Burns

The first brick on Coach Heath Burns’ coaching road was laid many years ago.It was a time that smelled of dank locker rooms, felt like bus seat leather, and sounded like a thousand beats of a round, seamed sphere against a worn hardwood floor. Grainy black-and-white images in school yearbooks show hairless-faced young boys with scratchy polyester uniforms dashed with yellow-and-white piping, and shorts that revealed copious amounts of thigh. In those winter days so long ago, those cold nights where knees rattled and palms sweated, athletes were born. And it was then that Heath Burns had his first inkling that he wanted to be a basketball coach.Back then, the Maddox Middle School basketball team was directed by a young coach with bouffant hair who paced the sidelines in salt-and-pepper sport coats. Greg Tinker, fresh off of graduating from Trevecca Nazarene, was the Jets’ skipper. “He was a great coach, but he was a guy you could talk to. A friend,” Burns reminisces. “He taught us how to be men. He is a winner in all phases of life. He’s the best coach I know and I was blessed to play for him. He made me want to be a coach.”After two seasons under the tutelage of Tinker, Burns moved on to Walker High School, where he played varsity under Coach Phil Schumacher. In 1990-91, Burns was a combo guard on a very talented squad that included Chad Key, David Kilgore, Chris Webster, Gerard Terrell, and Marcus Mitchell. “We had a tight-knit group,” Burns says. “We believed in what we were doing and bought in to the system. I loved to shoot the 3, but our offense was structured around feeding the post. So I got those guys the ball a lot.”Like many athletes in Jasper, Burns also played baseball throughout his youth. Springs and summers were dusted with the sublime joys of Little League baseball. “My dad coached me in youth league with John Kirkpatrick,” Burns says. “Their coaching helped me to be a better coach.”After high school graduation, Burns accepted a scholarship offer to play baseball at Northwest-Shoals Community College. He stayed there one year before transferring to Huntingdon College in Montgomery. “My freshman and sophomore years, my life was not prioritized,” Burns recalls. “I learned that the longest trip in the world is from the head to the heart.”Burns says that soon, “divine intervention” came with the reemergence of Coach Tinker in his life. “He talked to me about not giving up, about perseverance,” Burns says. “In the offseason, we worked with me on batting practice and taking ground balls.”Tinker suggested that an opportunity might be available to play baseball at Trevecca under Hall of Fame coach Dave Altopp. Soon, a scholarship opened up and Burns jumped.For a while, Burns thought about coaching baseball, but realized that basketball was his true love. “A lot goes into baseball due to weather,” he says. “The field will get flooded, and that steered me away. Basketball is faster-paced, and I feel like you have more of an opportunity to change the game.”Burns returned to Walker County in 1998 as the head coach of the Townley Tigers after legendary coach Kenneth Lakey recommended him for the job. “He became a mentor at Townley,” Burns says.Burns’ teams at Townley were untalented and slow, but played with tremendous grit and heart. “Every kid knew that the Townley Tigers were going to play hard and compete,” Burns says.One of Burns’ favorite memories at Townley was a game against Lupton:“At Townley, playing Lupton was like Alabama-Auburn. We had practice on a Sunday, and two of my kids didn’t show. So I told them they could dress out for the game but could not play. During the game, we were down 16 in the third, but came back to take the lead when Matt Handley fouled out. That left us with four players, because we had only seven on the team. Well, I wasn’t going to take back what I said about suspending those two players. The referee came over and said, ‘Coach, you need to put somebody in.’ I wouldn’t, so we got T’ed up. They shot the free throws, made both, and tied the game. The game that night was at Townley and people were sitting elbow to elbow. And I wasn’t well-liked. If I got another technical, they were going to throw me out and the place was going to erupt. So I subbed one of the suspended players in and I said, ‘When you get in, I want you to come stand right here in front of me and don’t move.’ So he did. And I guess the Lupton coach thought I had some kind of scheme going on, so he put a defensive player on the kid who was standing in front of me. And he was in deny defense. The rest of the gym was playing 4-on-4. It was the craziest thing. We ended up winning by two, but if we would have lost that game, I would have never left the gym alive.”At Townley, Burns coached the boys’ and girls’ teams. In the summers, Burns would take the boys to the Trojan Academy Basketball Camp in Nashville. One particular summer, he had the opportunity to pick the brain of Tennessee women’s coach Pat Summit. “I said, ‘Coach, we’ve had success and have won ballgames, but I have not had much success with the girls.’ She said, ‘Where are your girls at?’ You treat your girls different. That’s your problem. You have to treat your girls like you treat the boys.’”Burns took that sound advice and applied it across the board, to the long-haired athletes as well as the short-haired ones. Results and championships followed. In Burns’ five years at Townley, his teams won eight county championships.In 2003, Burns became the head coach at his alma mater, Maddox Middle School. Over four seasons, his teams amassed a record of 178-9, winning seven county championships. “At Maddox, I was able to teach and coach in the same building I was coached and taught by some very influential people. I just tried to reflect the people I learned from in my life so it became repetitious the longer I coached. It was then I really began to understand that faculty, parents, students, churches, businesses and communities rally around good teams that are full of great kids,” Burns says.Burns left Maddox in 2007 to take the head coaching job at Dora High. After a mediocre first season, Burns says that an awakening occurred that following spring. “I met with my coaching staff and decided that in order to be a better team we had to put together a better idea of what we were going to need in order to win,” Burns says. “The very first thing we thought we had to do was to structure the kind of player we were going to win with. We demanded more from our players in the weight room, classroom, and on the floor. We wanted to make our kids tougher both mentally and physically. We’ve all heard the old cliché ‘he looks like Tarzan and plays like Jane’ and it’s true in some cases. So the idea was simple from then on: a Dora player could be any size, shape, or color. There would be no common denominator except for a passion and love of basketball and a sincere desire to get the most out of his abilities. We had to make our guys understand that attitude was everything.”Burns also stressed preparation and goal-setting. “I went back to quotes Coach Altopp had stressed to us in college,” Burns says. “’Failure to prepare is preparing to fail’ and ‘The only preparation for tomorrow is the right use of today.’ And we went to work. We played 17 games that summer. We tweaked the system and the team loved it. The next two years, that group went to the Final Four and lost in the state finals and the following year, we went to the Elite 8.”But after four years at Dora, Burns sensed that it was time for another change. “I had a chance to go work with a friend of mine, Eric Smith at Parrish High School,” Burns says.At Parrish, Burns took an otherwise lackluster basketball program and made them winners. Across three years, his Tornadoes went 77-14, winning two county championships and two area championships. The team reached the Elite 8 twice, the Final Four, and lost in the state championship game to St. Jude in 2014.Reflecting on Parrish, Burns says, “I have never seen a community that cared about its kids as much as Parrish.”When Parrish High School was shut down two years ago, Burns took the head coaching job at Cordova. In his inaugural season, the team went 19-7.Now Burns stares down his second season as headman of the Blue Devils’ basketball program. He’ll bring all of the lessons he’s learned over three decades with him as the whistles of fall commence and colder air rushes through the house-dotted Cordova hills. A new crop of players, fresh faces, as well as old ones will put on their practice togs and suit up for Coach Heath Burns. While the players change, the message remains the same, because Burns knows the challenges of this fall are the training ground for that unscripted drama we call life. 78To read Part 1 of this two-part series, please pick up the latest issue of 78 Magazine at select locations.