Wellborn Steps Down as Avery Baseball Coach

Avery High School varsity baseball head coach Benny Wellborn resigned following the end of the 2009-10 school year. A successor has not been named by the school.

Wellborn spent seven seasons in all with the Avery baseball program, the first two as an assistant coach under former head coach Zack Wigstrom, and five seasons as the Vikings head coach. The coach will be moving from the high school to teach at Banner Elk and Riverside schools next school year

Wellborn cited the desire to spend more time with his family as the reason for his decision to step away from the position.

“For seven years I put baseball in front of family for six or seven months out of the year. With the new addition to our family, it helped me to realize that there comes a point in time where you have to put your family first, and I made that decision to do so,” Coach Wellborn said in an interview from his home last week.

The coach began seriously considering the option during last regular season when the team had some down time during the school’s week off for spring break.

“What got the ball rolling was a trip our family took up to Grandfather Mountain for a day. My son said to me “Dad, I really like having you around,” and that opened my eyes a little bit as to what was going on. The week after the season I had to stay home to keep the kids for a day alone for a day, and during that time I finally had the first real chance to spend time with my baby daughter and really bond with her for the first time since she had been born,” Coach Wellborn stated. “That time helped me to put things in perspective. My son will be turning five years old soon and he’ll be starting to play different sports, and I want to be the one who takes him to practice and games and that sort of thing.”

Wellborn admitted that he may miss some of the coaching aspects but that the benefit of family time exceeds the time would spend on the diamond.

“I will miss developing the relationships with kids through the game. As crazy as the kids might think I am sometimes, you hope that along the way you can touch the life of a kid through your coaching experience,” Wellborn added. “I’ll also miss the relationships I shared with the fellow coaches. As a group we developed a close-knit bond and have been able to confide in them. I’m a competitor, so of course I’ll miss the preparing and game planning for a game with them, but that will always be with me. I felt like I surrounded myself with good people and formed close bonds with those guys as we went through the day-to-day grind together.”

Winning in high school athletics at a consistent level takes enormous time and dedication, something the coach had exerted for a number of seasons. According to the coach, the point came that he could no longer give that amount of dedication at the expense of those closest to him.

“I always said that family comes first, even though for a few years I didn’t quite put them first, especially during the season,” Wellborn said. “I felt that I had to give the baseball program 100 percent to be successful, which took months of work, so I felt torn between two places and felt that I was no longer able to give that amount of dedication to the program, which wasn’t fair to the kids or the school.”

Coach Wellborn, who led the Vikings to multiple playoff berths that included a run to the state quarterfinals in 2007, leaves with a standing among the most successful baseball coaches in school history.

“Hopefully people will see a person who put everything they had into the baseball program while he was there. I demanded a lot from my players, but at the same time I demanded a lot from myself,” Coach Wellborn said. “I was never satisfied with mediocrity and wanted our school and our program to be represented in a classy manner. I wanted our to be a program that worked hard and didn’t care about getting their hands dirty and just believed that hard work pays off. All things were possible because of the players, the coaches, and the support of the parents and families as well as the school.”

Coach Wellborn expressed deep appreciation to those people who were seen every day during his tenure working as coach, as well as those folks who worked behind the scenes to help the team succeed.

“We had success as a program because of a lot of people that I appreciate who have been such a help. I first and foremost appreciate my wife who put up with me being away for so long. I appreciate Jay Smith who has really been a crutch to lean on and has been awesome, in addition to all my coaches. I appreciate folks like Dwayne Krege, who was always willing to help me with getting the fields ready and playable and everyone who was instrumental worked alongside me day in and day out,” the coach stated.

Wellborn hopes that the next head coach will remain steadfast to continuing to build up the program and build on successes the team has experienced.

“Of course I wish the best of luck to the next coach, and I hope they take what we tried to do the last few years and build on it to be even more successful and have people take pride in it,” Wellborn said. “I hope a person who comes in will look at baseball first and won’t have interest in coaching a lot of different sports because it’s hard to do one sport, much less two or three. To have a successful program you need to have someone willing to commit to giving 100 percent to the program not only during the season but in the summer and off-season as well.”