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Lessons Learned
WFU's Vaughn got education in football, life from his father
AP File Photo
Chip Vaughn led Wake Forest in tackles last season and returned a fumble for a touchdown against Boston College.
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Published: August 25, 2008
There's a memory that Chip Vaughn will carry into No. 23 Wake Forest's opener at Baylor on Thursday night that has been with him for 13 years.
It would be hard to forget.
It helped get him where he is today, a senior safety starting for the first Wake Forest football team to ever be ranked in a preseason poll.
He was 9. He and his family were living in Montgomery, Ala.
And he was standing with his father in a field in the rain.
"In the pouring rain," he recalled.
He and his father, Lt. Colonel Oscar Vaughn of the U.S. Air Force, weren't there to discuss the weather. Chip's team had just lost a game of Pee Wee football, partly because Chip had failed to make the tackle that would have stopped what turned out to be the winning drive.
"It was overtime, and it was fourth-and-10," Vaughn remembered. "I was on defense, and a dude runs me over and gets 11 yards. And they go on and win the game.
"(His dad) takes me to a field and tells me to put on all my pads, in the pouring rain, and says ‘Hit me.'
"I was like ‘What?' He says ‘Hit me. A kid just ran you over, and they won the game.'
"We were out there in the pouring rain, and he was saying ‘Hit me, hit me, hit me.'"
The memory doesn't end in the rain.
"Then we come home, and my mom's like ‘Where have you all been?'" Vaughn continued. "My dad takes off his shirt, and he's got big bruises on his shoulder. He's saying, ‘Don't worry about it. It's fine. I'm just trying to get him a little tough.'"
"She had a fit, man. She went nuts over that."
Sharifah Vaughn said that there has always been a clear division of duties in child rearing in the Vaughn family.
"My husband told me early on ‘You've never been a guy, so don't try to tell me what to do,'" she said. "No matter how great a mother I can be, I'll never be a father. And no matter how great a father he can be, he'll never be a mother. I'm clear about that.
"The (bruises) were pretty ugly. I just thought he was crazy. There was some lesson he obviously was trying to teach him that I wasn't going to get. I'm not sure to this day that I really quite got it."
To know Chip Vaughn, one has to know his family. Lt. Colonel Vaughn, a graduate of North Carolina, wasn't around to watch Wake Forest's march to the ACC championship of 2006 because he was stationed in Afghanistan. He missed about half of last year's games because he was stationed at Travis Air Force Base near Fairfield, Calif., where he was squadron commander.
His mother is also a graduate of UNC whose career is health-care services. She worked in the Intensive Care Unit at Travis but was still able to make all 13 games last season.
Oscar Vaughn is now with the Defense Intelligence Threat Reduction Agency based in Washington, so they're living back in their family home in Fairfax, Va.
Both parents plan to be at all 12 regular-season games this season and have their schedules cleared for a possible bowl trip.
And that, Chip said, is a good thing.
Honest.
"Me and my dad have a great relationship, especially when it comes to football," Vaughn said. "He didn't want me to settle for just being good. He always wanted me to be great at everything.
"He was the one who always pushed me, saying ‘Don't settle for anything. If you beat somebody, don't beat them by a step. Beat them by a mile.' That's something that has stayed with me all my life.
"I always hold myself up to higher standards."
Those standards have been evident in Vaughn's four years at Wake Forest. He's pursuing a double major in sociology and religion, but any plans to put the degree to use might have to wait.
At 6-2, 215-pounds, Vaughn has been timed at 4.4 second in the 40-yard dash. Next spring, he'll find out just how interested NFL teams are in players that big and that fast.
In the meantime, he'll be a key player in what has the potential to be the best Wake Forest defense ever.
He was good as a junior, when he led the Deacons with 105 tackles and 14 passes broken up.
Coach Jim Grobe expects Vaughn to be even better as a senior.
"He's got kind of an uncanny knowledge of the game," Grobe said. "He figures it out.
"He gets us lined up and has good speed to play in the throw game, but he's a real physical kid. He's real strong and runs the alley well and is really a physical tackler.
"He's kind of the whole package."
■ Dan Collins can be reached at 727-7323 or at dcollins@wsjournal.com.
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