Q&A: Biggerstaff reflects on lengthy coaching career that included 8 years at East Burke

Football has been an important part of Mike Biggerstaff’s life, with the now 77-year-old finding success as both a player and a high school coach.

A McDowell County native, Biggerstaff graduated from Marion High School in 1966 before walking on at Western Carolina University, where he eventually earned a scholarship and was a team captain during his junior and senior seasons. Initially an offensive and defensive guard, Biggerstaff moved to linebacker as a senior and proceeded to earn All-Carolinas Conference honors for the third year in a row to go with a Collegiate All-State team selection, an All-NAIA District 26 selection, and an NAIA All-America honorable mention selection.

Biggerstaff was also chosen as the Catamounts’ defensive MVP as a senior after he helped WCU finish 9-1 and attain a final ranking of eighth in the NAIA national polls after the program entered the season having never achieved a national ranking. Furthermore, the Catamounts’ defense led the country in takeaways in 1969, finishing with 24 interceptions and 26 fumble recoveries.

Following his playing career, Biggerstaff spent the next few years as an assistant coach at Marion as well as R-S Central. He then became R-S Central’s head coach for two seasons before leaving to take an assistant coaching job under the late Ralph “Jug” Wilson at Freedom, a role he remained in for four years.

After that, Biggerstaff served as the head coach at West Caldwell from 1979-87 before working in private business for 14 years. He returned to the sideline in 2002, spending eight seasons as the head coach at East Burke before stepping away again, although he came back in 2019 for a final year as West Caldwell’s head coach before retiring for good.

All told, Biggerstaff posted a 145-81 record in 20 seasons as a head coach, including a 76-36 mark at West Caldwell, where he is the winningest coach in program history and also boasts the highest winning percentage (.679) by a coach. And his .621 winning percentage (59-36) at EB is the second-highest in program history, while his win total ranks third all-time for the Cavaliers.

During Biggerstaff’s first tenure at West Caldwell, the Warriors won six conference titles and made a North Carolina High School Athletic Association (NCHSAA) 3A state semifinal appearance in 1987. Biggerstaff also guided EB to seven NCHSAA 4A state playoff appearances as well as a conference championship in 2007, when the Cavs earned a program-record 12 wins and reached the third round of the playoffs before falling at home to an Independence squad that had won state titles in each of the prior seven seasons and had won 119 of its previous 121 games entering the matchup.

Biggerstaff was also notably 4-4 as EB’s coach in Fat Friday games against Freedom after previously helping the Patriots to a 2-2 record against the Cavs when he was their defensive coordinator from 1975-78, and he coached in both the Shrine Bowl of the Carolinas and the North Carolina Coaches Association’s East-West All-Star Game in 1985. Additionally, he was inducted into the Caldwell County Sports Hall of Fame in 1999, the East Burke High HOF in 2015, the Western Carolina Athletics HOF in 2016, and the West Caldwell High HOF in 2023.

Earlier this week, Biggerstaff took time to talk with The Paper. Here’s some of what he had to say:

Q: When and how did you get started in football?

“I started playing in junior high and then in high school with coaches Ted Freeman and Howard Wilson, who were both very basic, fundamental coaches, and I just really enjoyed it. I had a chance to get a college scholarship, but couldn’t make the SAT score. I had good grades, but I could not connect with the SAT, so I ended up walking on at Western Carolina, and that was a great time in my life.”

Q: How did you get into coaching?

“I just loved the game. I loved all the small points of the game and the way you had to break things down to make things happen, and it being a total team game was what appealed to me. Also, the relationships and the friends that you make, friendships that last for life because of the hard work and the team atmosphere that you have to have to be successful, I just really enjoyed that environment.

“After I finished college, I had to come back home and I got a job offer at home in Marion with Johnny Anderson (who also later served as Freedom’s coach from 1991-94), my best friend until he passed away. He gave me a chance to coach. I was a defensive coordinator right out of college, coached two years there, then went to R-S Central as an assistant coach with Worth Johnson, who was just a tremendous person and a tremendous coach at R-S Central, and that was the largest 3A high school in the state at that time.

“I coached one year with Worth and then before my 25th birthday they named me the head coach at R-S Central, and I coached there for two years before coming to Freedom as an assistant coach for Jug Wilson. I had a really fun four years there, we won a lot of football games. And then I was offered a head coaching job at West Caldwell and coached there for nine years, went into private business with my brother for 14 years, then the company was sold and I decided I wanted to coach again.

