By: Joey Mullins - Samford Athletic Communications
 
This past weekend, former Samford football players, coaches and staff that played for, were recruited by or coached under either Coach Kim Alsop or Terry Bowden gathered in Birmingham for a reunion many years in the making.
 
A reception was held Friday night, with a round of golf and a tour of campus being held Saturday afternoon, followed by a dinner Saturday evening. The former players, coaches and support staff members reminisced about old times and caught up on each other's lives.
 
"The former players were all very much excited," Tony Ierulli, a former assistant coach under Bowden, who led the organization of the event, said Friday afternoon. "A lot of them haven't seen each other for the last 30-something years and we're looking forward to a lot of memories and stories with a lot of lies in them."
 
One person who was, unfortunately, unable to attend was Alsop, who brought the Samford football program back from scratch in 1984 after more than 10 years without a program. Alsop, who coached the team from 1984-86, passed away on Dec. 26, 2020, at the age of 87.
 
Alsop, however, was on the minds of the men who either played for or worked under him. Scott McClanahan, who coached the team's offensive line for the 1984 and 1985 seasons, remembers Alsop as a caring man.
 
"Kim Alsop was a great guy to work for," McClanahan said. "He had a sense of humor and he was a strong Christian man. He was outstanding."
 
Carl Klann, the linebackers coach for all three seasons and the defensive coordinator for the last two years, said he had fond memories of his time at Samford.
 
"I really enjoyed my time with Coach Alsop, and I enjoyed my time at Samford," Klann said. "I got a lot more out of it than I gave, and we worked hard. What a great place, I really thoroughly enjoyed it."
 
John Olive, who coached running backs and served as the offensive coordinator on Alsop's staff, praised the way Alsop built his program and the way he and his wife treated the assistant coaches.
 
"I think he did a wonderful job of getting the program up off the ground," Olive said. "His wife, Emily, took us coaches in as if we were her kids and would feed us from time-to-time to keep us from starving to death. I have nothing but good memories of the man."
 
Ierulli said it was important for him, even though he never worked for Alsop, that he and his teams be recognized as well as the team's from the Bowden era.
 
"I thought it would be great to have a Bowden reunion, but really what laid the foundation was the Alsop era," Ierulli said. "They brought football back in 1984, and they brought it up kind of out of the ashes."
 
Building A Program From Scratch
The process of building a football program from the ground up is never an easy task. However, for Alsop and his staff, it was an even tougher task. While most start-up programs will spend a season practicing and building up a team before playing actual games, the Samford staff did not arrive on campus until close to time to start practice for the first fall season in 1984. Alsop got to campus a few months earlier, but the assistants did not join him until it was time to prepare for the season.
 
"They made the decision to bring football back in the spring of '84, they got a nine-game schedule together, we didn't recruit any of the kids," McClanahan said. "The kids show up and some of them may have been on campus already and decided they wanted to come out, and we started practicing for the first game against Salem in August of '84."
 
When Alsop got to campus in June before the assistants, he began putting together the locker room, securing equipment and putting his team together. Klann said when the coaches got to campus they had to start contacting prospective players about coming out for practice.
 
"We got on campus and we had our first meetings," Klann said. "He was going over what he wanted to do football-wise, but he also gave us a list of names of Samford students who had expressed an interest in playing football, so we were calling everybody and trying to get them up there to make sure they had physicals and all of that stuff."
 
Klann said that a very important piece of equipment did not arrive until a few days into practice.
 
"We didn't get our helmets in until the first day we were cleared for contact, and that was kind of a bad thing, because they put their helmets on that day and we went out and started hitting," Klann said. "For about three or four days there, those kids were walking around looking like a team full of Frankensteins. Their foreheads were swollen and bruised, because they hadn't had a chance to adjust to wearing a helmet."
 
After just a few weeks of practice, Samford's first football team in over a decade took the field on Sept. 1 against a highly ranked Salem College team at Seibert Stadium. That Salem was coached by Bowden, who would later become Samford's coach, and was quarterbacked by freshman Jimbo Fisher, who would play his final season at Samford in 1987. The outcome of that game was predictable, but the foundation had been laid with all of the hard work the coaches and players had put in just to get to that point.
 
