FROM THE HART: Spend this holiday season honoring the legacy of Mel Maxfield
Merry Christmas!
After a month of listening to Mariah Carey and Bing Crosby, the day has come for all of us to gather around our loved ones and spend the day together. It's a time to give presents to those we care about and receive them in return.
Christmas time is commonly referred to as the season of giving. A time for kindness, caring and compassion. It's a time that we honor the legacy of those who have best embodied those attributes in the past. It is with that in mind that I say we should spend Christmas day honoring the legacy of Mel Maxfield.
I just moved to the Panhandle back in May, so I never had the honor of meeting coach Maxfield. From everything that I've heard about him the past two weeks, though, that was truly my loss.
Maxfield passed away Dec. 11 at the age of 64.
He spent more than 30 years as a football coach in the Panhandle, including eight seasons with Amarillo High. He resigned from AHS in 2017 after going 65-29 during his tenure and won the Tom Landry Award in 2016. At the time of his resignation, he held a career record of 239-113-1.
But what Maxfield did on the football field isn't the reason it's my loss that I never met him. It's everything that I've heard and read about him since then. The tributes from my peers Lance Lanhart, Kale Steed and others around the area effused praise for the quality of person he was, not just the kind of coach he was. That praise was echoed by one of Maxfield's proteges and the man who replaced him as head coach of the Sandies.
“Coach Maxfield was a real salt of the Earth type of guy," AHS football coach Chad Dunnam said. "He was as good of a man as you’ll come around and one heck of a football coach. He was very, very successful throughout his career anywhere he’d been and the main reason for that is he built great relationships with the people around him.
"He truly cared about people and everybody knew that. He cared about the kids who played for him and the coaches he had on his staff. He was a relationship guy and anytime you start that as your foundation, you’re going to find success.”
The Christmas and the other winter holidays are supposed to be about caring for those around us and spreading love and joy to those important in our lives. From what Coach Dunnam said, that was the type of person coach Maxfield strived to be all the time. It was who he tried to be with everyone that he got to know and others around him, regardless of what time of year it was.
We often interpret the season of giving to mean the giving of material possessions. We buy people something nice (or maybe not so nice depending on your budget, or who it's for). We wrap the gift up in flashy wrapping paper and get excited about how the other person will react when they open it.
Sometimes, though, the best thing you can give isn't some object that you bought on Amazon or something you can wrap up and give out. Sometimes the best thing you can give is your time, your energy and yourself.
Dunnam said that's what helped make coach Maxfield so special.
“He was a guy who was always a mentor for me," Dunnam said. "When I was a young, first-year head coach I had a lot of questions on a lot of different things. … Any time I had a question I could call him, and he would always be honest and helpful. He was always going to give you a genuine, sincere response. He truly cared about developing you as a coach, and I appreciated that.”
As you're reading this, I'm on vacation back home in New Orleans. Hopefully, I'm gathered around with my mom, sister, her husband, two children and their dog. My hope is that we're exchanging gifts, and good times like every year, before we put a call into my dad and stepmom in Montana at some point.
However, I also hope that this year we take the time to truly be with one another. I hope we make the effort to listen to one another and ask how best we can help one another in our lives. I hope that in 2023, we dedicate ourselves to being there, not just for each other, but for those who need us. I hope all of you reading this will do the same.
After all, from what I understand, that's what coach Maxfield would've wanted.
“The most defining part of his legacy was that he was a genuine human being," Dunnam said. "What you saw was what you got with coach Maxfield. He wasn’t putting on any act or anything like that. He was a genuine, truly kind person. His legacy is going to be that he was one heck of a football coach, but he was an even better man.”
This article originally appeared on Amarillo Globe-News: FROM THE HART: Spend this holiday season honoring the legacy of Mel Maxfield
