Q&A: Freedom grad, former Patton coach Glass has fostered a winning culture at Hickory

Morganton native Joe Glass was initially against the idea of becoming a football coach, but since deciding to do so in 2002 at the urging of former Freedom High School assistant coach and East Burke High School head coach Tom Harper, he has made countless memories on the gridiron.

A 1995 Freedom graduate who didn’t start playing football until he was a student at Oak Hill Junior High School, Glass’ first coaching role in the sport was as a prep assistant at Alexander Central under the late Chris Deal. He was also the head coach at East Alexander Middle School for a year before joining current FHS head coach JK Adkins’ staff at South Iredell, following him to Patton and remaining there during Deal’s year at the helm in 2010, and then serving as an assistant at Hickory in 2011.

Glass then received the opportunity to return to Patton, this time as the head coach. In his second season with the Panthers, the team finished with a winning record for the first time at 7-5 and reached the North Carolina High School Athletic Association (NCHSAA) state playoffs for only the second time in program history.

In the years since, Glass has coached at Jay M. Robinson (2014-17), Eastern Guilford (2018), Lincolnton (2019-20), and Hickory (2021-present), posting an overall record of 97-61 as a head coach. He has particularly found success during his time with the Red Tornadoes, leading the squad to four straight winning seasons — Hickory is 44-10 since Glass’ arrival, highlighted by a 30-1 mark since the start of the 2023 season — including NCHSAA 3A West Regional final appearances each of the past two years, and a state title victory in 2023 when the squad finished 16-0 and defeated Seventy-First by a 33-26 final in the championship game at Kenan Memorial Stadium on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

After guiding Hickory to its first state championship in 27 years, Glass was named the 2023 CarolinaPreps.com Coach of the Year, and he also served as an assistant coach for the North Carolina squad during the 2024 Shrine Bowl of the Carolinas. He also previously coached in the North Carolina Coaches Association’s East-West All-Star Game in 2019.

Glass was interviewed by The Paper earlier this week ahead of his 24th season of coaching and his 14th as a head coach. Here’s some of what he had to say:

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

“I started playing football at Oak Hill Junior High. I never played rec ball or anything like that because the only recreation teams at that time were at Oak Hill, and I’m a Chesterfield kid. With work and everything else, my parents were not able to take me to go play, so I was a baseball kid all the way up until I thought I was a basketball player. I tried out for basketball my seventh-grade year, got cut, started doing karate and did that pretty strong for a while. And then next thing you know, Coach John O’Neil talked to me about playing football, and it was a wrap from there.”

Q: How did you get into coaching?

“I was out of the military and came home, kind of didn’t know what I wanted to do, was flying around doing different jobs. I was in construction, I was a CNA, I worked at the bakery, I worked at CommScope. I mean, I did all kinds of stuff, and I kind of did things backwards, had kids early and was doing part-time security work at restaurants and bars.

“It just so happened that one night I was working at good ol’ Legends in Morganton when I ran into Tom Harper. He had just got fired at East Burke and was going to be the defensive coordinator at Alexander Central, and my brother and he played football together at Lees-McRae. When I came back home one time on military leave, I had gone to Freedom to go lift weights, and that’s how we met. We knew each other a little bit, but did not know the connection to my brother until then.

“Tom said, ‘Hey, would you happen to be interested in coaching football?’ I said, ‘Uh, probably not. I don’t think I can do it.’ And he said, ‘Well, just come and check out our youth camp next week, meet everybody, and see what you think.’ Well, within a month I was full-fledged into it as an assistant offensive line coach under Chris Deal.”

Q: During your playing days, Freedom’s head coach was Johnny Anderson. What was he like to play for?

“Coach Anderson was funny. He was tough, but he was at the end of his career, so he was more of a managerial-type coach at that point. I really played under Scott Lambert as offensive line coach and Robert Crawley as defensive line coach, and had guys like Rob Bliss and Tommy Russ and Roger Baker as assistant coaches. They really took the forefront because during my junior year, Coach Anderson had a heart attack, and when he had that heart attack things were kind of crazy for a little bit there.

“Coach Anderson came back the next year, and that really was the first year that we actually started doing summer workouts. We actually started lifting weights during the summer of my senior year when he came back, I guess he had a little fire under him after he had the heart attack, and playing under him was tough, hard-nosed. I played both ways, started both ways at offensive guard and defensive end, and played on every special teams unit but kickoff, so it was true ironman football back then.”

Q: Patton was still a very new program when you became the head coach there. What do you remember about that experience?

“They were winless that previous year, so we knew it was gonna be tough, but we had a really good group of freshmen that were coming from Walter Johnson and Liberty. Our JVs that first year won five games, and our varsity broke the losing streak by beating R-S Central one night and won two games that year. That was when we were in a conference with teams like Shelby, Burns, and Freedom.

“We really just hit it hard the next year. That first year was rough, but it was such a good group of kids, a fun group of kids. We just didn’t have a lot of talent. Everybody wanted to be at Freedom, nobody wanted to come to Patton that was supposed to be there, especially some of the basketball players and some athletes from the Mountain View and Hillcrest area. But we were able to keep some of those guys and were able to turn it around pretty quick.”