Working With A Young Staff
While Alsop was a veteran coach, he had a staff full of young coaches just getting their start in college football. Olive said, looking back, he admires how Alsop was able to manage such a young staff while building a program from scratch. He said the athletic trainer on the staff, Chris Gillespie, who was still quite a bit younger than Alsop but older than the assistant coaches, provided a lot of help to the head coach.
 
"The vast majority of us coaches were just young coaches, and he stuck with us," Olive said. "We're all 24, 25, 26 years old, and he's 51. Chris Gillespie, the trainer was probably to closest to him in age and Chris was probably in his early 30s. There was a part-time coach, Mike Tucker, who would have been about the same age. I know that he used Chris as his sounding board.
 
"We were just a bunch of young, gung-ho coaches that were ready to go out in the world and make a mark," Olive said. "So, not only did he have to take a team that had never practiced together until three weeks before we played the first game, he had to take some young coaches that were really wet behind the ears. I didn't appreciate that at all at that moment, but as I have become a seasoned coach, I have realized what Coach Alsop did."
 
Desert Walkers
Alsop was the head coach at Samford from 1984 through 1986, and the team's win total increased each season he was in charge of the program. Though most of those men were not able to be there for the tremendous success the program enjoyed just a few years later, they rightly feel proud of the foundation that was laid by that group.
 
The hard work of the 1984, 1985 and 1986 teams paid rich dividends down the road. McClanahan had a unique way of describing the situation the group was in at the time.
 
"I call ourselves the desert walkers," McClanahan said. "We walked the desert, and Coach Alsop was our Moses. He went through all the pain of starting the program, but never was able to experience the good. With that said, and make no doubt about it, he stayed faithful. Everybody wants to have success, but they don't understand all of the work that goes into it."
 
Being There For His Staff And Players
As the head coach of the program, Alsop took his role as a mentor to his assistant coaches and players very seriously.
 
McClanahan remembers a time when he needed to have a wisdom tooth extracted. But, at the time, the assistant coaches were only making $4,500 per year for their first season and $5,000 the next season with no benefits. So he knew he could not afford to have the procedure done. Alsop stepped in to help his assistant out.
 
"He told me he got me hooked up to go see this dentist over on the other side of Homewood," McClanahan said. "I said, 'Coach, I can't afford it.' He said, 'don't worry about it, go see him.' So, I go over, he takes it out, and the dentist said, 'Scott, you have to get some more out too, when do you want to set it up?' I said, 'Well, I'm not real sure if I can.' He said, 'well, we'll go ahead and set it up.' So about two weeks later, I went back and had the other ones extracted. Kim Alsop, I believe, paid for that to be done. That is not an inexpensive thing to have done when you have dental surgery with wisdom teeth coming out."
 
Lessons Learned
The assistant coaches that worked under Alsop while at Samford learned a lot from the veteran coach. Klann said one of the biggest lessons he learned is communicating with your players when they are having issues getting things right.
 
"If we were having an issue or some performance problem, he would say, 'well, have you talked to him about it?'" Klann said.  "We'd say, 'talk to him about what, coach? He won't take the right step, or he won't do this.' We'd worked it over and over again, but that was always his thing, have you talked to the kid? And he was right. I've probably said that a lot now to my assistants. 'He's coming out here, he wants to be a good player, now what's the problem? Talk to him about it and find out if there's an issue or if there's something he doesn't understand.' But he would always elude to talking to him about it."
 
A Growing Program
It has been 37 years since Alsop and his staff resurrected the Samford football program at the NCAA Division III level. In 1988, with Bowden as head coach, the program moved to the NCAA FCS (then I-AA) level. The 1991 team reached the semifinals of the FCS Playoffs, and then returned to the playoffs the following the season.
 
Samford is now a member of the prestigious Southern Conference. The Bulldogs have earned three bids to the FCS Playoffs in the last eight seasons, and the team earned a share of the 2013 SoCon title. Samford also has five players currently on NFL rosters.
 
All of the football players and coaches who have come through the program since Alsop restarted it in 1984 owe the man a debt of gratitude for stepping up and putting in the work to rebuild a football program from scratch. He will always hold an important role in the history of Samford Athletics, and I am glad these men were able to honor him at this weekend's festivities.