One of the main reasons Moses became a football coach was his desire to encourage others to excel just as his mother had encouraged him. Reinhardt’s starting defen-sive end Javier Dyer attests to his coach’s effectiveness when he says, “Coach Moses pushes us as hard as he can, and him doing that shows how his background influenced him and how it is basically influencing the defensive line, and the defense as a whole.”
As a coach, Moses makes sure that his voice is heard by all of his players. He holds everyone accountable and encourages his players to give their best in order for the defense to succeed.
Moses gives credit for his successes both on and off of the field to God. He ex-plains, “If it weren’t for my spiritual back-ground, then I wouldn’t be the man that I am today.” The church has been a place where Moses has spent most of his Sundays and Wednesdays. God was and is very important to him. He feels that without God, he wouldn’t have the talent and the mindset that he has today.
The church also created an outlet for Moses’s outgoing nature, equipping him to draw attention from the crowd as he does today. He explains, “As a child, whenever we had a play or anything where we acted as a group, I would want to be the main character. I loved the spotlight! For some reason, I felt as if I shined when the spotlight was on me, instead of shying away from it like others do at times.” This helped inspire him to embark upon a motivational speaking path, which has been one of his greatest goals other than coaching at Reinhardt.
Moses’s mother always made it a point that if his grades were not up to par, then he wouldn’t be able to participate in his extracurricular activities. That was always a major lesson from his mother; she said that if he wanted to go anywhere in life, then he was going to have to get an education first. She wanted to make sure that he did what he needed to do to get the best education possible.
One of his mother’s prime strategies to encourage his success was through compe-tition. To urge her children to excel, Smith made sure that Moses and his sister com-peted in everything. She encouraged them to take pride in everything that they did. Who could brush their teeth the fastest? Who could make better grades? Who could clean their room the best? Everything was a competition. This set the young Quentin up with a drive to achieve more, because he never wanted to finish last and never wanted to lose—especially to a girl. He definitely didn’t want to cut himself short.
It is easy to be the best when you grow up being a tall guy looking down on everybody at an early age. Football and basketball were the two sports that Moses fell in love with when he was a little boy--perhaps I should say young boy, because he was never little. Being such a tall child, it was a given that he would always be the center on the basketball team and that he would be somewhere on the offensive and defensive lines in football.
Even as a child, Moses always believed he could become someone great both on and off of the field. This 6’7" man has managed to become someone that young adults at Reinhardt University can look up to.
"Everything was a competition."
Photograph on this page by Jalen Holloman; other photographs provided by Quentin Moses.
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