Roger Cox: “We have built a solid foundation at Rabun Gap, now we can grow rapidly.”

It’s been 4-5 years since I graduated from Rabun Gap. I’ve seen how much athletics have grown since my time there. You are sending more kids to D1 schools than ever, there are more D2 scholarships being awarded, more exposure. How did it all happen and what are the key factors that led to this?

I am so fortunate and blessed to have seen the majority of the growth here in athletics.

In the 90s and early 2000s, Rabun Gap was considered a very good academic school, and it was also considered a very good artistic school, but it was not considered good in sports. For example, Boys Basketball was winning no more than four games in one year and even those were against really bad teams. And so the head of school said “We need to hire some coaches who know how to coach”. I happened to have a connection to someone working here and he asked me if I would do it. Initially, I was not interested. But eventually I became extremely interested and wanted to be here, badly. For myself, but also for my family, my children. That’s when the journey began for me. I really was the first coach that they hired to start changing the way that they approached sports.

Now every coach at Rabun Gap, essentially across the board in every sport, has an even better approach to how they train and what they do, but I came in and did what I needed to do at the time. I helped change the mentality of how we approached practicing, training, offseason, recruiting.

Since I started we’ve had two heads of school, and every head of school that’s been here, and every coach, every person that’s been here has played a part in the growth of the school overall.

For example, Dr. Scro, who was the head of school when you were here. His foresight and understanding of how to reach out and welcome you and Paulius here was a huge part of our overall growth as a school and in sports. Because the mentality was, here’s a couple of really great young men who deserve an opportunity, who are in a weird spot, we’d like to welcome them here and help them pursue their dreams. We see the people and the opportunity and their heart, and we want them to be here. So you and Paulius came in here and were part of that journey. And I can go through every season and tell you individuals and people that were part of that growth, and that’s how we get a little bit better, a little bit better.

It’s not necessarily wins and losses that determine whether or not we were a little bit better, because you’re gonna have some years that maybe it’s a little up and down. It’s the general way that we are perceived and our competitiveness, our growth, our depth of students.

We are now into the third head of school since I’ve been here, Mr. Jeff Miles. He had been involved with a previous boarding school where he saw a similar situation.

He saw a good school with average athletics and sports, and then started working on improving it. He had some ideas about how he wanted to make that happen and he implemented those things. And they’re not very complicated. They’re just simply, let’s find really great kids. And let’s help them be good. Let’s hire good coaches, and help coaches who are in place by giving them the tools that they need to succeed. This will make everybody better, not just that sport. It will make other sports better, it will make the school better and that way everybody’s done their part.

And boy, I have watched it grow. And I’m so grateful for it.

As you know, our boys soccer team won the state championship last year and they’ve been runner up the two years before, the boys baseball team has been great. The boys basketball team has been winning for years, we’re just in one of the toughest leagues in the country, so we haven’t won a championship yet, but we’re knocking on the door. The girls basketball team won the championship last year, the American football team has been in the championship game the past two years.

I just think all those things have grown appropriately, that’s what I’m most proud of. We didn’t just say, “Okay, let’s be good.” We didn’t just go and get a bunch of good people all at once, and go from not good at all to really, really good. That’s not proper growth. We built on a nice foundation from way back, back before even my time. And then we got a little bit better, a little bit better, the foundation got better. And eventually now the foundation is so strong that we can grow rapidly.

I think of it like big cities, if you have good foundations, you can build tall buildings. If you have weak foundations, you can’t build tall buildings. And now it’s just left and right.

Like you said, I think people all around the world when they hear about us just have this high regard for us. But really, why do they have a high regard for us? It’s because of our alumni. It’s because of our graduates who are good people and successful and have good personalities and they function well in the world. And that’s the best indicator of whether we’re doing a good job as a school.

Over the last 2-3 years, have there been a lot of students that got athletic scholarships in the NCAA?

It’s a pretty significant amount. If we just go to last year, talking about the American football team, I think there’s maybe eight guys from that team playing in college right now, six of them in Division I. We just watched one of them play on TV the other day. He plays for Vanderbilt and he was playing against Alabama. Alabama is really, really good. Vanderbilt is not known for being great in football, however, it’s good football, there are guys that will go to the NFL from there. And it’s also an elite academic university. So we’re really excited for him being there, because he’s a great athlete, but he’s also a very good student. And that’s a good combination. We’ve got a guy at Michigan, a guy at Minnesota, guy at Virginia Tech, those are all really good football schools. Several of them are international guys who came here to play American football.

From a basketball standpoint, we’ve got a guy at Georgia Southern and he was one of the top players in the country, scoring-wise and he chose Georgia Southern, which is not a top tier Division I university. However, in the end, when you’re choosing universities, you want to choose the place that fits you best. And I feel like he made a really good decision. He’ll play a lot early. Whereas had he gone to maybe a “higher” level, he might have had to sit and wait. In the end, it’s an individual choice.

In this coming graduating class, we’ll have a couple of guys playing at the next level, one of them being a Lithuanian guy (Domas Kauzonas).He’s getting great, great recruiting right now at some really wonderful universities. For example, University of Pennsylvania, which is an Ivy League school, very, very great school. I’ve believed in him for a long time. It’s helpful that he came here in 10th grade as it gives you time. As soon as he got here I thought okay, if he will listen, if he will learn and progress the way I think he should he will do great. And he has progressed and he has a great work ethic and where he goes to school now is going to be so impressive and he will reap the benefits of that for the rest of his life.

