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Mike Williams was a head wrestling coach before he was a head football coach, which makes more sense than you'd think.
Wrestling is about "the room,'' as in the wrestling room, the relatively private place where kids sweat and shove and grapple and pay the considerable price that sport exacts.
Williams loves that sort of thing. To death. Even more than the championships and the trophies and the glory, and there have been a lot of those, he loves improvement. He loves coaxing out of athletes the most they've got.
"We've talked a lot about how different kids react differently, and how to find a way to get through to them,'' Matt Nagy, one of Williams' best players and now himself a coach, said Thursday.
"He loves that. He's unbelievably passionate about what he does. Anybody who loves anything that much is gonna succeed at it.''
The formidable project that has been his life's primary work, Manheim Central High School's football program, is almost as much a part of Lancaster County culture as shoofly pie. Williams has with it a relationship not unlike family. He loves it. It's almost ridiculous how much be loves it. But sometimes it wearies him.
Which is why as he sneaks up on a coaching mega-milestone - 300 wins, all at the same school - Williams isn't really thinking, or thinking fondly, about winning.
"Right now the games are so doggone stressful,'' Williams said Wednesday. "I enjoy the offseason, the 7-on-7, more than the games almost. I enjoy learning how kids can get stronger and faster.
"I take the losses personally. If we lose, it's on me. That's how it should be.''
Fortunately there haven't been that many losses. In his 29th season, Williams is 299-59-3. His current team takes a 12-0 record into the semifinals of the District Three Class AAA playoffs Friday at home against Conrad Weiser.
The numbers astound. Williams is 177-24-2 in Lancaster-Lebanon League games. Second and third place on the L-L wins list belong to Cocalico's Phil Kauffman (149) and Donegal's Gayne Deshler (136), both retired. Nobody else is remotely close.
He's won 20 L-L section championships and 15 District Three championships, both unprecedented. Central is 40-6 in district playoff games, which is so unprecedented it seems silly to even have to say it.
The ultimate confirmation, a state title, came in 2003, with a double-overtime victory more than a few people consider the best football game they've ever seen.
Williams will be the 10th Pennsylvania coach to reach 300. Of that group, only Southern Columbia's Jim Roth and Central Bucks West's retired Mike Pettine got there with fewer losses than Williams' 59.
Williams, a Manheim Central graduate, started his teaching and coaching career at Central Cambria High in Ebensburg. He came to Central in 1971, and spent 13 years as the head wrestling and assistant football coach.
In 1981 he got the head football job, and did both that and wrestling for one year. By 1986 and '87 it was clear he was building something big.
In 1988, Central went 10-0 in the regular season and reached the district final.
"We had a pretty good weight program in place,'' Williams said. "The commitment was there. I felt like we had turned a corner.''
In 1989, Central got two epic wins over Elizabethtown, both 15-14, both with Central scoring a late touchdown and then making a two-point conversion to win it. The latter of those games was for the district title.
In a state semifinal that year, the Barons led mighty Berwick 10-0 before losing, 14-10.
"That was a good loss,'' Williams said. "After that, the kids knew they could play with anybody.
Berwick proved to be a big hurdle. So, later, did Strath Haven and Allentown Central Catholic and Thomas Jefferson ... whoever the state AAA superpower was at the time, the Barons were there, trading blows.
Incredibly, since 1989 Central has had its season ended by the eventual state champion eight times, and by a state finalist two other times.
Some of them were classics: 37-30 to Berwick in 1994, 18-17 to Berwick in 1995, 14-13 to Strath Haven in 2001.
Somewhere in all this, the Barons stopped being seen locally as David, and started being seen as Goliath.
"When we started out, we were everybody's darlings,'' Williams said. "Now we can't do anything right.''
The biggest perceived wrong was beating Solanco 96-0 in 1999. You can't beat anybody that badly, the reasoning went, without being a bully.
Williams said he heard from Central alumni who told him he was a disgrace to the school.
"That's my biggest regret as a coach,'' Williams said. "No one who saw that game, or a film of it, could tell me what I could have done differently.
"Maybe I should have gone to the officials at halftime and asked if we could end the game now.''
He wasn't kidding when he said that. He wasn't being sarcastic.
"It was the worst night of my career,'' he said. "Never did I think it was cool, or impressive. I wish it had never happened.''
It stuck in the public consciousness. Central recruits. Central's priorities are out of whack. Central rubs people's noses in it.
"For every time we've been told we had no class, there have been many, many times when we've held scores down, when our kids have done everything right, on and off the field,'' Williams said.
"I understand that. I didn't at first. At first, it really hurt.''
The state championship goal stayed out there, for a long time, seemingly out of reach.
Then came an amazing six-day stretch in 2003. It began as Central took out Strath Haven 3-0 in a strange, unique, classic battle in sub-freezing cold and gale-force wind in a state semifinal.
Good as that was, it was only prelude to the final, played in a hideous blizzard at Hersheypark Stadium. The Barons won it, over Pine-Richland, 39-38 in double-overtime, with a blocked extra-point that came, it turned out, when the PIAA was about declare co-champions and send everybody home.
Then they made snow angels. Then they hoisted Williams, and the trophy, on their shoulders.
He may not be about milestones, but that was a huge one. The next one will be too, he grudgingly admitted.
Mike Gross is Assistant Sports Editor for the Sunday News. E-mail him at mgross@lnpnews.com.
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