McMichael's Marty Woods' coaching is about more than just winning

It was March 1991 when Marcia “Marty” Woods, a divorced, 35-year-old mother of three girls, emerged from a routine medical exam with terrifying news: Cancer had produced a tumor the size of a softball in her colon.

Then came the bad news.

The tumor could be surgically removed, but the cancer “was stage 4, in the lymph system,” Woods recalls, “traces of cancer cells in 28 out of 30 lymph nodes.”

Woods pauses, re-living a shadow of the shock she felt. “I really was not sick,” she continues. “I (had) almost called the appointment off … but I’m glad I didn’t.”

So are many of the hundreds of girls influenced by Woods. Woods enters her 39th season coaching volleyball this fall at McMichael High School, the last 37 of which were winning seasons.

Her accolades range from a division state championship to the North Carolina High School Athletic Association’s Hall of Fame. A career so lauded makes one wonder: What influenced her coaching, and what made her such an influential coach?

Rewind to 1977. Woods was a young wife with a baby on the way, “and I needed a job.” Madison-Mayodan High School needed a girls’ volleyball coach, and Woods thought, “I’m an athlete, I can figure this sport out.”

She got the job, though it was bigger than she expected: It included coaching girls’ softball and teaching.

“My kids grew up in ball parks,” she remembers, a smile in her voice. “I’d run drills with one hand and hold the baby with the other.”

Woods had found her calling: After the first season, every season was a winner for Woods’ volleyball team. In 1982 she coached the softball team to a state championship.

Then the cancer was identified. Woods’ girls were in first, fifth and eighth grades.

Within a couple of months of the diagnosis, Woods had two surgeries and started chemotherapy. Fifteen days a month for the next six months, Woods traveled to Greensboro for treatments, fighting to stay alive.

“All of my coaching friends and their wives would drive me to treatments,” Woods recalls. “Somebody would have to take me to chemo, and somebody would have to take the team. Some days I was so sick, I would just lay on the bench.”

One of her chemo drivers was Lane Woods, now her husband of 24 years.

The two had met 20 years earlier, and Lane, a native of Eden, had returned home to Rockingham County.

Both were enduring a divorce. Both were coaches. Both had children.

“We had such a connection,” Marty says. “Throughout all the treatments, he was my reality check when I was having little pity parties.”

Pity parties? Marty?

Yes, indeed, Lane agrees.

“I’d come in to see her in the hospital, she’d have one of those down times, and I’d tell her, ‘I’ll come back when you’re feeling better.’ That would perk her up. It made her realize she was going to have to fight it, and I could only do but so much.

“It was a tough battle for her,” he says. “At times we didn’t think she’d make it, but she’d fight hard. She beat it, and not everybody does that.”

Woods refers to it as “a tough-love situation.”

“It’s easy to want to quit. But that wouldn’t be me.”

The treatments ended, and Woods waited to be deemed “in remission.” Lane broached the topic of marriage.

Marty balked.

“I didn’t want to get involved when I didn’t know if I was going to be here in a year,” she says.

“He said, ‘Don’t make my decisions for me. I’d rather us be together for a short amount of time than never be together at all.’ ”

Marty couldn’t argue with that logic. They chose Aug. 1 for their wedding day, always the first day of high school football practice for Lane, so neither would forget their anniversary.

Facing a terminal illness left Woods with greater determination and a different outlook.

“If you don’t know if life is going to continue, it will change your perspective” Woods says emphatically. “That has definitely carried over into my coaching. There are definitely things more important than games.”

Such as respect. “One of the things that we pride ourselves on is we’ve never had a player or a coach receive a discipline card,” Marty says.

Stephanie Wray, her oldest daughter and principal of Western Rockingham Middle School, recalls one of her mother’s discipline methods. She and her sisters all played on their mom’s team.

“Have you heard about the cuss jar?” Wray asks. “She didn’t allow (her players) to use profanity, and when we did, we had to put a quarter in it,” Wray recalls. “She wanted us to be responsible, nice young women.

“In all my years, I never saw people disrespect her, and I think it’s because of how she treats people. It’s fair, it’s consistent, it’s with a purpose,” Wray says. “She doesn’t tolerate people who don’t respect that system.”

Jessica Kallam, who was close friends with Wray in middle school, says she had other coaches besides Woods during her youth, but “I couldn’t tell you who they were.”

She says Woods “was a part of what truly shaped me. She pushes you, and you push yourself to be the best you can be. You didn’t want to disappoint her.”

The other message Woods emphasized, Kallam says, was that team and family are one and the same.

“When you have high school girls together, there’ll be bickering and arguing. She (Woods) did not tolerate that,” Kallam says.

Woods moved Kallam up to varsity during her freshman year while daughter Wray continued to play JV. “I never saw her treat her daughters any differently than the rest of us,” Kallam says.

That sense of fairness drew players to her, says Tiffanie Dalton, Woods’ middle daughter.

“People don’t think of her as a teacher or a coach. They think of her as a mentor. They’d go to her with problems before they’d go to their parents. She’s not judgmental, and she looks at all aspects” of a problem.

“I was only 5 when she was diagnosed,” says Dana Eaker, the youngest of Woods’ three girls, emotion straining her voice. “I went to a lot of her chemo with her, and I would sit there with her and read books.”

Eaker pauses, then apologizes for her tears. “That was special. That’s when we would spend a lot of our time reading together.

“My mom has the patience of a thousand moms. She wants each person to learn and to grow. She wants everyone to succeed, as an individual and as a team.”

Wray believes her mother’s influence reaches far beyond the court or classroom. “She’s much more than a coach to people. Yes, she knows the sport, loves the sport, can coach the sport. But more than just the sport, she tried to teach all her athletes to be good people. It’s not just about the winning.”