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Former NSU football coach Willard Bailey honored for years of work

The legendary Norfolk State and Virginia Union head football coach set for induction into the Black College Football Hall of Fame.

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. — "I did not think I was college material." 

This was Willard Bailey's mindset coming off a high school career full of athletic championships, but short on studies. His coach had come to him with four scholarship offers.

"I'm not gonna go there and get embarrassed around all those smart kids," Bailey responded. 

His coach kicked him out of his office and told him to come back the next day. 

The coach saw in Bailey what Bailey himself would see in countless players who came into his own office over the ensuing decades. After some convincing, Bailey relented: "I told him I'd try for one semester just to get him off my back."

Fast forward through a successful playing (and academic) career at Norfolk State, followed by a championship-winning coaching stint at Virginia Union University, and the Spartans came with an offer to come back home and coach his alma mater. The last time they came with an offer, academics almost stopped him, this time he had only one condition. 

He wanted to teach, just as he had been at Virginia Union. 

"They wanted to give me the coach job, but no academic tenure. I told them I wouldn't go without it," said Bailey. Just as his coach had once convinced him to embrace academic tenure, it didn't take long for the University to relent. 

Now the same Willard Bailey who thought school wasn't for him, enters the Black College Football Hall of Fame as the only football coach to have academic tenure at three separate schools.

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