Football Program
The first football coach, Stan Huffman, previously served on the coaching staff at Burlington High School before joining Williams during its inaugural year, serving as head coach until 1954. In 2010, he was presented an award at the annual Alamance County high school football press conference.
The second coach, Richard "Bud" Phillips, served from 1954 to 1957. A native of Guilford County, Phillips graduated from the former Burlington High School, and earned an athletic scholarship to Wake Forest College to play baseball and football. Following his freshman year, Phillips served in the United States Army during World War II. He completed his Wake Forest education after serving his military duty. In 1957 Mr. Phillips left Williams to became the high school football coach at Junius H. Rose High School in Greenville, North Carolina, and in 1970 became the athletic director, retiring in 1991. Phillips was honored twice as the Athletic Director of the year in North Carolina, in 1982 and 1987 and served as president of the North Carolina Athletic Director's Association from 1981 to 1982. He served on the board of the National Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association, representing the Southeastern section of the country and received that organization's Distinguished Service Award in 1982. He also received the NIAAA's State Award of Merit in 1988, the first year it was presented. At the time of his retirement from Rose in 1991, Phillips was the longest serving faculty member at Rose, having served since the school opened in 1957, a period of almost thirty-five years.
Upon Phillips' departure for Greenville in 1957, Bill England was appointed coach, and served until 1960.
From 1960 to 1970, the team was led by Cicero Abraham Frye. Frye was a 1951 graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who came to Williams in 1956 as the assistant football coach and head basketball coach, after previously serving as basketball coach at Pfeiffer College. He became head football coach after the departure of Coach England in 1961. Upon his replacement by Jerome Thomas Evans, left to coach at Gibsonville High School in 1970. His career and personality is described to some extent in the book Black Coach in the context of the circumstances surrounding his departure. Serving as head coach for ten years, Coach Frye had the longest period of service as head coach until this record was broken in 1994 by Coach Story.
The career of football coach Jerome Evans, who served from 1970 to 1976, is documented in the book Black Coach by Pat Jordan (published by Dodd Mead of New York in 1971), which also documents related racial tensions in the community at that time. A graduate of North Carolina Central University, Evans was appointed as head coach in the fall of 1970 during the period of integration. Evans was briefly alluded to in the film Remember the Titans (which tells the story of a football team at another Williams High School ocated in Virginia).
In the fall of 1976, when Coach Evans turned to administrative duites full-time, a new head football coach, Pete Stout, was hired, and the Williams athletic program changed from class 4-A to class 3-A. The 1980 football team won the state championship, the first for Williams. A second state championship was won in 1981. During each of these years, the Bulldogs won 14 games, and lost 0, a record that has not been matched either before or after these two seasons.
Sam Story, who served from the early 1980s until his retirement in 2008, was the North Carolina head coach for the 2007 Shrine Bowl game, and coached for a number of years at Duke University. In 2007, the football field was named in honor of Dr. Kernodle, the long-time football team physician, who continues to support the Bulldogs to this day. During the 2002 season, head coaching responsibilities were shared with Williams alumnus and faculty member David Grant. Under Story's leadership, state championships were won in 1985 and 1999.
From 2008 to 2010, the team was led by Scott Frazier, a Williams alumnus, formerly on the staff of Western Carolina University, Elon University, where he served as defensive line coach and recruiting coordinator, and Presbyterian College, where he served as the offensive line coach and recruiting coordinator. Prior to joining the Elon staff, Frazier was a graduate assistant coach at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for three years, where he served under head coach John Bunting, spending the 2001 and 2002 seasons as the Tar Heels' assistant offensive line coach. He also served as a defensive graduate assistant for the Tar Heels in 1996, under head coach Mack Brown. At Williams, he had played under Coach Storey in the late 1980s, and had served as defensive line coach at Williams during the fall of 2004.
David Green came to Williams as head coach in 2011 from Leesville Road High School in Raleigh.
The team currently plays schools in Alamance, Guilford, and Rockingham counties.
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