“Rick Sherrill, a really good player and great principal and great superintendent, one of the best I’ve ever known, hired me as the head coach at East Burke. I coached at East Burke for eight years until I was retirement age at 62.”

Q: What do you remember about coaching under Jug Wilson at Freedom?

“Coach Wilson just had his way of going about things, and it was fun and it was a different way. We scrimmaged an awful lot and the kids just loved him. It was a good experience for me to see how he handled kids, how you could be their buddy and their friend and then of course things have to change when you get on the practice field and the game field to be successful, and Jug was the best at it.”

Q: You were involved in the traditional era of Fat Friday games when Burke County only had two high schools. What was it like to coach in that rivalry?

“It was a tremendous rivalry. It was even more intense during my time at East Burke, and the entire community got into it. There were 2,000 kids at each school at that time, and that’s 8,000 parents, and it just really was the most intense game that I was ever involved in from a coaching standpoint. It was really a lot of fun, and I really miss that.”

Q: As far as your time coaching at East Burke, you won a lot of games and made the playoffs all but one year. Just how fondly do you look back on your time in Icard?

“It was just really the best job I ever had coaching, it was tremendous. I didn’t win any games, our kids won a lot of games, but I lost several for them by not being real smart sometimes. But the kids won a bunch of games and a bunch of championships and got in the playoffs a bunch of times. They were really, really tough kids who put in a lot of work in the offseason and really wanted to commit to be part of a team.

“One thing I always really enjoyed that I did just about every year is if you were on varsity, you were gonna play. You had an assignment, you were gonna get to play football unless the situation just couldn’t be helped, and most kids bought into that. They’d work hard, they knew our practice time was limited, they knew what time they were gonna practice, what time they were gonna be through, and they would really apply themselves to what our goals were. The kids are what made it special.”

Q: One name that you got to coach at East Burke was Tyler Shatley, who went on to play at Clemson and then enjoyed an 11-year NFL career with the Jacksonville Jaguars before retiring earlier this year. How satisfying has it been to watch his success and what was he like to coach?

“Just a complete joy. I coached his older brother too, and it was just a special family. Tyler was a tremendous athlete, a tremendous player, and an even better person. He was humble, and the humility that he possessed just rubbed off on everybody else.

“A good friend of mine, Dan Brooks, was at Clemson and recruited Tyler. Dan coached the defensive line and was the associate head coach. They tried him on defense a year or two, and then Tyler ended up making all-conference as an offensive lineman. It was special to watch him do that and go through it knowing what kind of person he was and the impact he had on other people. That’s what I loved about Tyler Shatley, he had an impact on everybody he was around — students, teachers, teammates — he was just a very special person.”

Q: You spent half of your total years as a head coach at West Caldwell, and in August 2016 they named the field after you. What did it mean to you for them to choose to do that?

“I was kind of amazed by it when they called me. I’d been there nine years prior, and it was obviously a big honor to me, a big honor to my whole family. My memory goes way back to players like Derrick Donald and Russell Gibson and about 50 or so more kids that were able to come out of that program, go on to college, and get their education. That’s the main thing I remember is how competitive at the state level that those kids became, just a disciplined program and wanting to pull together to win.”

Q: Overall, what do you hope people remember about you as a coach?

“Anything but winning football games. I think for a high school coach there’s so much more that you have to contribute to other than winning, and we won a lot of games. But the main thing kids have to learn is you’re not gonna win them all, but you’ve got to prepare to win, and that carries over to not only winning games but winning in life. And I spoke more about that to our kids, regardless of what school it was, I talked about those things much more than winning the football games.”

Q: What are you up to these days in retirement?

“I played golf two or three days a week up until about a year ago and enjoyed that. And I enjoy spending time with my son, my grandchildren, and my great-grandchildren. My wife and I are kind of homebodies, we don’t travel a lot but enjoy family and a few friends.

“I’ve lost a lot of close friends the last three or four years, so now it’s just about hanging out, relaxing, and trying not to hurt so much from all the contact and all the hurts and pains I had over the years that come about now because of football and working 24/7 for many, many years. We’re just trying to relax and enjoy what time we have left.”

NOTE: Excerpts of this Q&A were edited for brevity and clarity.