Senior Rams take the field behind Coach Chick Austin, Fall 1976. Photo provided by John Utley.
By Lana Pierce
Ever inquisitive, my 12-year-old son recently asked if I knew why Lakeside Football Field is named after “Chick Austin.” I’d never even noticed, but down the rabbit hole I went.
A phenom on the football field and the basketball court, Chick was just built different. Playing both sports, he made his name at Hendrix College (Class of 1943). After college, he became a Lakeside football coach credited with building up the Rams program. From the mid-1950s through the 1970s, Austin’s Lakeside teams logged 126 wins and nine conference titles. (His wife, Betty, is remembered as a dedicated Lakeside teacher during those same years.)
Coach Austin, named Regional Coach of the Year eight times, earned the 1982 Curtis King Award from the Arkansas High School Coaches Association and is both a Hendrix College and Arkansas Hall of Fame inductee.
But is that enough to honor a man with a stadium? That kind of honor rewards those whose contributions go beyond winning. Stadiums celebrate a man’s legacy and his philosophy, apparent in today’s “Ram Family” culture. What we gleaned online didn’t touch upon who Coach Austin was as a man or his contributions on a personal level. For that, we reached out to former players like John Utley.
“Coach [Austin] didn’t care who you were or what your parents did,” Utley reminisces. “He treated us all the same. In fact, you felt he either loved us all or hated us all, depending on the day. But if we lost,” Utley laughs, “practice was gonna be hard.”
I asked Mr. Utley (who became a Lakeside coach himself) what games stood out from his own high school years.
1974. A Thursday night. Lakeside delivered a blistering 42-7 win over Camden. “He was proud, but we gathered in the locker room that night, and I’ll never forget what he said. Years later, I’d come to understand that Coach’s speeches were preparing us for something bigger: perseverance through adversity.”
And the post-win words that Utley remembers forty years later? “Men, Thursday night winners still practice on Fridays. They come to school. They don’t rest on their laurels.” Utley laughs before adding that no player dared to miss school or practice on Fridays. “You made sure Coach saw you in the hallways.”
For my son and me, the name now has meaning behind it. Coach Austin is memorialized on campus because he turned young boys into men with every speech, every practice, and every hallway stare. “He made practice so hard… so hard that the games were easy,” Utley concludes quietly. That’s Ram Pride. And that’s a legacy worth celebrating.
Lana Pierce extends her thanks to Superintendent Orr and Coach John Utley for their contributions to this story.