Q: After you left Patton, you had a few other head coaching gigs before ultimately ending up at Hickory, which was also winless the year before you took the job. Given how rapidly things have improved, what would you say have been the keys to the success that the football program has been able to have in recent seasons?

“I think it’s a bunch of different things. I think that, first off, the great thing about Hickory is Hickory kids don’t leave Hickory. When I was in Greensboro, you’d never know if you were gonna have a kid that was gonna come from middle school or not, if they’d end up at Dudley or Grimsley or something like that, but with Hickory being such a close-knit and small community, it’s been great.

“We have homegrown, invested parents that really take care of our kids booster club-wise. Our athletic director is the best one I’ve ever worked for, he’s a Hickory guy in David Craft, so he knew what it took to win and he gave me full reins. And then the principal that hired me, Ms. (Rebecca) Tuttle, she was the same way, she was just one that was gonna let me do my job and do it my way. I had made some mistakes in the past with my two previous stops of trying to do it the way that they wanted it done instead of what I knew would be successful, which I was able to do at Robinson and at Patton, so it was great to come into that situation with a great booster club, a great principal, a great athletic director, a great community, and a talented group of kids that were just really hungry to win.

“That group that we got that first year, that group of sophomores was a group of seniors that won the state championship, so it was just like a perfect storm. And then the other thing is staff-wise, I was able to bring in an unbelievable staff of guys — former head coaches, guys that have played for me, and stuff like that — and we haven’t lost people. We’ve lost one staff member the whole time I’ve been there and that was because he passed away, and we lost one because he got sick but now, he’s come back and he’s sick again. But our staff has been together, and they’ve bought into what we’re doing, they know the expectations, and when you’ve got a staff that does that, that’s been together for a long time, it’s great.”

Q: How much fun was it to reach the mountaintop with the 2023 state-title winning team?

“It was great. If you would have asked me every week, I would not have thought that we would have been able to do that. But we had Brady Stober, an unbelievable quarterback who came in, and he’s probably a once-in-a-lifetime quarterback that a head coach gets to have. This kid as a freshman before we could get out of the locker room was already sending in his breakdowns from his JV games of what he did wrong and this, that, and the other.

“We had a little bit of a quarterback controversy with Turner Wood because he was there, he had been the quarterback the year before and was quarterback my first year there, and he got hurt and Brady came in. But this kind of tells you how these kids are: Turner had opportunities to transfer to other schools to play quarterback after we moved him to linebacker, but against the advice of some people, he wanted to stay. And he ended up being an unbelievable player for us, an extremely good leader.

“We had a lot of kids that may not have been the most talented kids in the world. If you would have asked me was that the most talented group I’ve ever had, I’d have told you no. Now, we had some talent with Jamien (Little) and Brady and Isaiah (Lackey) and Ellis (Chappell) and those guys, but from top to bottom we didn’t. I mean, we had kids that had moved positions the year before. One kid was a wide receiver, and we moved him to outside linebacker. Turner was a quarterback, we moved him to linebacker. We had Henry Pitts, who was a defensive end and didn’t play any offense, and we moved him to offensive line. It was just an unbelievable group of kids that loved each other, loved Hickory, and they really set the foundation for what we were doing.”

Q: After graduating 23 players from last year’s team, what are your expectations for the upcoming season?

“We’re young. Every skill kid we have except our quarterback will be an underclassman, which is exciting in terms of the future, but every offensive lineman we have except for maybe one will be a senior. We return three offensive linemen, which really helps, and then we had a kid transfer in and he and another kid are fighting for the center position. It will be the biggest team I’ve ever had, and there’s a lot of experience up front.

“Offensively, we will look different. We will not be throwing it all over the place. We do have a lot of talent at wide receiver, we don’t have kids like Jamien and Ellis that are just gonna take over games, but I do feel like we’ve got four to five kids out there that we can throw to at any point in time, so it’s almost a little bit better.

“We have Maddox (McRee) who’s our quarterback who’s committed to play baseball at NC State, but we’re kind of gonna look different this year. We’re gonna be committed to running the football and try to hit people over the top with stuff late, and we’ll try to cater what we do to what he can do. And we’ve got a big running back, Jaheem Jenkins, who’s very similar to Isaiah Lackey from years before. They’re almost carbon copies of each other when it comes to running the football, so that’s another thing that’s gonna help.

“Defensively, we have adjusted our defense to match what we have. We’ve got Dorrian (Medley) and Brett (Rowland) back, so those are two safeties who will help. We have Gary Gabriel, who played some last year and is just a big, physical, violent nose guard. And then there’s (defensive lineman) Jashaelyn Saddler, who I missed in one of our other interviews because he just never says anything and he’s so reliable you never have to say anything to him.

“We also have (defensive lineman) Micah Hird, who played a lot of minutes and really made a lot of plays for us, and Carter Toney’s coming back at outside linebacker. He played inside last year, but we’ve moved him around a little bit.

“We’re going through the gauntlet with our scrimmages and 7-on-7s and things like that, so we’ve seen some good and some bad, and really we did that to try to see what team we have. We’ll know once we strap it up against East Forsyth (in an Aug. 8 scrimmage) where we’re at and what our kids can do. We’ll have a better understanding of what we’ve got.”

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