Billy Hite's mother kept telling him how much she hated coaching. This was just after Christmas 1986, and Hite's boss, Bill Dooley, was on his way out at Virginia Tech amid recruiting violations. Dooley's assistants felt uncertain about their future as they prepared for the Peach Bowl on New Year's Eve.
Three days before Christmas, Tech had hired Frank Beamer, a mostly unknown coach from Murray State. Hite heard rumblings at the bowl that Beamer would retain him, but wasn't sure. Meanwhile, his mom, Louise, urged him to give up this unpredictable job and attend chef's school in New York. She would even let his wife and 1-year-old daughter stay with her back home in Maryland.
Chef's school made sense. Hite has loved cooking ever since Big Lou, as everyone calls his mom, started her own catering business when he was 10 to make money after his father died. But Hite didn't need to consider quitting coaching because when he returned from the bowl, Beamer called Hite into his office and hired him.
Beamer wanted to keep an assistant from Dooley's staff to maintain consistency. He talked to dozens of people in the athletic department — coaches, secretaries, ticket office employees — and asked them who they'd hire.
"Billy's name came up just about every time," Beamer said.
If Beamer hadn't received the glowing recommendations, Hite might be a chef instead of a Tech football icon whose 37-year coaching career, the past 33 at Tech, spawned countless stories that trace the rise of a program. As of last season, no current Football Bowl Subdivision assistant had worked longer consecutively at one school than Hite.
Twenty-four years after Hite met Beamer in his office, the two men got together Feb. 8 at Beamer's house, just up the hill from Hite's at Blacksburg Country Club, where Hite has resided off the 17th green since Beamer retained him in '86. Beamer asked Hite what he thought about leaving coaching and taking an administrative job within the program.
"I took two steps out of his house that night and I said, 'Why the hell do I have to think about it?' " Hite said. "I should've gone right back in."
The next day, Hite agreed to stop coaching, which allowed Beamer to hire his son, Shane, to replace Hite as the running backs coach, a job he held since 1980, two seasons after he came to Tech from North Carolina with Dooley. When the Hokies hold their spring game Saturday, Hite won't be coaching for the first time since 1974, the year he graduated from Carolina. That fall, he became a graduate assistant at his alma mater.
Hite planned this move into administration. About 12 years ago, he told Beamer and Athletic Director Jim Weaver that he wanted to stop coaching and get a desk job by his 60th birthday, which is Thursday. Around the same time that he approached Beamer and Weaver, Hite began to tire of recruiting, which once fit his gregarious personality so well.
His feelings about recruiting "started going south," he said, "when a commitment meant nothing anymore." He traveled to Florida in 2000 to visit a fullback, only to learn from the recruit's coach that the youngster had committed to Miami but still wanted to take his official visit, perks and all, to Tech.
"If you're committed to Miami, you're not coming to Virginia Tech this weekend," Hite told the recruit.
"He thought it was fine to do that," Hite said. "I didn't want to deal with people like that. I really didn't."
Hite will miss working with his players on the field and in the meeting room. Yet he insisted he loves his new job — officially, assistant to the head coach and senior adviser — and its change of pace, with fewer hours and no more recruiting.
"I'm going to miss certain things, but I'm not going to miss the 80 hours a week," he said. "How many years have you been doing what you're doing? Are you tired of it? When you get up to 37 years, then you come back and tell me at that time whether you're tired of it or not."
He is starting an alumni weekend for next year's spring game and increasing his fundraising speaking engagements. He still works from the same office, still sits in on some offensive meetings and attends practice.
He still has the first whistle string he received when he came to Tech in 1978 — the only one he ever used — though it remains in his locker now. He doesn't plan to fully retire any time soon. When he does, he thinks he might spend a week in the kitchen of a local restaurant to learn some new tricks.
But his old life in coaching defined him for so long that his friends worry about him.
"How's Billy?" they constantly ask Benny Bonanni, Hite's closest friend since high school, who phones him weekly.
"I've got to tell them, 'He sounds as happy as I've ever heard him be,' " Bonanni said. "He's not lamented it for one moment."
Hite never thought he'd stay this long at Tech in the first place.
Dooley's replacement at North Carolina in '78, Dick Crum, hired Hite as a part-time wide receivers coach. But Dooley kept asking Hite to come look at Tech. Hite agreed.
Having never visited Blacksburg, he was unfamiliar with the town's varying April weather. He borrowed a friend's open-air Jeep, drove up through the mountains and accepted Dooley's offer. When he got in the Jeep for the trip back to Chapel Hill, it was 40 degrees.
"I felt like I was going to get blown out of the Jeep," he said.
He liked North Carolina, but Dooley offered a full-time job, at $13,500 a year. Hite was 27 and had been married for just six months. The stability made sense. But when he and his wife, Anne, arrived in Blacksburg, he told her, "Don't get to know anybody. I'm going to be here a year or two, and then we're going to be out of here." He figured he'd return to Carolina soon enough.
The next year, interest rates skyrocketed to 18 percent. Hite couldn't sell his house and move even if he wanted. Plus, he enjoyed working for Dooley, his old coach, who began to see the amusing side of his former running back, whom he still calls Willy.
Dooley always thought Hite stood next to him on the sideline at Carolina because he wanted to get in the game. Actually, Hite told Dooley after they became colleagues, he stood there because Dooley puffed cigarettes and Hite tried to inhale the residual smoke.
It is easy to envision Hite charming recruits in those early years, as he helped Dooley elevate Tech from a nationally irrelevant program with a "pitiful" stadium, as Hite put it.
Back then, Blacksburg had one fast-food restaurant, and the coaches toured recruits around campus in a double-decker bus they rented from the Best Western motel. After one momentous occasion for the town, Hite got on the microphone during the bus tour.
"We have really become big-time now," he told the recruits. "We not only have a McDonald's here, but we have a Wendy's also."
In recent years, Hite recruited only southwest Virginia schools, but Dooley sent him to the Tidewater area, Northern Virginia and Maryland. Hite was on the road constantly because the NCAA had far fewer restrictions on face time with recruits.
"Wherever there was a good player, then I was going to put Willy on him," Dooley said.
Many surely could relate to him, as his boyish appearance made him look their age — the bowl cut of brown hair, cherubic face and slight gap between his front teeth. And his laugh — that hearty, baritone chuckle from deep down in his round belly, a sound his friends have imitated for years. Hite speaks earnestly to everyone, punctuating stories with "I really am" or "it really was," as if he hopes you'll agree.
In his new job, Hite still will attend road games and wear a headset on the sideline, though he can't communicate with the coaches. So he'll be at next season's bowl game, should Beamer extend his bowl streak to 19, a testament to the program's progress. And Hite will be at East Carolina on Sept. 10, his 400th consecutive game on Tech's sideline.
But none of it will be quite the same, especially his relationship with the players. He will miss few things about coaching more than accumulating stories — like, for instance, the time Kevin Jones dozed off in the meeting room in 2001 as Hite was trying to ready him to replace an injured Lee Suggs.
"You (expletive)!" Hite shouted at Jones. "Get out of here!" When Jones screwed up at practice that day, Hite barked the same word at him.
"So the rest of his freshman year, it wasn't K.J. or Kevin Jones," Hite said. "I called him (expletive) the whole year. So this is the great thing . . ."
The laugh rose from Hite's belly as his story gained steam. He jumped ahead to 2004, after Jones' first NFL game.
"My phone rings," Hite said, pausing before the punch line. "He goes, 'Hey, (expletive), it's K.J.'"
He leaned back, slapped his leg and laughed for a good long while.
"It's just things like that that end up being really special," he said. "They really do."
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