I suppose it’s taken me a couple of weeks to get use to the idea of Robert Lassiter not being the head coach of the Green Wave football team. On one hand, it doesn’t seem possible that he’s been in that role for fifteen years. On the other hand, it sort of seems like he’s been there even longer.

I first met Coach Lassiter in the early 1990s when he returned to White House High as an assistant coach under Head Coach Jeff Porter, another Gallatin man. Just a few years earlier, Lassiter had been the head coach of the Blue Devils and Porter was one of his assistants. Once he returned, and ever since, Porter referred to Lassiter as his head coach.

I immediately liked Coach Lassiter, of course he wasn’t making me run sprints or do belly flops. After a while, I realized our paths had kind-of crossed several years earlier.

The very first high school football I ever attended was the 1968 Clinic Bowl, played on Thanksgiving Day at Dudley Field on the Vanderbilt University campus. I was about two weeks shy of my 10^th birthday. My dad dropped me and my older brother, Mike, off at the funeral home across West End from the campus. He was 13. The two of us were on our own to cross West End, traverse up the hill to the stadium, go to the game, go back down the hill after the game, and back across West End to meet my dad afterwards. In today’s world, a parent would likely be charged with child neglect for leaving two youngsters alone like that. But it was 1968. It didn’t seem like that big of a deal.

The game was pitting a Nashville power-house team from Montgomery Bell Academy against the Gallatin Green Wave. Even though I was a kid growing up in Madison, I was sure the Gallatin guys would win. Like I’m prone to do, I ran my mouth about it. A classmate of mine, a pretty fourth-grader named Suzi Winchester, informed me that MBA, led by All-State football player Jeff Peeples, would easily win the game. Peeples later attended Vanderbilt and became what some consider the greatest Commodore pitcher ever.

The Green Wave squad was led by a quarterback name Robert Lassiter, who directed the Gallatin squad to a 7-0 lead in the first quarter.  Near the end of the quarter, Lassiter, in football lingo, got his bell rung. Today he would be sent to the hospital with a concussion. In 1968, however, he toughed it out and finally came back around late in the fourth quarter, but it was too late. MBA was up 28-7 and went on to win, 35-7. MBA would be named 1968 State Champions in the Associated Press poll in the last year before the playoff system was adopted.

I was sad when Coach Lassiter left White House to take over the top football spot at Hendersonville High in 1994 and I was happy for him to be able to go back home to Gallatin in 1997. I’m glad to hear that he is staying on at Gallatin with hopes of helping out with the football team.

I imagine his wife, Mary Glen, will still call him “The Coach” on the radio so I suppose I can still call him coach as well. I’m sure I always will.

by Randy Cline

It finally happened. Honestly, I’m surprised it took four and a half months.  I knew as soon as I started working in Gallatin again it would happen, but I just didn’t know when. As I left the office late Friday afternoon, I eased past the Gallatin Police Department and saw him standing on the corner with his arms full of newspapers. It was Buzz.