Mrs. Coach

Game nights at Vestavia Hills High School start the same way for Linda Anderson: a phone call from her husband, Buddy, and her good luck phrase, “I’ll see you on victory field.”

She can be found in the tunnel giving hugs and grabbing hands as the football team passes by on the way to the gridiron. The coach always comes last, to get a final kiss from his wife before the game begins.

And three minutes before the game ends, Linda Anderson, sometimes accompanied by her children or grandchildren, makes her way to the sidelines. Win or lose, she always finds Buddy Anderson to celebrate or to mourn with him. Then, they get ready for the next week.

“If you lose, you have 10 or 15 minutes to grieve. You go back to work. And he’ll just say, ‘We have work to do. I’ve gotta go,’” she said.

Buddy Anderson started his coaching career with the Rebels, and with Linda Anderson by his side. Forty-six years later, the routine of being a football coach’s wife still feels like a calling for her.

“I have hundreds of sons,” she said.

‘Love at first sight’

Buddy and Linda Anderson both grew up in small towns — Buddy in Thomasville, Linda in Oneonta. She spent her senior year of high school in Mountain Brook and tried to follow her father’s footsteps by attending University of Alabama. The transition from small town to huge university was too much, though, and she transferred to Samford University as a sophomore.

Buddy Anderson was on the football team there, with dreams of following his own father’s path as a football coach.

“[I] walked in the cafeteria and saw Buddy and that was it. It was love at first sight. And he was dating my roommate,” Linda Anderson said.

Her roommate eventually told her that she and Buddy Anderson were a perfect match. They started dating in May and got engaged in July.

“We had a calendar in our car. We marked off all the days until we graduated, because we didn’t get married until we graduated,” Linda Anderson said.

They got married on Dec. 28, 1971.

Becoming a Rebel

While the Andersons were still dating, she said they once went to a Mountain Brook vs. Vestavia Hills football game.

“If you have a date with Buddy, you go to a high school football game. You eat pizza at Davenports, where we had our first date, in Mountain Brook,” she recalled.

Though Mountain Brook was her alma mater, Linda Anderson said she kept feeling drawn to the little opposing team.

“I just heard God say, ‘That’s where you’re going to be,’” she said. “It was one of those watershed moments.”

And on the way to the car at the end of the game, Buddy Anderson said he felt it, too. Despite that calling, Linda Anderson said at first he didn’t look at Vestavia Hills High School as his first coaching job.

It was due to the tragic loss of three Vestavia assistant football coaches in a car wreck in 1971 that Buddy Anderson decided to apply. One of the main questions during the interview, Linda Anderson said, was how long he planned on sticking around.

“When he was in high school, he had a different coach every year. And that’s the case in so many high schools, they don’t have the longevity of the coach,” she said. “He said, ‘I want to plant my life in one place and be aChristian coach.’”

That was the case even as he spent several years as an assistant coach, once being asked to coach wrestling, and passing up a job offer to head the Pelham team. After spending time in prayer, Buddy Anderson would always tell his wife that he wanted to stay dedicated to the Rebels.

“I always felt that he knew what was best because I was committed to this,” Linda Anderson said.

In 1978, he got his chance to lead the Vestavia team. Linda Anderson said he was given two years to put together a winning season for the Rebels. He did it the same year. Despite having only two returning starters and losing the first few games of the season, Buddy Anderson got his first win as head coach in 1978 on the Hewitt-Trussville High School field — the same field where he would earn the title of “winningest” coach in the state — and, Linda Anderson recalled, where she would accidentally get caught in the Gatorade dumped over his head — in 2014.

That very first win was made especially poignant by the fact that Linda Anderson delivered their second child, Abbey, the night before.

“I had all my babies on Thursday. I did my part,” she laughed. “He came in the hospital with the game ball.”

The Rebels capped off their 1978 winning season with a trip to the state championship. 

“They were known as the Cardiac Crew that first year because we went to overtime so many times. It was always down to the wire,” Linda Anderson said.

In the Anderson house, right down the street from the high school on Lime Rock Road, there are stacks of photo albums, newspaper clippings, yearbooks and other memorabilia from the many winning seasons and two state championships that followed in the footsteps of that 1978 team.

At home with Buddy

Most of the players on the Rebels team know Linda Anderson as “Mrs. Coach,” the softer side of the coaching team. She’s there not only to give hugs on game nights, but also to bake cookies on Wednesdays when around 40 high school boys will crowd into the Anderson home for their Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) meetings.

She first felt convinced that her future was to be a coach’s wife at an FCA retreat. Despite the hard schedule that comes with coaching high school football, she heard the call “to open your home to boys, to bake cookies and to have a place that they can call home — a second home or sometimes a first home — and to support Buddy.”

Supporting her husband is more than just game nights for Linda Anderson. She’s there to encourage and listen to him as he preps for each week’s game, which sometimes means accepting the long hours he’s away from home.

“Buddy is at work hours and hours. Sundays, he goes at 1:25 [p.m.] and comes home by about 11 [p.m.],” she said.

She also raised three daughters — Lindsey, Abbey and Stacey — during the first half of Buddy Anderson’s Vestavia career, along with countless boys who filtered in and out of the house over the years. She said they called Abbey the “good luck baby,” not only for her birth before her father’s first big win, but also for her habit of falling asleep next to Buddy Anderson as he was reviewing game footage.

“Buddy needed daughters to help balance his life. But it’s hilarious going to school with your daddy, who’s the head coach. You don’t get dates, but they were protected,” LindaAnderson said.

Linda Anderson has seven grandchildren and runs a tutoring business in her home. One of their family’s greatest challenges, she said, has been her diagnosis with trigeminal neuralgia about 17 years ago. The pain, centered in nerves in the face, can be debilitating, but they try not to let it interfere with their lives.

But the demands of football season sometimes come before everything else. Linda Anderson said when she was pregnant with their third child and her water broke, Buddy Anderson put her in the car and drove — straight to the Rebels field house.

She recalled a player coming up to the car and, upon finding out she was in labor, trying to figure out where her husband was.

“I said, ‘You know, Robby, that’s a really good question, and we’re going to have a very educational day right here if you don’t go find him, because this baby’s coming,’” she said. “That’s kind of my life.”

On the sidelines

As she has done for 46 years, Linda Anderson is always in the stands to watch her Rebels on Friday nights. She said that the big wins are memorable, but so are the players who have been injured during games over the years. As the coach’s wife, she feels like a second mother for the team. And she takes it seriously.

“It’s very grueling if someone gets hurt. I’ll go down to the bench, like the mother, and wrap my arms around them,” Linda Anderson said.

One of the hard parts of being in the stands is that she sometimes gets to hear critiques on her husband and team’s performance from the audience.

“I’m not real good at that. I have turned around and glared at somebody until they sunk under their seats or else got up and left. I’m a good glarer when it comes to taking care of [Buddy],” she said.

And when the big wins happen and the entire bleachers empty onto the field, Linda Anderson always finds her way to Buddy. Their four-decade tradition is still a special moment for just the two of them.

“It [is] an intimate celebration in the midst of a city celebration, a team celebration,” she said.