Central from 2012 through 2015.
He says he misses his fellow coaches but also likes the moments when he looks outside, near the mountains where he lives, and sees tranquility and hears quiet and can sometimes relax in ways he never could before.
He and the wife have two special buddies – boxers Macy and Marley – and the Bazzles recently toughed their way through Macy being lost in the Holden Beach area (she’s been found and is back at Nick’s side).
While on vacation visiting his mom, Dolly, the Bazzles decided to take their dogs with them for the first time. Bazzle even made the drive ahead of time to put up fencing in his mom’s backyard so the dogs could be outside.
A next door neighbor there, Bazzle says, had 12 chickens running nearby and Macy, at 80 pounds, pushed a wire fence up at the bottom and was suddenly out and running free.
She got into the woods and no one could find her. And for the next eight days, finding her was the only goal the Bazzles had.
They had Marley but Macy needed to come home. They had TV stations doing stories on the missing dog, posted a $1,000 reward, had fliers up and put up cameras in area’s they thought Macy might be but didn’t find her.
Bazzle drove home on a Sunday, got a bit of rest and then headed back to Holden Beach by 7 a.m. on a Tuesday morning.
He got a phone call from a volunteer organization in New Jersey that sent one person to Bazzle to help him find Macy. She taught him how to do this and that when searching for a missing dog and how to go with hunches he might have about where Macy might be.
Just as determined as he was to deliver a big hit while playing defense for East Lincoln as a teen, Bazzle was all in. He was going to find his dog, period.
“Marley,” Bazzle reflected, “is the good child and Macy is the wayward child, the one that always gets into trouble.”
Ultimately, on another trip out to hunt for Macy on a rural road, it happened.
As Bazzle was driving to check on a camera he’d set up, two black Labradors came up out of what seemed nowhere and began walking beside his car.
“I was going slow, not even 5 miles per hour,” Bazzle said. “They got beside the car and were trotting.”
Bazzle thought maybe some of the tracks he’d been seeing in the vicinity of the camera were made by Macy, which gave him hope. Now he was thinking they may have come from the lost labs.
“They stopped and I started calling them… trying to get them to come to me,” Bazzle said. “Instead they took off into the woods. And no sooner than my voice called out to those dogs, I heard something move in the bushes to the left, which turned out to be Macy. Her little boxer head popped up over the bushes.”
Always trained by coaches to follow instructions – and a learned skill from his own disciplinary approach to coaching – Bazzle was supposed to refrain from doing particular things if he found Macy.
“Soon as I saw her, everything they (the experts) told me not to do… I did,” Bazzle said. “I stuck out my hand. She smelled my hand and about knocked me over. It was just a miraculous thing… you’re out in the middle of nowhere.”
During Macy’s days away, the Bazzles had received calls to come and look at dogs to see if it was theirs. Once, they got up at 3 a.m. to make a drive to check, and some of the calls were ‘Come and see if this dead dog is yours.’
Those were tough phone calls, and Bazzle now says his experience in coaching helped him get through it all.
“I told Kim this (the search) is just like an intense football game that is going up and down like some of those Bandys games when neither one of us could stop each other,” he said.
“The highs and lows of maybe someone saw (Macy). This is just like playing Salisbury or some of those games with Bandys and Maiden.
“You just learn to deal with it. Going through rollercoaster rides for 32 years of coaching helped me to get through all those days of her (Macy) being gone.”
With the family back intact, Bazzle says he’s keeping busy – he will attend the Burns at Alexander Central game tonight (his son Matt is the Cougars’ offensive coordinator) – and keep adjusting to life outside football.
“I am still in the honeymoon part (of retirement),” Bazzle said. “I haven’t been out long enough to totally adjust. I’ll be honest, I miss the game terribly and I knew that I would.
“If I could just take a vacation from July to December (of every year), I think I could survive it.
“I still have a passion for the game and love the competitiveness of a Friday night. That kind of thing is probably never going to leave me.”
Bazzle now enjoys the luxury of looking out his windows in his mountain home and seeing deer, turkey, squirrels, coyotes, raccoons and even black bears. He’d never hunted turkey before moving there but now has three turkeys on his walls and an eight-point buck.
He admits that he has watched some game film, and he won’t say he will never, ever coach football again.
“(Football) is hard to get out of your system,” he said. “And I don’t know that I ever really,” want to separate from it.
When he was 7 and hanging out with players three to five years older (as their manager), he’d sneak off and play football rather than making sure the water bottles were kept full.
One day, the coach asked him if he wanted to play. He gave Bazzle some shoulder pads, a jersey and a helmet with a big crack in it and Bazzle was hooked on football for life.
“When he gave me that … I thought ‘Man, this is awesome,’” Bazzle said. “I loved it (football) so much.”