Game changer: Richard Wooten played, coached, tended the fields and gave local athletes the spirit to excel

 Some men can reside in a small town forever, memorize its hideouts and pretty spots like a storyteller who took notes all along, and be perfectly content there till long after the last CSX coal train fades down the track into the night.

Richard Wooten, 64, lives a mile from where he grew up. He knew Mount Holly when its population was a mere 4,000, before its high school merged with rival Stanley to form East Gaston, before new residents started trickling across the Catawba River from Mecklenburg.

He was a two-sport athlete at that new high school, then one of its coaches, and eventually coached the town’s younger children, for whom he elected himself caretaker of their fields, their recreation complexes, their fancy uniforms and sometimes, their sanity.

Someone asked Wooten recently if there were anyone in Mount Holly who doesn’t know him, who didn’t grow up with him on their team, or their sideline. “Not many,” he says. “My family and I went to Georgia one time, and to Florida once, and both times saw people who go, ‘Hey, Coach Wooten!’ And my children were like, is there anywhere we can go that they don’t know you?”

Wooten’s devotion to his hometown’s athletics has earned him a spot in the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame, taking its 2025 Community Spirit Award. “It just kind of blew me away that they would even ask,” he says. “I think it’s an honor to even be considered.”

He drops names of Hall of Fame members who coached him, mentored him, worked alongside him: Doug Smith, Vance Furr, Scott Pope, Eddie Womack, Aaron Goforth. “I looked up to them,” he says.

After his playing days at East Gaston, Wooten took to giving time to his community, piece by piece.

Those junior varsity boys need a coach.

That baseball field at Mount Holly Middle School? He made sure it got new sod.

Those Optimist Club kids needed coaching, and those Babe Ruth players would look great in fancier uniforms.

The Tuckasegee Park gym needed some fixin’ up.

A new football goal post went up, a new concessions stand, a flag pole. He had a list.

“We got together on Saturday and put up a big ol’ flag pole at the Mount Holly Middle School,” he says. “They didn’t have one, so I asked Aaron Goforth, who was a welder, and he was at Duke Power at the time and they had some aluminum somewhere, and me and him and Mike McKinney made a 40-foot flag pole.”

He also kept the grass cut.

“You take pride in what you do,” he says. “And I wanted it to look good.”

Wooten’s relationship with Mount Holly sports dates to East Gaston High School, where he was Class of 1979. He played left guard on the football team as a sophomore, defensive end as a junior and right tackle and defensive end his senior year. “We were 10-2 that year,” he says. “Best season they had, until 2006. We won the conference and first round of the playoffs, the biggest comeback ever. We were down 20-0 and beat Statesville 21-20.

“We had a lot of firsts in ’78. It was our first time beating South Point, first time in the playoffs and first time we won a playoff game.”

He wrestled his senior year and went 8-8, competing at 185 and 192 pounds, a bit higher than his actual weight. “We won the conference,” he says, “coached by the legendary Doug Smith.”

After graduation, he stayed with East Gaston to coach junior varsity offensive line three seasons. “I was just hangin’ out, and they said ‘Hey, you want to help with the JVs?’ There wasn’t any pay.” 

He was hangin’ out with the Optimist Club about 1985 when Eddie Womack asked him to help coach. “He was coaching Mighty Mites and he said, ‘You want to help? You got the defense, and I got the offense.’ I kind of watered it down from what I was coaching at East Gaston, going from 17-year-olds to 6, 7 and 8 year olds.”

A few years later, Wooten started coaching Pop Warner, then became defensive coordinator at Mount Holly Middle, helping it to the county championship in 2002.

And somehow, he figured, that with all this on-field coaching, the grass and the players could use a little decorating.

“I picked up a knack for painting logos and stuff on the field,” he says, “so when people came to Mount Holly the field looked like a college field, and one particular championship I had Mount Holly Hawks in one end zone and Stanley Blue Devils in the other. And someone said they couldn’t believe I put the other team’s name on there and I said, well, it’s their Super Bowl.”

One year for the Holly Bowl – a football tradition that drew out-of-state teams from as far as Chicago and Florida – Wooten artistically recreated the NBC-TV peacock logo midfield. “The Channel 36 television chopper landed on the field and brought the game ball,” he says. “So I painted the NBC peacock, and we coordinated that with them, and the chopper was supposed to drop the ball off and he was supposed to go back up and do a traffic report, but his director made him stay until they went live with sports and when they went live, it was with the Holly Bowl.”

So many achievements, so many marks left along the hideouts and pretty places.

Wooten also works for Freightliner – it’ll be 41 years in September. He and his wife Tracy have been married 39 years and have two sons, Nathan, 37, and Zach, 36.

It was an incident with a son that led him to coach Babe Ruth ball.

“I watched my son stand in right field, and no one ever hit the ball to him, and I said, ‘This has gotta stop,’ so I went to the commissioner and told him that if he had a team no one wanted, I’d take it,” he says. “I also changed the way Babe Ruth looked in Mount Holly. We went from plain uniforms to sponsored jerseys and hats, and we only lost one game our first year. When we got started, everyone wanted to play for us.”

Playing days end and kids grow up, and some of those seemingly innocent little children stray from the proverbial playbook.

“A lot of these kids,” Wooten says, “we coaches are more of a parent to them than their own parents. You coach all types – some are good, some are bad and you just try to love on them and be there for them. They were always welcome at my house, and some stayed there a lot. Unfortunately, some would stray and some went bad, and to this day I have parents come back to me and ask, ‘Would you talk to my kid?’ because they’re 35, 36, 37 years old and they struggle with an addiction. The parents say they’ll listen to me more than they’ll listen to anybody.”

Ball coach turned life coach.

“Some of these Hall of Fame members were my mentors, who I looked up to,” Wooten says. “I tried to do like they did, and leave something behind. A lot of great people paved the way. They showed me the ropes, and I took it from there.”