Athletic success starts at the top
Whether it’s been Berry, Hoover or Spain Park, the high school sports state championships have come in droves to the city of Hoover, Alabama, over the last 50 years.
Like it or not, the conversation starts with the success of the football programs at those schools. Berry won the state championship in 1977 and 1982. Hoover – which opened in 1994 – has ripped off 10 titles since the beginning of the millennium. Spain Park has yet to win one, but advanced to the state championship game twice, as recently as 2015.
But all three schools have enjoyed an almost obnoxious amount of athletic success in the past half-century. The list is long, whether discussing Berry’s boys swimming run of dominance from 1969 to 1973, or Hoover’s cross-country and track and field reign of terror the past 20 years, or even Spain Park’s seven boys golf titles since 2008.
It would be easy to chalk up all that success to the fact that Hoover is a big city, with a big school, with a large number of students, increasing the likelihood that any given sport would be highly competitive.
But people involved with Berry, Hoover and Spain Park athletics believe there is more to it than that. The people at those schools tasked with guiding and nurturing successful programs did that in the past and are still doing it today.
“We hire great people,” said Jennifer Hogan, a former student-athlete at Berry and currently an assistant principal at Hoover. “They take it and run with it, and we get out of their way.”
THE FIRST NAME
The first name brought up when discussing the impact of leaders at Berry is Bob Finley, a longtime educator and coach at Berry High School from 1963 to 1994. Finley is responsible for those 1977 and 1982 football championships – the 1982 state title game ended in a 10-10 tie with Enterprise – and he spent time atop both boys and girls basketball programs during his tenure as well.
Finley arrived at Berry in 1963 as an assistant football coach and head boys basketball coach. He assumed the head football coaching duties in 1968, and his first team put together a 9-2 record, followed by an 11-1 mark in 1969.
Berry missed the playoffs the following seven seasons despite the Bucs posting a winning mark each season. His 1977 squad burst back onto the playoff scene in a big way, finishing the season 13-1 and allowing 11 total points in four playoff games.
He also took over the girls basketball program in 1984, and his teams in that sport advanced to the Final Four six times in 10 seasons.
In 26 years as head football coach at Berry, Finley’s team posted a losing record just three times. During the summer of 1994 – the summer of transition between Berry and Hoover – Finley passed away unexpectedly.
But Finley’s impact extended far beyond the sidelines he roamed or the basketball courts he coached on. The stadium at the former Berry High School was dedicated in his honor in 1979 and bears Finley’s name to this day. There is a Finley Award handed out to a Hoover or Spain Park high school student each year honoring his/her outstanding character.
Spain Park Principal Larry Giangrosso knows Finley’s impact firsthand. Giangrosso’s first job out of college in the mid-1970s was as an assistant at Berry with Finley. Giangrosso remembers his time fondly being involved in a program with Finley and future head coaches Gerald Gann (Hoover, Homewood, John Carroll), Dickey Wright (Homewood, Shades Mountain) and many other great leaders.
“They were just wonderful people,” Giangrosso said. “You talk about mentoring, before mentoring is what it is now, they just did it naturally. They just took us under their wing. We were really fortunate to have that. I know I would’ve never made it in education and coaching were it not for those coaches.”
ENTER SPAIN PARK
Giangrosso certainly did make it in coaching, as he led the Berry baseball team to a state title in 1981 and served as UAB’s baseball coach from 1999 to 2006 among other stops.
He has been on the Hoover side of the fence and now is on the Spain Park side, as the principal since 2015. Both schools compete at the Class 7A level, Alabama’s top athletic division. Despite opening in 2001, the Jags compete toe-to-toe with the Bucs in nearly every sport.
“When Spain Park started, we were the younger brother,” Giangrosso said. “But after we got a few years under our belt and got through some of the growing pains, I think we’re making really good progress.”
Spain Park has totaled 16 state championships in that time. The Jags have yet to win a football state title but have been on the doorstep twice, advancing to the championship game in 2007 and most recently in 2015 (a playoff run that included a defeat of Hoover).
The boys golf program takes claim to seven of those titles, while the girls soccer team has four. Baseball, boys and girls tennis and girls golf have all won titles in recent years. Neither the boys basketball nor softball programs have claimed a title, but were each in the state tournament in 2016.
“We compete in everything,” Giangrosso said.
CONTINUED GREATNESS
Myra Miles served as the athletics director at Hoover High from 2007 to 2014, and during that time oversaw an impressive amount of on-field success. That, however, was onlypart of her formula when determining the people to place in charge of the programs at the school.
“We expected every single program to be as successful as every other, but we felt like we had the best coaching staff, but one that would also teach them how to be great people,” she said. “That was very, very important to us.”
Miles remembers a particular coaching hire, where a portion of the final decision ultimately came down to a coach’s community service record at his previous job.
“All he had done with his programs in the community, sacking groceries, feeding the poor, those are things that we really encourage them to do with their teams,” she said.
The focus on the whole picture is what has allowed high school athletics to thrive in the city of Hoover. It is not just about the on-field success, and it is not just about character development with no competitive goals. One is not sacrificed without the other.
“It all goes back to leadership,” Hogan said. “With [Hoover principal Don] Hulin, we’ve had the consistency of leadership here. He’s for excellence in everything, not just athletics, but he wants excellence everywhere.”
Whether it is a robotics class, swimming team, or top-ranked football team, each group at Hoover and Spain Park seems to enter each season with an achievable goal in mind: a state championship.
After all, continual winning is what is going to keep the history of success at the forefront of the conversation.
“You can’t say we’ve been state champs for five years in a row then all of the sudden drop off and live off that glory,” Hogan said. “You’ve got to continue to strive for excellence.”
Other communities are successful at placing competitive products in action in athletic pursuits and couple that with developing high-quality members of society after they leave school. But there is something about that blend in Hoover.
“I think you have to be here to understand it,” Giangrosso said.