Coachspeak: Poly football's Roger Wrenn
After 40 years of coaching high school football in Baltimore City, Poly coach Roger Wrenn will hang up his whistle at the end of this season.
First, he'll guide the Engineers into the 123rd Poly-City game Saturday at noon at M&T Bank Stadium. After that, his career will extend as long as the 9-0 Engineers can continue in the Class 4A playoffs. They aim to make it to Dec. 2, so they can present Wrenn with the ultimate retirement gift – his first state title.
Wrenn’s career started here as an assistant coach at City in 1972. He took over at Patterson in 1974 and moved to Poly in 2006. The Engineers have already clinched the Baltimore City Division I title – the 14th city championship of Wrenn’s career. His career record is 183-113-2.
Although Wrenn’s many proteges coaching in the area insisted the he would never retire, Wrenn decided that it was time to do new things. He and his wife Donna Bowers, a former Patterson athletic director, plan to travel and visit family.
As this week’s football Coachspeak guest, Wrenn discussed the Poly-City game, his undefeated Poly team and his retirement.
What does the Poly-City game mean to you?
I was at Poly a couple years before I kind of reflected a little bit. It’s been the neatest thing about coaching there. The last year I played in college was 1969 and that was the 100th anniversary of the Princeton-Rutgers game, the first college football game. I know that because we all wore 100s on our helmets, everybody who played college football when I was playing at lowly Division III Frostburg. It wasn’t until I had been at Poly for a while and I thought, the 100th anniversary of the first college football game was in 1869 and by 1889, these two high schools were playing each other. That was just 20 years later. That had to be really at the advent of football in America, much less high school football in America. When you think of these long college rivalries, Poly’s played City longer than Arrny’s played Navy, longer than Michigan’s played Ohio State. It’s really an amazing rivalry. I was invited to a luncheon with the players who had played on 1944 team and they were obviously elderly gentlemen, but they were just as interested in what we do now. They would say, “Some of the spin stuff you do looked just like what we used to do with the single wing.” I thought the more things change, the more they’re the same. One guy said, “My brother played and they hadn’t beaten City in a while. Poly had lost three times in a row. Then we beat them and I wrote him a letter. I knew he got it and read it and had a smile on his face, because they found the letter on his body when he was killed in the Battle of the Bulge.” I was so moved when he talked about that. Isn’t that a great story? It was interesting that those elderly gentlemen were still just as interested in high school football and telling me all about their experiences and what it was like and how much they loved it. I always tell our players, “You’re just one in a very long line of guys who have worn those beautiful orange and Navy blue uniforms and represented Poly.”
You’ve said this is probably the best team you’ve coached at Poly. What makes that so?
The fact that they’re so hardworking. They have a lot of heart and they play together. The whole is the sum of its parts. We just have a lot of parts. We have a lot of good senior leadership and we have a lot of heart and guys who just play with a lot of personal pride and great determination. We have a lot of overachieving guys. We have some little teeny guys that you’d say, “He’s not big enough to play,” and yet they play for us and they play effectively. I kind of knew because we had a great year in the weight room. Their off-season work ethic was just terrific and all the 7-on-7 stuff we did in the summer and combine sort of things. They just showed up en masse and kept impressing people with how focused they were. Some of the other teams maybe had better individuals who went on to win in college, but this is certainly the best team I’ve coached at Poly.
Some of your proteges swore you would never retire. What made the timing right?
I‘ll be 65 later this month and I don’t want to be Joe Paterno. I don’t want to have the game pass me by. I don’t think it has, but I don’t want them saying, “Geez, you know you haven’t kept up with the Xs and Os of it.” I always tell the kids, “I’m old school. I don’t have pretend to be old school, because I really am old school.” But I don’t understand all the technology in it now. (Perry Hall coach and former Wrenn assistant) Keith Robinson was explaining to me this system they have where they put all their [scouting reports], all their game film in and they e-mail it to each kid and they get a reading back how many minutes each kid has spent studying the film. I’m not smart enough to do all that. Keith Robinson said, “Yes, you are,” but I’m not ready for all that technological part. I heard somebody at a clinic last year, this was a college coach, say, “My father was a high school coach and he’d take the game film and a legal pad and some 3-by-5 cards and he’d lock himself in the war room in our house where the equipment was and he’d watch and watch and watch, come out for a cup of coffee every couple of hours. When he’d come out, he’d have all these scribbled notes and stuff on his 3-by-5 cards and I thought, “That’s me!” But then he finished it and he was a little bit disparaging. He said, “No of course, we’ve moved beyond all that.” And I thought I haven’t moved beyond all that.
Won’t you miss football?
I’m going to miss it something terrible. I told my staff I would have trouble going to high school games next year, because it’s just going to tug at my heart. A lot of people who came before me said, “You’ll know when it’s time,” and I guess I do.
What are you going to do after you retire?
My wife and I are going to travel. We’re going to go on a cruise and we’re going to go to Georgia where her whole family lives and my oldest son Russell and my two grandsons live with their mom and dad (Russell and his wife Erin). Russell is a high school football and baseball coach. He said any time I want to be his third base coach, just let him know, but I said, “No.” My wife and I both worked often in the summer and that accounts for the fact that we saved a little bit of money, but it precluded us from doing a whole lot of things. I’ve never been to California and there’s any number of places we’ve never been.
