Dula Moves On

A longtime area football coach is moving on.

Shell Dula will be missed in his role on the sidelines after his announcement Monday following 32 seasons, 254 wins, and six state titles at three schools.

But give him credit. He’ll move from his job at Greenwood, where his teams won three of those championships, into the role of running the South Carolina Athletic Coaches’ Association. It’s an organization that represents over 5,000 coaches in many matters both within the field of play and in their lives away from it.

As a football coach, you admire the charmed life Dula led. He was an assistant under the legendary Willie Varner at Woodruff in the ‘70s. His first head coaching job was at Ninety Six, where he won his first state title in 1982 for a school in which the whole town shows up on a Friday night for the game.

From there he moved to Union, similar in many ways to Ninety Six but a 4A program at the time battling the likes of Spartanburg, Gaffney, and other heavyweights. He won two state titles there and departed two seasons after his team took the 3A state championship in 1995.

At Greenwood, he inherited a once proud program that had fallen on hard times. Within three seasons of his arrival he had his team winning the first of back-to-back state championships. And his last crown came in 2006. Each of his stops was in a football hotbed. Not many coaches who make multiple moves can say that.

What’s really special is that Dula gets to leave on his terms at an age (62) where he still has plenty to give to athletics in the Palmetto State. There is no finer person to carry out the work of his fellow coaches as their voice at the head of their professional organization. His knowledge of how things work in athletics in this state will be invaluable.

On the subject of veteran head coaches, Westside’s Ted Luckadoo gets his turn to guide the South Carolina Shrine Bowl team.

Something noticeable at Monday’s opening practice was the absence of Division One scouts. That’s because the NCAA recently passed legislation banning them from attending practices for all-star games because of the addition of national games for profit that have sprung up in recent years. For some reason the organization believes it’s a bad practice to have scouts at such games’ practices so they outlawed them attending workouts even for non-profit games such as the Shrine Bowl.

Luckadoo was visibly miffed at the rule and expressed it Monday, pointing out that having the scouts there added so much in terms of not only evaluating players in the game but mingling with high school coaches and, perhaps, finding out more about players who aren’t on the Shrine squad.

It’s a good point and yet another subject to roll your eyes at the NCAA making an effort to keep the playing field level yet doing so in a nonsensical manner.