Meet Seth Davis, current Alleghany High School History Teacher, Radio Broadcaster, Coach, and Historical Sports Statistician.
What do you get if you combine a high school coach, a history teacher, and a knack for thinking outside the box? In this case, you get a pretty cool project by Mr. Davis that needs some attention and praise.
Over five years ago, Mr. Davis thought it would be fun to catalog all historical sports stats for Alleghany High School. He started with football, and wanted to go further than simple wins and losses. One of the reasons Mr. Davis initially chose football was because of all the stories of the great players he heard about since coming to the area, and wanted to see how they stacked up against the new guys.
Davis has since included stats on all varsity sports, some more detailed than others, with the goal of building on the immense work that has already been started, and eventually getting down to individual stats.
Mr. Davis gives a lot of credit to longtime AHS employee Bonnie Hayslett, who started a scrapbook in the 1980’s, dating back to the school’s inception in 1983. Anything that he could not find in the scrapbook, Davis would scour old yearbooks, and also take trips to the Virginian Review, and the Clifton Forge Public Library to search through archives.
I took notice of the detailed stats Mr. Davis had put together through his twitter account @boystenniscoach, and reached out to him to discuss a side project I was working on for my professional web development and design portfolio. Without hesitation, Davis sent me each team’s statistics in order for me to create some cool graphics to highlight some of our athletes’ accomplishments on social media. You can find a few of those samples along with this article, as well as on Facebook, and our Website. We also plan to release additional sports in the near future.
When I spoke to Mr. Davis about his project, he indicated that he would love to see this information come to life in the form of a small museum at the high school, that would contain posters, portraits, trophies and cool historical stats and information about the high school’s sports programs.
We also spoke about continuing his initial efforts through community participation and collaboration. If anyone has any information, stories, old highlights, news clippings, or similar items, feel free to reach out to Mr. Davis, or email me at Bosco@virginianreview.com, and I will pass over the information to him.
Outside of being the local historian for Alleghany sports, Mr. Davis recently completed his last year as the indoor track coach.
“After 16 seasons, it’s time. Coaching 3 Sports for the last 6 school years is hard.
I can focus on radio broadcasting and more off-season tennis in the winter”, said Davis via his official twitter account.
If you’ve never listened to one of Mr. Davis’s radio broadcasts, podcasts, or been to a basketball game where he is announcing the starting lineups, you’re missing out.
Being a student and player (Basketball) of Mr. Davis in the early 2000’s, I’ve experienced the passion and creativity he pours into his teaching and coaching.
Mr. Davis is currently in-season with Boy’s Tennis, and in his 13th year coaching them, he has not had a losing season yet. Last year the team finished 5-5 due to a shortened season that included the postseason. This year the team is back to 16 matches in the regular season, and a full postseason. Davis states that he has been blessed to have kids that work very hard every year. We also discussed some of the challenges he has faced while coaching this sport.
“Since tennis is not a major sport in this area, getting kids to come to open courts in the off season is a challenge. Also, a lot of high school tennis players don’t start playing until they are in high school, and at that time, a lot of kids have already chosen their primary sport.”
Given the recruiting challenges, Mr. Davis provided a recruiting message to prospective tennis players, “Get out of your comfort zone. Why not try something new and something fun? Over the past 13 years, over half of the players on the open day roster had never played tennis before. You are only in high school once, why not try something different, especially if you are athletic. Also, with consolidation, Covington kids will now have the opportunity to play, and hopefully we will continue to grow the program in a positive direction.”
The Mounties boys tennis team is currently 7-7 and will have senior night tomorrow prior to their match with Carroll County at 4:30 p.m. at Clifton Middle School.
