If not for having to take foreign language courses, Woody Hamilton's professional life would have been much different.

While a teenager at Jackson County High School (now Scottsboro), Hamilton was a sports correspondent for The Sentinel-Age (now The Daily Sentinel), and his byline appeared on a number of stories.

He loved sports writing, but when he arrived at the University of Alabama following his high school graduation, he had no interest in taking the foreign language classes required for a degree in journalism.

"I just wasn't going to do it," he said, "so I went into physical education."

It worked out for Hamilton, who went on to a long career as a teacher and coach. He began his love affair with sports particularly basketball at a young age when his father would take him to watch his cousins play. Hamilton, whose mother was a teacher, grew up in Macedonia and played the sport himself, but said he couldn't find a spot on the talent-loaded Jackson County teams of hall of fame coach Q.K. Carter in the early 1950s. "Anywhere else I'd have gone in the county I would've (played)," said the small-statured Hamilton.

Instead, he dove into the game from a sports writer's perspective. Carter allowed Hamilton to ride the bus with the team to road games, and in turn Hamilton began to learn the ins and outs of the sport even more.

And while he loved sports writing, he found he had a love for coaching. He served as the player/coach of his fraternity's intramural team at Alabama, with his fraternity's team enjoying a lot of success. After taking some time away from school, he returned and finished his degree. Then he began a teaching career that spanned five decades. He worked all of those in Jackson County and Walker County, Ga.

Hamilton taught and coached at six different schools in Jackson County, which included two stints at Skyline and North Sand Mountain. "I never was afraid of change," said Hamilton, who coached numerous junior high, junior varsity and varsity teams often during the same year during his career.

He began his career at Woodville before making the move to NSM and then Flat Rock. After teaching in Rossville, Ga., he returned to Jackson County as the head varsity boys basketball coach at Skyline from 1973-1976. He then went back to teach in Georgia. It was then that he was diagnosed with cancer that "nearly took me out of here." Following surgery in 1981, he recovered and returned to teaching and coaching in Jackson County. He was at Stevenson during the 1981-82 school year and then went to Bridgeport, where he spent the following years as an assistant coach to Bridgeport varsity boys coach Kenneth Storey.

"He and I coached against each other for a few years, when he was at Skyline and I at Bridgeport, and when he was at NSM and I was at Bridgeport," Storey said. "When time came for us to finally be on the same side of the court, we really connected, maintained a great working relationship. Woody had his coaching philosophy and I had mine. Together we worked on adapting bits and pieces of each other's. We learned from each other."

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A change of course led Woody Hamilton into coaching