Once a Yellow
Jacket, always
a Yellow Jacket
Lee Ozmint changes teams,
but he’s still a Yellow jacket
By Al Muskewitz
N
ormally when a coach changes jobs
the first order of business is to clean
out the closet to make way for all
the new colors about to dominate
his wardrobe.
Lee Ozmint left everything right where
it was. All he had to do was make a little
room.
“When I ordered coaches’ stuff I rarely put
(the team logo) on it, because an old coach
told me don’t ever put your logo all over the
stuff you’ve got because you never know
when you’re going to be gone and you’re
going to have to get a whole new wardrobe,”
Ozmint said. “I would get a gold shirt or
black shirt and I would just leave it blank;
all it’s got is the swoosh or the three stripes.
Once a Yellow Jacket, always a Yellow Jacket “I didn’t have to change my wardrobe
-- all the way back to his high school days in hardly at all. When I met with (then Oxford
Anderson, S.C.
principal Chris Cox) I said I’m going Yellow
Jackets to Yellow Jackets, this isn’t that big a
Ozmint has been wearing black and yellow jump, and we laughed.”
for a long time. For the past 10 years he
had been the head coach at Glencoe, but
But being a coach is a lot more than what
this winter he broke from the hive to join
color you’re wearing on the practice field.
another group of Yellow Jackets, taking a
The expectation is Ozmint will have a huge
defensive assistant’s job at Oxford.
impact as these Jackets look to return to the
success they enjoyed in fourth-year Oxford
Even his high school team had the same
coach Ryan Herring’s first season. Their
nickname and color scheme. Some of the
3-7 record last year represented their most
gear doesn’t fit any more, of course, but he
losses on the field since 1990 and resulted in
could probably wear a shirt from one team
missing the playoffs for only the fourth time
and coaching shorts from another and get
since 1984.
away with it without anyone the wiser.
82 | 2016 Pigskin Roundup the Magazine
“What we’re getting is another solid coach
out there, another quality man of character
in our program to help our team be better,”
Herring said. “He’ll probably help us in
more ways than X’s and O’s. He’s going to
help develop these young men to be better
people, better adults, one day. A lot of the
Marine work he’ll get done people won’t
know about. There won’t be a lot of Air
Force work.”
It raised more than a few eyebrows when
Ozmint left the head coaching job at
Glencoe for an assistant’s gig at Oxford. His
teams had made the playoffs each of the last
seven years and won eight or more games
in six of them. But for the most part his 10year run with those Yellow Jackets had run
its course.
Administrations were changing, his two
boys -- Thomas and Pace, standouts on the
previous two teams -- were through playing
and if he wanted to coach on a bigger level
it’s perceived to be a lot easier from a Class
6A program that’s run like a small college
than it is from Class 3A regardless how
solid the foundation.