A Perfect Match
Doubles Partners Still Playing 50 Years Later
In 1962, John Waters (’64) was inseparable from his doubles partner John Williford when they helped build the first-ever tennis team at Georgia Southern.
Today, exactly 50 years later, every Monday and Thursday, they’re still playing.
Waters made his career coaching football and teaching high school, but since 1972, he’s played plenty of tennis alongside Williford and a like-minded group in Athens, Ga.
“We have a number of guys our age who are still playing,” said Waters. “We play at Butch Mulherin’s house. He played football at Georgia and was the team’s orthopedic surgeon for a number of years. There are a couple of guys like former Bulldogs tennis player Andy Homeyer, former UGA tennis coach Dan Magill and a two-sport athlete at Georgia, Jim Nagel, who have played in our group. Jim is called the ‘Hemingway Author’ now. He’s published a bunch of works about Ernest Hemingway. But we’re all athletes, and we’re all still extremely competitive.”
These days, Waters can’t imagine life on the tennis court without Williford and his buddies from Athens, but it was a few years before they reconnected.
“John was in Athens before I came,” said Waters, whose time as a student at Georgia Southern put him on a path to becoming a teacher and a coach. “My mom was a math teacher, but it wasn’t long before it looked like I was going to be a coach. I took classes for health and physical education at Georgia Southern, but I had enough credits to take a job teaching math.”
In 1965, Waters began what would turn into a long and successful coaching career. He served as a basketball and assistant football coach while teaching math at Mary Persons High School in Forsyth, Ga., and quickly moved on to continue coaching football at Willingham High School in Macon after finishing his graduate degree at Georgia Southern in 1969.
He got his first head coaching position when Cedar Shoals High School first opened its doors in Athens, Ga., in 1972. That was when Waters and Williford’s paths crossed again and they got back on the tennis court together.
Of course, that didn’t stop Waters from having a long, successful career coaching football at Cedar Shoals.
Though Waters was tasked with starting a football team from scratch, he had some student-athletes who had played the game before, including future Georgia quarterback Jeff Pyburn and Jay Russell, the youngest son of University of Georgia defensive coordinator and future Georgia Southern head football coach Erk Russell.
Jay Russell was in eighth grade when Waters started building the program and Pyburn was a freshman, but by the time they were upper classmen, Waters had turned Cedar Shoals into a state-wide powerhouse.
“The school opened in 1972 and I was the first football coach. We were very fortunate to have some very good players. Football’s a pretty big deal around Athens,” Waters laughed. “By the time (Russell and Pyburn) were upper classmen in 1976, we wound up fourth in the state that year. We went 11-1, and we had some very good football teams after that.”
The culmination of Waters’ coaching career came after he stepped down in 1985 with a career record of 102-41-3.
Cedar Shoals dedicated Waters-Wilkins Stadium, named in part for the football coach who started it all.
“I was very surprised that it happened,” said Waters, “and very proud that it did.”