'Not Mount Airy': Holder, who at one time hated the Bears, is now in his 11th season as their coach

Kelly Holder didn't wear pads during his final college-football season -- he was a graduate assistant at Elon instead. But after it ended, he decided he wanted to go into coaching.

And with high-school jobs available throughout the state, he figured he would be happy coaching anywhere. Anywhere except Mount Airy, that is.

"I said I will coach anywhere but Mount Airy," said Holder, who is now in his 11th season leading the program he swore he would never coach.

"I was a North Surry boy, and I hated Mount Airy."

But, Holder added, he "loved" Jerry Hollingsworth, a coaching legend at Mount Airy and later the school's athletics director, and when he called in the spring of 1999 to gauge Holder's interest in the Mount Airy position, things changed.

"He wanted to know if I would be interested, and my exact words were, ‘If you are calling, then I am interested,'" Holder said this week. "When he called, it became important to me."

Holder said his respect for Hollingsworth is tied to the program he built, and that "his teams played real hard and with a lot of class, and he won a lot of games.

Now, just a couple of weeks past his 40th birthday, Holder is a fixture at the school he used to loathe. His Bears (15-0) have won 31 consecutive games and will try to win their second straight NCHSAA 1-A title Saturday, when they play Wallace-Rose Hill at noon at Wake Forest's BB&T Field.

The state final will be the Bears' 17th playoff game in the past four seasons. Holder has a 111-37 record in his 11 seasons, and over time has become pretty fond of the school he once "hated."

Coach's dream

Holder was a standout quarterback at North Surry -- all 6-4, 175 pounds of him -- and his coach, Carl Sanders, tailored the offense to include more sprint-out plays and option.

"One of the reasons I wanted him to play quarterback is, as tall he was, he ran the ball well, and he threw it well sprinting out," said Sanders, who is now the offensive coordinator at Parkland. "He was a real hard worker in high school. He was one that got in the weight room and improved himself every year."

As a senior at North in 1987, Holder completed 111 of 213 passes for 1,583 yards and 12 touchdowns and rushed for 520 yards and 10 touchdowns. He was selected to the Journal's All-Northwest Team by area coaches, was an honorable-mention all-state selection by The Associated Press, and he was selected to play in the East-West All-Star Game in the summer of 1988.

What Holder wanted was a football scholarship, and he thought he had one at Duke.

Holder said he had "written off everybody but Duke." But one day after his senior season, Richard Bell, a Duke assistant who had recruited him, showed up at North Surry and dropped off Holder's highlight tapes.

"He said he had been let go, and they weren't going to recruit me," Holder said. "That was a tough day. But it wasn't a couple of days after that that Elon called and came and watched us play basketball, and they offered me right after that."

Holder said he took a visit, loved quarterbacks coach Bob Bailey and decided that Elon was the place for him.

"He was just a good athlete, No. 1, and he had that mentality of absorbing everything and wanted to know more type of stuff," said Bailey, now the AD at McMichael High. "He was a coach's dream as far as quarterback was concerned. He wanted to know about defenses. He had an open mind and wanted to absorb.

"You could tell he was going to be a coach. And he was smart, he was intelligent."

Up-and-down career

Holder's football career at Elon was a mixed bag. Rushed into action just three plays into the first game of his freshman year against Winston-Salem State, Holder lasted five plays. He was hit hard on a sprint-out by Donald Franks -- who later played in the NFL -- and broke three vertebrae. He started several games at quarterback over the next two seasons, but also was moved to receiver and led Elon in receiving as a junior.

Doctors found, before his senior season, that Holder had an irregular heartbeat, and he couldn't play because of the medication used to treat it.

That turned into a blessing in disguise, as he took on the graduate assistant's role.

"It was the best thing that ever happened to me, coaching-wise," Holder said. "I sat the press box, I was in coaches' meetings, and just learned things that would be difficult to learn otherwise about the in's and out's of offense and game planning and those type of things."

After graduating from Elon in the spring of 1993 with a degree in mathematcis, Holder took a teaching position to Surry Central and a football position as an assistant to Alex Mebane. Two years later, Mebane left, and Holder, then 24, became a head coach for the first time. He stayed at Central for four seasons, compiling a 23-23 record, then got the call from Hollingsworth.

Hand-picked

Hollingsworth said, tongue-in-cheek, that people in Mount Airy "forgive" those who went to North Surry after they grow up.

"Knowing the type person he was, the people he had worked for and played under in college, we just felt like he had the good knowledge of football, and we haven't been disappointed," said Hollingsworth, now retired but still teaching driver's education at Mount Airy. "He is very easygoing, and he gets along with everybody. The kids rally to him.

"We have been very fortunate here at Mount Airy. We had the right coach at the right time. He has done a great job with these kids. The kids have had good athletic ability, good talent, and he has known what to do with it."

Holder married his high-school sweetheart, Jill Taylor, and they have two sons -- Logan (12) and Ian (9). Logan will be a freshman at Mount Airy in two years.

"Right now I am enjoying it, and loving it," Holder said. "I'm getting ready to have the opportunity to coach my own kids. If I feel like that is going to be a great experience, I will still be doing it. That definitely has the opportunity to be a tough situation, and I realize that."

Hollingsworth said he tried to lure Holder to Mount Airy as an assistant coach right out of college but that Holder "wouldn't listen to it." Looking back, Holder said he now knows there's nowhere else he'd rather be.

"Mount Airy has been more than I could have asked for," Holder said. "The support, the youth foundation, the administration is top notch. And the talent that we have had is just the icing on the cake."

mlinker@wsjournal.com.

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