Coach Joe: Joe Abrams’ Long Career as a Northshore Coach
by Susan Owens
“Well, it’s about time to hang it up,” Joe says, referring to his coaching days. “My oldest team member just turned seventy.” Seventy? Sixty-nine years old himself, Joe explains that Annette Wilson was a couple of years older than he was at the time he coached her. Joe remembers it like it was yesterday.
“I was a nursing student at Providence School of Nursing in Mobile, back in 1959,” he says. The school was St. Catherine’s, a small university with a ladies basketball team—and they were looking for a coach.
“You WILL be the coach,” Sr. Bernadette said.
“Yes, sister,” Joe said. And thus began his one-and-only paid coaching job, the women’s basketball team. “At one hundred dollars per month, it was a great student job.”
Former college basketball star Annette Wilson is not the only oldie-but-goodie who resides in Joe Abrams’ personal Hall of Fame. He has quite a roster of former elementary and junior high players who went on to excel in sports, playing on local high school teams and even playing college football. But most important to Joe, even more of them have gone on to live very successful lives.
Not surprisingly, they all remember him–from the ones he coached on basketball and football teams to the young and old sailors he trained at the Pontchartrain Yacht Club. It is not unusual for some big burly guy to come up to Joe, give him a big bear hug and say, “Hey, Coach!”
Recently, Joe made a call to help a relative with a plumbing problem. The voice on the other end said, “Is that you, Coach?” Remembering the hours Joe had spent on the field with him, the plumber eagerly agreed to help Aunt Julie. And that seems to happen everywhere Joe goes—somebody stops to say, “Hey, Coach, remember when…?”
For Joe, that is ample reward for his forty-plus years of coaching hundreds of young boys and girls enrolled in northshore sports programs.
Sitting in his red leather chair, wearing his signature red socks, Joe talks about sports—participating in sports himself and watching his beloved Arkansas Razorbacks play. He chats about some of the best teams, the best kids and the best moments that he has experienced since that fateful day when Sr. Bernadette at St. Catherine’s saw a potential coach in that young nursing student.
Not all of the seasons have been successful, but all have been rewarding. Joe remembers one team at St. Joseph’s in Biloxi. The team, made up of eleven- and twelve-year-old boys from troubled backgrounds, had a big quarterback who was sure to take them to the playoffs. When the star walked into the locker room smoking a big cigar, however, Joe sent him home to quit smoking. When he did not return, the dreams of a championship went up in smoke. The little inner-city team did not win a game that season, but the boys were big winners. They had Joe Abrams for a coach.
Joe has coached a team wherever he has found himself, in Biloxi when he was in the military and in Little Rock while he was in anesthesia school. In 1969, as a certified registered nurse anesthetist, he found his way to Covington, started his medical practice and gathered up a football team. With no organization to support the team, he and some other sports fans created an informal league. Everyone got to play that year.
Eventually, the teams were divided into three age groups—the Jolly Green Giants, the Monsters and the Dragons. They were named by Trudy Lagarde, the official “team mother,” who had boys playing on every team. She attended most of the practices, often providing the cookies and drinks for the tired, thirsty and hungry boys.
As the number of teams grew and the West St. Tammany League was formed, Joe recruited his friends in the medical field to provide physicals for the team players, a tradition begun by the late Dr. Luis Matta that continues to this day. Over the years, Joe and his wife, Beth, have done everything from buying uniforms to waiting at the field until the last player was picked up after practice or a game. Once, the Abrams brought one player to their home. He needed a port in a storm. As it turned out, he lived with the Abrams for a few years. Yes, years.
Joe says he couldn’t have coached all of these years without Beth’s help at home “Doing the things that I should have been doing, while I coached sports.” His partner at work, Gladys Brantley, also took up the slack when the team needed Joe for practice and at the games.
Joe’s volunteer coaching career parallels the development of youth sports on the northshore. Some of the very first teams held their practice sessions in the Tchefuncte neighborhood until 1976, when they moved to the Madisonville practice field. Joe moved with them to the new location on Pine Street, and then to their present home, the Coquille Sports Complex, in 2004.
In addition to coaching football, he was head coach of the Madisonville Junior High boys and girls basketball teams. “I had to clean up my language a little when I coached the young ladies,” Joe remarks, with a twinkle in his eye.
Year after year, all over the northshore, Joe coached the children and grandchildren of his friends and associates—as well as his own son, Louis, who played football. Win or lose. “One year, I even coached the cheerleaders,” Joe says. “It was a disaster. I didn’t cut anyone; we had about fifty cheerleaders, and I didn’t know anything about cheerleading.”
Ever the coach, Joe said, “Sure” when the Florida Parishes Juvenile Detention Center was looking for volunteers to coach its team for a weekend tournament. Joe says, “We had a pretty good chance until all of the tall guys ended up in lock down for fighting.”
He still knows many of his former players by name, number of yards gained, goals made and touchdowns scored. He does not recount win and loss records, however. He proudly tells you which players had talent, heart, determination, responsibility, and that intangible but very real quality he admires, “chutzpah.”
Don’t think for a minute that Joe is a syrupy, do-gooder schmuck. Like any real coach, he knows that winning the game is what it’s all about. He likes to recall one team that really made him proud. “A team of 8 to 10-year-olds who had never played football before. They went undefeated and untied. There were no real athletes in the bunch.” None of them ever went any further in sports, but for that year, they were the champions. Joe thinks that is just great.
Small of stature and big of heart are words that might describe Joe Abrams. He is funny and charismatic, one of those people who might be described by others as “a character.” And Coach Joe thrives on being in charge.
Joe Abrams wears his Alpha Male badge with honor. The father of two sons, Louis and Jody, he is a Past Commodore of the Pontchartrain Yacht Club; the self-appointed Admiral of the mythical Not Sure Cruising Club; and Captain of his boat, the Leah G, and quite a few sailboats. In his profession, Joe was formerly in command of the most delicate of operating room procedures, the administration of anesthesia to hospital patients. Most recently, he is King of the Road, traveling the American highways with Beth and their dog, Dominick.
Joe had to cut his interview for this story short. Seems that his new position, “Coach Emeritus” of the Madisonville Dragons, required that he head on out to the football field, in 98° heat, no less. So much for retirement from coaching. Joe thinks that he just might coach another year or so and then retire. “I’ll be eligible for my coaching pension then.”
