From the XFL to Union County: How Parkwood High got its new football coach

Parkwood High has hired one of the state’s youngest high school football coaches, and a former professional athlete.

Sam Mobley, a 2014 Parkwood graduate, was part of the Wolf Pack’s 2013 team that won eight games and made the fourth round of the N.C. playoffs.

After college, Mobley became a 1,000-yard receiver at Catawba College and played one year in the XFL, then owned by WWE wrestling magnate Vince McMahon.

“I’m very excited,” Mobley, 26, said. “I’m looking forward to it and being a hometown kid, and playing there and having the opportunity to be on the team that had the best playoff run in school history, man, there’s a lot of history behind me going there and playing there.”

Mobley replaces Tim Boyd who was hired in August 2022 after previous coach Terrence Gittens died unexpectedly in April of that same year.

Parkwood was 6-3 under Gittens in 2021 and made the second round of the playoffs. Gittens coached at Parkwood for two years.

Under Boyd in the fall, Parkwood finished 5-6 and lost 56-42 to Eastern Guilford in the first round of the 2022 playoffs.

Boyd was previously the defensive coordinator and an assistant coach at Guilford College in Greensboro. He also coached at Mallard Creek High in Charlotte and Chester and York high schools in South Carolina.

Last fall, Union County Public Schools conducted an investigation into Boyd’s actions as football coach and corroborated some reports from players and parents that Boyd “made the statements of a sexual nature,” according to the 10-page report provided to the Observer by a parent who’s child is named in it.

A Union County Schools spokesperson told The Observer on Thursday that Boyd is still employed as a teacher at the school.

Mobley has been an assistant at Parkwood for three years, but declined to comment on Boyd’s tenure as head coach at the school. He did respond to a question of how things might be different with him as head coach, and not Boyd.

“I think it’s going to be easier for the kids to relate, with me being from the area,” he said. “I’m a little bit younger, so they will be able to relate to me in that aspect. As far as trying to build the program, I think (Boyd) did a good job of doing that. I’m just going to try to continue that, and at the end of the day, do what’s best for the kids and make sure they have fun.”

Mobley was a 1,000-yard receiver in high school as a senior, averaging 19.1 yards per catch. He said he went to junior college for two years before transferring to Division II Catawba College where he became a star his senior year.

After college, Mobley played in the Alliance of American Football League, which folded. In 2019, Mobley said he got a chance to go the Denver Broncos rookie mini-camp and a contact who helped get him into the Alliance league asked about an XFL tryout.

Mobley made the Houston Roughnecks team and had 10 catches for 187 yards in a five-game season. In 2020, as COVID spread throughout the country, Mobley said he had a few calls from pro teams, including at least one NFL squad, but the pandemic ultimately shut his career down.

Today, Mobley and his wife of three years, Ty, are expecting their second child, a boy, this summer. The couple has a 1-year-old boy named Maverick.

“It was awesome (playing pro football),” Mobley said. “Growing up, I always had aspirations of doing it and I knew I had the ability and the opportunity presented itself. I made the most of it while I was there. I actually ended up getting a call from the (NFL’s Arizona) Cardinals a week after our (XFL) season got shut down, but there just was no progress after that during COVID.”

And that’s when Mobley came to Parkwood, before the 2020 season.

Now he works with students who take online courses in the school’s distance learning lab and will try to bring consistency to a program that’s had just two winning seasons in the past eight years.

“My plan is just to really rebuild some of the unity that we had in the community,” Mobley said. “I think that was big for us when I was going through. The community, it was really big and supportive, and starting there is my goal, and then developing the kids, having them develop physically and mentally and hone in on having that same unity with the team.”