PREP FOOTBALL: George making mark in Europe

As a graduate assistant at Auburn University in the early 1980s, Marcus George got to talking with a master’s student about working overseas.

He had one simple criterion for whether that opportunity interested him.

“The first question I asked was, ‘Do they play football overseas?’” George said. “And when I found out they did, I put my paperwork in. I thought I’d come over for a couple of years. But it didn’t work out that way.”

After his second year as head coach at Lee-Scott in 1985, George got a job working with the children of armed forces members at a high school on a base in Fulda, Germany, that plays as part of the Department of Defense’s European high school football league.

Since he started at Fulda, George has been in the business of making juggernauts in the league, which usually includes anywhere from 20 to 40 teams from American bases around Europe.

Over 22 years in Germany, George has compiled a 143-33 record and won 10 European Championships.

His current team, Ansbach, has lost only two games since he took over in 2002. On Saturday, Ansbach is going for its fourth consecutive league championship, a feat that no team has accomplished in the history of the league, which was established in the early 1950s.

George’s team currently has the longest winning streak in DoDDS-Europe history, with 31.

What team’s record did Ansbach break? Its own, which it set with 28 straight wins from 2003-2005.

“I guess we’re pretty famous,” George said.

This seemed like an unlikely future for George when he was graduating from Benjamin Russell, working as a graduate assistant at Auburn and holding head coaching jobs at Woodland and Lee-Scott.

George said he lived on a base in Germany with his father when he was a kid.

But his language retention skills were a bit rusty when he returned in adulthood.

“I could count to 10 and do some basic stuff,” George said. “I basically got a book and a tape and sat and listened to stuff and learned about 10 or 15 phrases until I was real comfortable with them. I was single for the first few years, so obviously I had reason to speak German pretty well to have a social life.”

George has made a living out of teaching and coaching fellow expatriates for the latter part of the past three decades, taking a three-year break from 1998-2001 and finding work as an assistant principal at Smiths Station while his wife finished nursing school.

Expatriates such as, oh, Shaquille O’Neal, who he coached for three years at Fulda.

“It was really nice to come out of a program — when I was at Auburn, Bo Jackson and all those guys were there, and Chuck Person and (Charles) Barkley and everybody — I come back over here and one of the first people I got to work with was Shaquille O’Neal,” George said. “That’s a nice run of getting to meet some pretty important people. He would have started for me at tight end in 1987, but his dad and him moved to San Antonio.”

Of course, not everyone that comes George’s way grows up to be Shaquille O’Neal.

George said that teams in his league are lucky to get two or three players a year that go on to play Division II or Division III college football.

And, with the dizzying turnover that goes with a military lifestyle, coaches have little clue who exactly will be coming back to play each year. George said 30 of his 44 players from last year did not return.

Just some of the odd perks that go with coaching American football overseas. Like those regular 18-hour road trips to play in Naples.

“We practice, take a shower, get on the bus and drive until we sleep,” George said. “Stop, get something to eat, bed them down, wake them up at about 12 o’ clock the next day. You put ‘em to bed, you get up and when you get there you try to get your feet back underneath you and try to play some football.”

George said the unique challenges that come along with coaching in Europe were only part of the reason he finds the job rewarding.

He also enjoys providing a sense of familiarity for the players he coaches.

“We’re facing a lot of deployment. So we really circle our wagons up and that school becomes like a family and a home for kids,” George said. “Because we’re overseas and we’re stuck on a military base and a lot of kids don’t speak a lot of German. When you take their dads and you stick them down in Iraq or Afghanistan or something like that, we really, really get close to these kids.”

On the verge of another coaching milestone, George doesn’t seem ready to pack it in quite yet.

But that doesn’t mean his thoughts don’t sometimes stray to his previous life — and coaching career — stateside.

“That ’84 Lee-Scott team – we came up a yard short in the semifinals – I think about them a lot,” he said. “That was a special group.”

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