The Florida A&M Rattlers men’s basketball program is playing at Georgia Tech on Sunday afternoon. But on a sunny Saturday afternoon, Rattlers head coach Charlie Ward took a seat inside the College Football Hall of Fame to talk shop. For a college basketball coach to be seated in college football’s hall of record here in Atlanta would be odd if not for the man in question. Thomasville, Georgia native, Charlie Ward is one of the greatest two-sport collegiate athletes of all time.
Moments after the Rattlers’ bus pulled up outside the College Football Hall of Fame, a dozen student-athletes got off the bus, followed by a shorter and older man wearing glasses and a FAMU sweatsuit. Ward still looks like he’s at his playing weight from his playing days.
Asked if his team had any idea how good a college football player he was, Ward smirked before looking ambivalent. His football-playing days are long gone. The visit to the hall will give his players quite an education on their head coach if they aren’t sure how good he was on the gridiron. This being Ward’s first season as a collegiate head coach, there have been some lessons learned along the way. The Rattlers are 3-7 overall and have lost their last two games. While playing basketball at Florida State, Ward’s teams, which included former NBA players Sam Cassell and Bob Sura, rarely lost games, despite competing in the highly competitive Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC).
Photo by Donnell Suggs/The Atlanta Voice
“I just appreciate our upbringing,” Ward said of his playing days.
He mentioned a game-winning layup against the Yellow Jackets and a big win at Boddy Dodd Stadium during his senior season as moments that stand out in Atlanta. Now he was back, looking for another victory.
Speaking of the ACC, FAMU will play a Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets team that is 8-4 and is also coached by a former NBA point guard, Damon Stoudamire.
“This has been a good experience. The players are the players, and the game is the game,” Ward said.
His high school coaching career gave him less autonomy over who he was coaching, but the college level will allow him to piece together a roster.
“Being able to go recruiting has been something. You just have to manage your roster,” he said.
As decorated for his on-field heroics as Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders, two legendary two-sport athletes on the collegiate and professional levels, Ward won the 1993 Heisman Trophy as the quarterback at Florida State University and the 1994 National Championship. He followed up a five-star college football career with a 12-year career as a guard in the NBA, first as a first-round draft pick, 26th overall, by the New York Knicks, who were also in Atlanta for a game against the Atlanta Hawks that night.
Asked if he knew that his former team was in town at the same time as his new team, Ward said he didn’t. He’s focused on coaching college basketball these days.
The team was given a tour of the hall, and for the majority of the players, this was their first time inside. Ward, who also finished sixth in Heisman voting as a junior in 1992, and is the basketball program’s all-time leader in steals, was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2006.
Ward and his wife started and continue to operate the Charlie and Tonja Ward Family Foundation.