For love of the game: After coaching baseball and football at Roxborough for more than 30 years, Cliff Hubbard is now an assistant football coach at Fels. MARIA POUCHNIKOVA / TIMES PHOTO
What’s the secret to longevity and career fulfillment? Find a job that doesn’t feel like one and enjoy it every single day.
Just ask Cliff Hubbard. On the eve of his 77th birthday, Hubbard is still working — as an assistant football coach at Samuel Fels High School — and enjoying himself at that. After all, a lifetime of teaching and coaching isn’t the easiest thing to walk away from, and Hubbard doesn’t see himself leaving … until he has to.
“I never really thought of it as being a job, which is why I’m still doing it,” Hubbard said during a lengthy conversation about his life career at the Grey Lodge Pub on Martin Luther King Day. “The way I look at it is I’m going out to work with kids, as opposed to just working a job. I feel like I can still be someone positive in their lives, so I’ll do it as long as I can get around. One thing you’ll never see is me walking out on to the field with a cane, crutches or riding a scooter. When I can’t get around anymore, then I’ll give it up.”
Hubbard has had a heck of a long career impacting city student-athletes, especially for someone who says he never gave much thought to teaching after he graduated from Temple in 1960. A 1955 graduate of Northeast High School — Hubbard’s class was the second-to-last to graduate from the school’s old location at 8th and Lehigh before it moved to its current location — Hubbard played football under legendary Northeast head coach Charlie Martin, and one of his teammates was future NFL All-Pro and Hall of Fame cornerback Herb Adderley. Baseball was Hubbard’s top sport (he was a teammate of local legend Sonny Hill), but football is how he found himself seguing into teaching and coaching.
Hubbard had initially hoped to play professional baseball, and the Phillies scouted him enough that he thought he could sign with the team right out of high school. But much to the delight of Hubbard’s parents, the scout recommended college, which led Hubbard to Temple. He hadn’t planned on playing football, but, in a thematic turn of events that would become common in his life down the line, nice-guy Hubbard just couldn’t say no.
“I’m sitting in a psychology class, and the teacher was just one of the worst to keep up with,” he said with a laugh. “I’m trying to understand her, and meanwhile a guy I played football with at Northeast who was in the class is over my shoulder telling me I need to come out for the football team. I said no a few times, but he kept at it. Finally, I said, ‘Look, I will come out to a practice if you be quiet so I can pay attention to the teacher.’
“I went to the practice and the freshman coach convinced me to play. Partway through my freshman season, I’m sitting in the locker room and they tell me the head coach (of the main team) wanted to see me. I walked in his office and he asked me how I’d like a scholarship. I figured it would make things easier on my parents and I didn’t dislike Temple, so I stayed.”
Hubbard played his final three years as a scholarship player. Being a college football player didn’t produce a ton of glorious memories — “We never won a game. Well, not never, but we didn’t win too many,” Hubbard quipped — but he did score one touchdown on offense serving primarily as a defensive player. Ironically, he quit baseball after sophomore year to focus on football, which had become his top sport.
He graduated with a degree in Health and Physical Education, but “came out and realized I had never thought about what I wanted to do.” Physical education was the closest thing to a career involving sports, so Hubbard figured the most logical thing to do would become a teacher. He was a substitute from February-June of 1960, and eventually was placed at the now-closed Wanamaker Junior High School, where he taught and coached soccer, swimming and track, sports he admitted he knew little about.
Hubbard went back to nearby Temple for his master’s degree while he was at Wanamaker, where he stayed for six years.
“I coached middle school but I got restless for a higher level,” he said. “So I decided to take the teaching and coaching exam for high school.”
Hubbard was hired and assigned to Roxborough High School in March of 1966. He had little way of knowing it then, but Hubbard had reached the starting line to a long and productive career at the high school level. He became the school’s head baseball coach in 1967, where he remained for the next 36 years, winning four Public League titles in the process; two years later, Hubbard inherited the head football coaching job from the retiring incumbent and was in charge on the sidelines until his final season in 2002.
He hadn’t planned on leaving when he did, but the Philadelphia School District superintendent’s office convinced Hubbard — now a wily veteran himself — to come downtown to serve as director of athletics for the entire district. Hubbard wouldn’t walk out on his baseball team in the middle of the season, so he refused to accept the job until they were done playing.
“They told me that whatever the last day of the baseball season was, come downtown the next day and assume my new position,” he said. “We got to the semifinals and lost, and I was there the next day. I didn’t even have time to get my things together. I spent almost four years downtown before I retired … or before I thought I retired.”
While working downtown, Hubbard landed the district a contract with Philly Transportation, the bus company it still uses to get student-athletes to and from games. When he became director is also when the schools began transitioning to the PIAA, and Hubbard had a big role in that while continuing to serve as budget overseer for each school in the district.
He retired in 2006, but a former colleague of Hubbard’s at Roxborough was now the athletic director at Fels. The school was starting up a football program, and they needed Hubbard’s help to get it off the ground.
Hubbard quickly got snookered into becoming the school’s first head coach, where he served for two seasons before current head coach Bill Harrigan assumed the job in 2008. Fels went just 2–17 in those first two years — pushing Hubbard’s career win total to 141 — but Hubbard loved the challenge of it, saying that success would be so much sweeter when it came. He’s gone back and forth between paid staff member and volunteer, but has been Harrigan’s defensive coordinator well into his 70s.
“Fels is a challenge, the kids are a challenge and I enjoy that every day,” he said. “You never know what to expect. But when we first started here, we didn’t win; when we started to, it was really great to see the kids come through. Take this year, for example: with all the problems we had with (low player) numbers, we made the playoffs, and that was a rewarding thing. It was tough to do, but when we got there, it made the whole season mean something. And for me, I’d always rather be in a challenging situation than one where we just beat everybody.”
As for how long Hubbard sees himself coaching, he’s still unsure. He was still deliberating on whether to come back for another season, but the realization that he will have to stop eventually has begun poking its head through more and more.
“I’m at the point where I know I can’t do it forever,” he said. “A day will come when, for one reason or another, I’ll have to give it up, whether I want to or have to.”
Hubbard has three grown children he enjoys spending time with, as well as his wife of almost 50 years. He said still working at almost 77 is “just dad” to his kids, and his wife understands it’s not easy to give up something he loves to much. And while he’s not still coaching to preserve or prolong his legacy, Hubbard said it’s comforting to know he’s made some sort of difference along the way.
“I guess I’ve never really thought about my legacy, because I’m still living it now,” he said. “That never really mattered to me, but one thing that makes me feel good are all the people around the city who know me. It doesn’t matter where I am, someone comes up to me and asks how I’m doing and thanks me, and it warms my heart to hear them tell me I did things for them I don’t even remember. But they do.
“The kids at Fels joke with me that I know everyone, and I always tell them that if you’re around long enough and get involved in enough things to help people, then they’ll remember you. I don’t know how important it is to have a legacy; it’s probably more important that people feel like I did something to help them out. And I’m still here.” ••
