Note: This is part of a series of stories highlighting the members of this year’s Vicksburg Warren School District Athletic Hall of Fame Class.

When he arrived at Warren Central in the summer of 1968, Robert Morgan was a fresh-faced young football coach looking to do anything he could to help his team win and to make a name for himself.

Whether it was taping ankles, coaching in the program’s lower levels, or doing mundane tasks like filling water jugs and cutting grass, he did it.

Forty-nine years later he’s come full circle.

Now a 73-year-old retiree with a fresh knee replacement, he wandered through Warren Central’s fieldhouse last week filling water buckets and performing other odd jobs a couple of hours before practice.

“My granddaddy was the same. If he got a hole in his britches he’d get mad if grandma patched them because he didn’t want people to think he’d been sitting down,” Morgan said with a laugh.

Morgan is retired, but certainly not sitting still. On Sept. 8, Warren Central’s Viking Stadium will be renamed in his honor. This week, he’ll be inducted into the Vicksburg Warren School District Athletic Hall of Fame.

The induction ceremony is Thursday at 6 p.m. at the Vicksburg City Auditorium. Tickets cost $20 and are available at the VWSD athletic office on Mission 66.

Morgan is Warren County’s all-time winningest football coach, with a 168-72 record and two state championships in 19 seasons with the Vikings. He was an assistant for 17 years before ascending to the head coaching position in 1985 and has continued as a volunteer assistant since retiring in 2003.

Morgan was inducted into the Mississippi Association of Coaches Hall of Fame in 2004, but said this latest induction was a surprise despite all he’s accomplished.

“This is not why you coach. It’s just something that happened. I can think of lots of people in my mind better suited for it. But they picked me and I’m honored,” Morgan said. “It’s not about one man. It’s about all the coaches I learned from and with, all the superintendents and principals I worked with, all the players. But the reason I enjoy this honor is my immediate family and my (wife) Cathy. Good, bad or ugly, she’s been with me and she’s the best thing that happened to me.”

Morgan was only 24 when he picked Warren Central over seven other job offers, and he never left. Over the next decade and a half he held almost every position within the program while working on the staff of Lum Wright Sr. — himself a hall of fame coach.

Wright won 125 games in 13 seasons with WC, as well as several Little Dixie Conference championships in the 1970s. When Wright resigned following the 1984 season, it was Morgan who was tabbed to take the reins and carry on that tradition and he did not disappoint.

Morgan only had one losing season in 19 years as head coach and won the school’s only two state championships during the MHSAA’s playoff era, in 1988 and 1994. He also led the 1993 team to the Class 5A championship game. His teams won 10 region championships.

“I don’t know how many games I’ve seen here,” Morgan said. “I had never missed a game until last year, when I had knee and back surgery and missed a couple toward the end of the season.”

He retired after the 2003 season but continued on as an assistant. His role declined over the next decade, from an advisor to successor Curtis Brewer to jack-of-all-trades for the current coach, his son Josh. Another son, Rob, is Warren Central’s offensive coordinator, and their children are at every game.

Most of the other assistant coaches also played at Warren Central, which Robert Morgan said increases the familial atmosphere even more.

“I really enjoy it,” Morgan said. “It’s made it fun since Rob and Josh are coaching, but the other coaches are boys that played for us over the years. I do what I can to help, but not to get in the way. I don’t have anything to do with gameplanning or anything like that anymore. My role would be ‘there if you need me.’ I help in any way I can. There’s a way you can help, if you see something that needs to be done, you just do it. My best friend right now is the golf cart.”

The renaming of Viking Stadium will ensure that Morgan’s stamp on the program will be felt for years to come, and his sons seem likely to carry on the legacy as well. Josh Morgan is in his eighth season as the Vikings’ head coach. Rob is in his seventh as the offensive coordinator. Another son, Brett, is an assistant at defending Class 5A champion West Point.

The three Morgan sons also have 13 children among them. Whether the eldest Morgan is still lending a helping hand behind the scenes when they reach high school age remains to be seen, but it seems that as long as he’s able to stand he’ll be around the program in some way, shape or form.

“Coaching, I guess, is what God meant for me to do,” Morgan said.

VWSD HALL OF FAME
The induction ceremony for the Vicksburg Warren School District’s Athletic Hall of Fame Class of 2017 is Thursday at 6 p.m. at City Auditorium. Tickets are $20 and available at the VWSD athletic office on Mission 66.
This year’s inductees are Warren Central football coach Robert Morgan; Warren Central baseball player Taylor Tankersley; basketball players Michael Phelps (Vicksburg High) and Mary Logue (Warren Central); football players Eddie Burns (Vicksburg) and George Nasif (South Vicksburg); and Warren Central softball player Jackie Pettway.