(Enlarge) Wilde Lake coach Doug DuVall ends his 36-year career at the school with 308 wins, five state championships and the respect and admiration of hundreds of players who came through his program. (Photo by Brendan Cavanaugh)

Doug DuVall has been having trouble visiting a certain part of the Wilde Lake campus in recent days: the football field. It's unusual considering that he was the Wilde Lake football coach from 1972 until a week ago. He coached his last football game Dec. 4, a 13-0 loss to Westlake in the Class 3A state championship at M&T Bank Stadium, in Baltimore.

You see, every time DuVall sees the football field -- his football field -- where he watched hundreds of boys become men, where his teams won hundreds of games, and where a community gathered each fall weekend for the past 36 years, he is blitzed with a wave of emotions and memories.

As a coach who has won 308 games, DuVall is used to being in charge and when he looks at the mangled turf that has been his "office" for most of his adult life, he has trouble keeping control.

"I've stayed away from it," DuVall said. His last game there, a 42-16 win over Hereford in the state semifinal, was "the one filled with most emotion."

The story of how DuVall started his career at Wilde Lake is almost a fable now. He was overseas when the junior varsity football coaching job at Wilde Lake opened. Frank Rhodes, DuVall's high school coach, thought he was perfect for the job and because the application deadline was looming, he forged DuVall's name on the application.

"I came here and we had a really great group of kids that I worked with. The following year I was going to do my second year of JV and Walt Caldwell, who was the original JV and head football coach here, right before school started they made him the vice principal ... so I ended up with the varsity and the JV together," DuVall said. "The following year I knew we were going to be really good, I could just sense it, or I'd have left after the second year, truthfully (laughing) ... I said I'd stay for two years and help you out and then I'm gone."

But "I had such a group of kids and I'd gotten so close to them, and I knew they were going to be good, so I couldn't leave them."

That year, 1974, the team went 9-1, with its only loss coming to DuVall's alma mater, Howard, which was in the midst of a 46-game win streak and went on to win the state championship that year.

That was how it all started. And it's never stopped.

DuVall has coached 18 county champion teams, five state champion teams and 15 other playoff teams. In 36 years at Wilde Lake, he has had only two losing seasons (1973 and 1993). He has watched several players go on to play in the NFL and countless more play in college -- by his count, his players have earned more than $7 million in college scholarships over the years -- then come back to become assistant coaches on their way to head coaching jobs elsewhere.

"You hope your kids (coach) when they go on, because you really love what you do and you want them to go on and do the same sort of thing," DuVall said.

While DuVall can avoid the football field, he has more trouble avoiding his e-mail inbox, cell phone and mailbox which have been bombarded with messages this season from former players telling him the impact he, and Wilde Lake football, have made on their lives.

DuVall said he would get a message here and there in previous seasons, but the response grew tenfold once the news that he was retiring leaked out.

He has heard from players from his first team and players have flown in from as far away as Texas to see their former coach during his last season at The Lake.

The first time DuVall saw Wilde Lake football was not as a player or coach, but as a scout. As a graduate assistant with the University of Maryland football team, DuVall still entertained thoughts of coaching his alma mater, Howard. So when then Maryland coach Jerry Claiborne asked him to watch Howard tackle Steve Brown, who was eventually signed by Maryland, he jumped at the opportunity.

"I came back and I watched Wilde Lake play Howard ... and I thought: That is the worst football team I've ever seen. They had yellow helmets, yellow jerseys, yellow pants and yellow socks, and not only did they look bad, they played worse. I thought, 'Oh my God.' "

Two years later, DuVall was well on his way to turning the yellow-clad team into a perennial champion.

The early days at Wilde Lake, like the early days in Columbia, weren't easy.

"The world was crazy back then, late '60s, early '70s, they just popped Columbia here in the middle of Howard County. It was supposed to be the city without racial prejudice and there was more hatred here than you could imagine because you took kids from all over and just jammed them together. My first day here we had a race fight in the locker room because one kid hit the other one in the face with a helmet," DuVall said. "That was the biggest thing that I had to overcome here with the kids."

For as long as Wilde Lake has had a football program, the rosters have been a cross-section of the community, a diverse blend of races, backgrounds and religions playing together harmoniously, as a team.

DuVall plans to spend several weeks just relaxing, and recovering from his Dec. 9 hernia surgery and then he start weighing his options. He has made it no secret that he would like to be an assistant coach at a local college.

"Fishing, cleaning my house and basement. Everyone else cleans the leaves, I'm coaching. I'm going to play some with the grandkids," said DuVall, who lives in Ellicott City with his wife, Jan, in a house he built.

In a way, DuVall's career has come full circle. If his name wasn't forged on that application 36 years ago, he might have gone straight from his graduate assistant's post at Maryland into the college coaching ranks. But then he wouldn't have been able to put down the roots that he has in Columbia, becoming a father-figure in hundreds of young men's lives and build one of the strongest football programs in state history.

"I'd never trade it for a million dollars, because I had a chance to live the dream," he said.

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