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Frustrations mounting early for Williams at Grambling
Roscoe Nance Doug Williams is not a happy camper these days. Never mind that his Grambling State Tigers are the No.1-ranked black college football team in the country and 1-0 after a season-opening 37-22 victory against Alcorn State. Williams, in his fourth season at his alma mater, is miffed by what he perceives to be a lack of attention to details and campus bureaucracy. "It's more or less regular stuff I feel should be done, (taking care of) the practice field, the game field," says Williams. "I don't know how much emphasis they put on it. As a football coach, that's all I've got." Williams was particularly perturbed when the school administration built new offices for the football coaches and a new meeting room, which took up part of the practice fields and left the team with just one field. "That's almost unheard of," says Williams. "The field gets torn up. How are you going to work on it." Williams is also displeased with the upkeep of the field at Robinson Stadium. His displeasure was intensified after the Tigers played at Alcorn and he saw the condition of field at Jack Spinks Stadium. "It's tough," he says. "We go down to Alcorn and their field is like something out of the NFL. They have a nice stadium, and their field is kept up. I wish I could answer why ours isn't. To me it's just a lack of concern about it until the last minute. When you have athletic fields, you have to keep them up year-round. I don't know whether they don't understand their importance and I'm not talking about just the football field but all athletic fields or that it's not important to them. I don't know. That's what bothers me more than anything. "After you go down and play on Alcorn's field and our boys play on our field, they see stuff like that. They want to know why our field is not kept up like other people's fields. I had a chance to look at Norfolk State. They do a good job. We know what Hampton does. Some of the people you least expect do a great job of keeping up their campus and their fields. It's those little things that make a program first class." And there are the campus politics that Williams says he has to deal with when he needs work done on the practice field or the field at Robinson Stadium. "You have to go through channels to get your field done," he says. "You have to ask this person and tell him this is what you need. And that person has to tell this person. That person has to tell someone else. My job is to coach football. The other stuff should be taken care off. I would love to have two guys just to take care of the fields. Two guys could take care of all the fields." Coaching at Grambling is the one job Williams has always wanted, and he walked away from a lucrative deal at Morehouse to get it. But the brushfires he has had to battle since taking over has made him question his return. "I love school," he said in a interview before the season began. "I love football. I love what we've done. "But I'm notsure I'm cut out to deal with the politics." Williams is 22-12 in his first three seasons at Grambling, including 10-2 last year when the G-Men won the Southwestern Athletic Conference and NCAA Division I Black College titles. Williams has another year remaining on his contract after this season. Grambling has offered him a three-year extension, but he says he doesn't know if he'll sign it. "I've learned there's more out there, and I may be interested in finding out what," says Williams, who said he doesn't know if the issues about the practice field will be a factor in his decision. "My job is just to coach the team. No matter what happens, I have to make sure we're ready to play." © 2001 Azeez Communications, Inc.
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