Our girls basketball team, which won the state championship last year, will have several girls go on to play at the higher level. They only had two seniors last year, one went to play Division Three and another one to play in a NAIA school. She was from Nigeria and had a full scholarship, so it’s perfect. Several girls from this group will play Division I.

Soccer team also had tons of guys that have gone on to play in college and that’s just going to increase and grow, the baseball team as well. Our top sports are American football, soccer, basketball and then we have some students who will go on to play college tennis, golf, swimming, volleyball.

When international student athletes come to your school they leave their home, their family and friends behind. They find themselves in a completely new place. What struggles do you see them face during this time? And how do they adapt to the new environment?

It can vary a little bit based on the age and on the personality and fearlessness that certain kids have. In general, if somebody comes in grade 9 or grade 10 they’re usually going to be very nervous at the beginning. If they’re not nervous, they’re probably not thinking clearly (smiles), because it is a new experience, and they probably should be nervous. They have to make new friends, they have to know how to get around places, there’s a lot to learn. However that nervousness usually is gone very quickly once they meet new people and find things to do when they get here.

Over the first month or two, the times that they usually struggle the most would be on the weekends, or at night, when they don’t have as much to do and aren’t as busy.

Let’s say a young person from a country far away, like Lithuania or Poland has a roommate from somewhere here in the US. And then a weekend comes and that roommate goes home and the student is sitting in their room. They’ve had a lot of fun, they’ve met people, they’ve had some training in their sport or whatever. And then the weekend comes and it’s quiet, the roommate is gone. They start thinking, “Well, they’ve gone to spend time with their family and I’m missing my family.” The time is maybe 10 or 11 at night, so it’s not the right time to call their family because they’re probably still sleeping. That’s when they can start to feel sad. It is normal and almost certainly going to happen at some point, but then they bounce back because they get busy again, have some training, go outside, go on a trip, maybe they go see a movie and everything is fine again.

Fall Break is another challenging time, because again, you have 4-5 days off from school and maybe some of your friends go to somebody’s house and the dorm has fewer people in it, and you have some time by yourself. Also, the weather is starting to change and your first grades have just come out, so if you are struggling with those it can be an emotional thing. Sometimes you do struggle initially and it gets tough. But once you get through those times, afterwards you have very little of that. You can have those occasional thoughts like “I kind of miss home” or “I wish I could have some food that my parents make or my grandma makes”. You can have a little bit of that, but the sadness has gone away. But mostly, and I think you can confirm this, most of the students have this mentality that they are coming here to train.

Yes, sir. I was just about to say this.

Exactly. I’m coming there to train athletically, I’m coming there to prepare for university and so I have things that I need to do. There’s a little bit of fun, there are people that love me, but I’m on a mission.

Another thing is, when you first get here, you’re not sure about people, you think they’re nice, but you’re not sure. And you’re not going to know for sure until you have moments that you need them to be very, very kind to you.

You won’t have those moments until you feel homesick and then you go and tell about it to somebody like me, who seems pretty tough as a coach, and they say “You know what, man, it’s okay. It’s okay. I love you. I get it, let’s go. Let’s go do something to try to help you through this time.”

Once you go through those difficult times with somebody and you know they care about you, then everything starts to feel a little bit better. Eventually, you don’t even have to try to figure out if you feel better. You’re like “Man, I have two families. I have a family in Lithuania and I have a family in Georgia.” And then you feel just much better about yourself and life.

Last question Coach, since you work in the admissions office now, what do you look for in kids that are applying to your school? What are the main criteria?

My main interest is that the student wants to be here and that the family encourages that. That they ultimately conclude that Rabun Gap is the best place for them. If that is not the case and you come here with any regret, then things are tough. Because they will be. They’ll be tough in your sport, in your classes, sometimes they’ll be tough because you’ve simply had a tough day. You may start thinking “I wish I was somewhere else”. Nobody wants that, that’s not good for anybody. That’s number one thing for me. To know that you want to be here.

What we’re looking for is students that are good. They don’t have to be the best student, but they need to want to be as good as they can be. We don’t need them to come here and for us to have to convince them to do their school work. That’s silly. You come in here ready to work.

We want people who want to be taught and trained, corrected, coached. You don’t have to be perfect, but you need to want to be coached.

We want you to be yourself. We don’t want somebody to be quiet who is loud and we don’t want somebody who is quiet to be loud. But we want you to be humble. Humble doesn’t mean to be soft, it doesn’t mean to be weak. It just means you can acknowledge that you are important, but so are other people. That allows everybody to work together. We’re not in a competition with each other, we’re in a competition together. Everybody on the team, everybody on campus, we’re all trying to do the same things.

Finances are also a factor. It’s going to be a challenge for families in some places to justify paying money, especially when they have good education at little or no cost. But here’s the thing. When you invest in something like this, there’s a lot of things that come with it, not just education. When you are able to take that opportunity that you have and turn it into an Ivy League education or something similar, whatever investment you’ve made is worth it. It’s always a risk, there is no guarantee. If you think it’s worth the risk then you go with it and we’re going to help you. We’re going to try our best to get you the opportunities that you need, but we can’t promise that opportunity, we’re just going to try and help you.

We’re just looking for people who want to be here and who have the academic and athletic and/or artistic interest to become really, really good at the things they love.

Yes, sir. Thank you. Good talk, Coach.