Builder of Men

On a grassy, hundred-yard field off Highway 69 in Oakman, under a blistering, egg-frying hot Alabama sun, Mark Hastings mentors a group of blue-clad teen boys as they line up in a T-formation, tossing a brown prolate spheroid-shaped ball made of cowhide. Building on a firm foundation of commitment, he consistently lays brick after brick of speed, agility, execution, and endurance, filling the joints with mortar made of character and integrity. Now in his eighth season as the Oakman Wildcats’ head coach, Mark doesn’t build houses. He builds young men. He builds teams.Many decades ago, Hastings could have been a brick mason. Opportunity came knocking in the 1970s for a young boy, helping his dad lay brick in Red Bay, Alabama. Mark was a quick study, and in no time had things figured out. “I learned very quickly I did not want to be a brick mason,” he says firmly. “You work a couple of days with him, it makes you enjoy school.” Mark laid down his trowel for good, thus ending his budding career laying brick.Fast-forward a few decades, to 2016. Mark is now a father of two. His twenty-three-year-old daughter Hannah Grace is a 2015 graduate of the University of Alabama and lives in Dallas. His twenty year-old son Hall is a junior at Ole Miss.Mark is still at school, and still enjoying it.Clifton Hallmark Hastings was born in 1966, the second of five children of that hard-working brickmason and a home health worker. “I came from a sure enough hard-working family,” he says. “They gave us everything they could. They instilled in us a good work ethic, a sense of appreciation and taking care of what you’ve got. I try to do that as far as coaching as well.”From an early age Mark loved sports, playing baseball, football, and basketball with his older brother Donnie. When nine-year-old Donnie showed up for Little League practice, little brother Mark often tagged along but was too young to play on the team. It wasn’t long, however, before Mark was in uniform. “They kept using me in practice, and finally they put me on the team. I was the first seven year old on the team,” he grins.Mark’s passion lay not on the baseball diamond, but on the gridiron. “I was fairly good in baseball but always had a love for football,” he says. Even though he went on to coach baseball a few years later, racking up over one hundred and fifty wins, there was no contest. “Those Friday nights, they're hard to compete with,” Mark says.At Red Bay High School, Mark quarterbacked and played tight end. After graduating in 1984, he went on to Itawamba Community College and Huntingdon College, leaving the pigskin behind for a wooden or aluminum bat.After graduating from the University of Alabama in 1991 with a degree in history, Mark landed his first football coaching position in 1992 as an assistant at Autauga Academy, where he spent two seasons. “You know, learning how to get your feet wet, how to deal with the kids and parents, it was a great learning experience for me,” he says. “We had some great kids that I actually still think about quite often, and that was twenty five years ago.”Following that time Mark spent five seasons as an assistant football and head baseball coach at Edgewood Academy. “We were not successful at all at Edgewood,” he admits. “I worked with some good people but we were just not good in football, but we were very good in baseball.” Despite the school’s less-than-stellar record, a silver lining remained, sewn inside the hem of the ebony cloud of Edgewood. “In 1996 I was the Montgomery Metro [baseball] Coach of the Year, private school,” Mark says.After seven years as an assistant coach, Tuscaloosa Academy offered Mark his first head coaching position in football in 1998. After three seasons, the Knights finished with a record of 11-18.In 2001 Mark came to Warrior Academy, this time pulling double duty as both head coach and administrator. After two years his record was 8-13. “It was a big difference to me because my relationship with the kids was different,” he recalls. “Being in an administrative role in addition to a coach was pretty difficult.”Then in 2003, he got a call from Holy Spirit Catholic School. At that time there was no existing football program. “During my first year at Holy Spirit, a lot of people were pushing for football,” he says. “When they decided to look into it, they asked me if I would do it. I told them yes, we ended up getting the funding and started the program, and were real successful very quick. Our first three years eligible for the playoffs we made it. I always thought that was kind of neat, being able to experience the playoffs the first three years. That’s gotta be the only school in the state that’s ever done that.”When Mark came to Oakman High School in 2009, the Wildcats were rather docile. “The first year we were really really bad,” Mark says. “We were 1-9, and we had a tough schedule. When the season was over, the coaches and I just dug in. That was one thing we talked about was, if we were gonna do it, we’ve gotta be on the same page. We dug in, and we started trying to get more of the athletes out, we coached them up really well because we played a lot of young kids that year. The second season I think we finished 3-7. We had injuries all year long. I felt like we could have finished at least 5-5 or even 6-4 and gone to the first round.”Oakman finished the 2010 season with a 3-7 record, followed by 8-4 the year after that. In 2012 they finished at 10-2 and held that record for three consecutive seasons. “I think the biggest difference was, we did it with Oakman kids that started with us,” Mark says. “We were able to develop them from junior high into high school, and our coaches made a commitment to dig in and coach them up every day. I feel like our coaches the last few years have done a really good job getting our kids ready to play. Out of those last five seasons I think we only lost one game that we really shouldn’t have lost.”With Oakman’s season opener set for August 26th at Lamar County, the Wildcats are gearing up for what could be a challenging season. “This season could very well be our most difficult with our schedule, a very, very tough schedule,” Mark says.Success, for Hastings, can often be attributed to several factors: work ethic, commitment, attitude, and just plain old hard work. Although those certainly apply here, perhaps the primary factor in this case is that Coach Mark Hastings loves what he does, and he actually cares. “One thing I’m most proud of is that we have had our success with our kids who came through our program, who started and are finishing at Oakman,” he says. “To me it’s rewarding that we are able to take a small community and, you know, you take what you have and you do the best that you can. That’s one of the things that I’m really proud of about our coaches. We have some very dedicated, very good coaches that are good to the kids, that care about the kids, and they’re in it for the right reasons.”And so, the mason that could have been has chosen another area of life in which to build. 78Photos by Al Blanton