Coffeetown: An Origin Story
How and why I came up with this crazy, fictional high school football team
“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”
― Nelson Mandela
Man alive, son. That’ll make your eyes leak.
If you read the sentence before this one (and after the wonderful quote from Mandela) in the voice of ‘Coffeetown’, then you already know some of this story.
If not, then let me catch you up to speed. I will start this origin story from, well, its own origins.
My career in local television news ended on Halloween, 2019.
Did you know Nick Saban was born on Halloween in 1951?
Spooky*!
(*Saban’s birthday, not the career re-adjustment part.)
As of right now, this isn’t a Michael-Jordan-to-the-Birmingham-Barons moment. I’m at peace with no longer being in that specific form of this industry, and moving ahead with a career that is:
- still some form of sports broadcasting
- still in content creation / storytelling
- still in a reality where I get to make informative and/or funny videos that entertain you during whatever the hell is happening on planet Earth right now.
I discovered that last part, about the funny videos, in a time that could have been darker and scarier than Halloween if I allowed it to be.
I learned that my TV contract would not be renewed on Friday, September 13, 2019. Tough biz! While I processed what that meant for my career, my wife, and our child that had just introduced herself to us as a blue line on a home pregnancy test a few months earlier, I also found myself reflecting upon a lot of undeniable truth.
How fortunate I was to pursue and realize some amazing dreams in my career at such a young age.
How lucky I was to meet some incredible people in this industry.
How I knew, in my heart, that I had done everything to the best of my abilities with the opportunities I was given in order to serve Athens’ and Macon’s and Atlanta’s sports communities up to that point.
Sure, I had plenty of reasons to be bitter. But I had more reasons not to be, and no regrets to speak of.
I also didn’t really have time to let bitterness overcome my heart and my attitude. I had to pivot quickly and strategize efficiently. No one in this business hires a sports broadcaster in the middle of football season.
Suddenly, I had two jobs:
1. Finishing my current job (I was given the option to leave early. That wasn’t going to happen)
2. Formatting my award-winning resume and applying for new jobs
If you’ve been in this boat lately due to the pandemic, my heart is 100% with you. You know it - looking for a job can require just as much of you as working one. I was determined, but I needed some downtime whenever I could find a few minutes, and my morning-sick wife wasn’t puking. (This is just objective journalism. I love her and our daughter very much, and her support during this exasperating point in my career means everything to me.)
Every now and then, when I had a moment of silence away from all of that, this same idea kept nagging at me.
It was one I’d had for, quite literally, years. It just hadn’t been given the chance to fully develop, because I believed it wasn’t the type of thing that a respectable voice of sports journalism would act upon, much less have the outlet to share at a local television news station.
Ok, I do have one regret. I wish I’d learned how to start pursuing ideas like this much sooner.
Here was the idea:
What if I acted out a character that was an accurate impression of all the high school football voices and mantras I’d heard through the years? Something that pointed out how outrageous those calls can sound, while also paying the utmost respect to my upbringing, the wholesome foundation that I’d like to think the institution of high school football in America rests upon, and the voices themselves?
Voices I heard as a passenger in a car on any given Friday night growing up in the South
Voices I heard as a player in high school
Voices I heard as a reporter under crackly PA speakers in high school stadiums all over Georgia, and over even crackly-er AM signals driving Georgia’s rural, dark roads on the way back to the TV station to anchor sportscasts
What if I did that impression in a YouTube clip, or maybe one day on a stage in a standup comedy act (Lewis Grizzard is a dangerous but necessary influence on my career) and shared that part of me, that is part of so many Southerners, with the world?
One day, the silent reflection that made me think about this idea collided with a moment of opportunity.
It was a couple of weeks before my last day with my previous employer. I was in the parking lot outside the gym (I lift)
(Light weights)
(Or I used to before the pandemic, anyway)
I had my standard-issue Apple headphones on me. I’d noticed in the past that they made audio recordings sound like an older microphone. I knew right then.
It was time to create Coffeetown.
First of all, about the name:
Some people in Georgia assume that I based the team off of Coffee County. I can tell you directly, I did not. It had much more to do with a theme of names that I wanted to pursue in this particular high school football universe.
Coffeetown
Dirtville
Mulchwood
Copper County
(Those dirty cheats) Briarton
Leatherdale
All of these names (to me, anyway) evoke feelings of good, rich, American earthy-ness. They come from nature, or the ground, or a forest, or the side of a mountain. Not that I overthought all of this when I came up with the name, ‘Coffeetown’, by any stretch - I just had a kernel of the idea that I’d like for this to feel natural, without having to use any actual high school names.
So many of America’s communities, the ones I envision when I think of Coffeetown, rely on agriculture to keep their place on the map. In a way, establishing the roots of these names against somewhat of a blue collar background was my tone-setter for anyone that happened to watch and listen.
Coffeetown could literally be anywhere in America where high school football’s lights on Friday night glow brighter than the week’s toils.
Second of all, about the names:
Ashley Holt
Donnie Chuggs
Ronnie Chuggs
J.C. Bingo
Nacho Davis
Tantavious Maxwell
Mackerel MacKenzie
When you cover enough high school football games, as I have for the last decade, you see thousands of names on football rosters in that time.
So when it comes time to create a fictional, but also very realistic universe…
…fictional, but also very realistic names have a way of finding their way to you.
(Also, you can’t say ‘Donnie Chuggs’ or ‘Ronnie Chuggs’ without sounding like a small-town high school football radio announcer. Try it. It bounces off the tongue like a pickup truck driving over a gravel road.)
Finally, about calling the “games”:
Some background about my upbringing and the cultures woven through it:
I was born in Savannah, Georgia and had family there for much of my life. I grew up during my formative years in Lawrenceville, which is a suburb of Atlanta.
My parents grew up in Savannah. Their parents grew up in West ‘by God’ Virginia, and Kentucky. Many of their collective years were spent in some deeply Pentecostal church environments.
One particular phrase that my dad used to share, which was passed down from his father and uttered on many a Sunday morning when making a scriptural emphasis, is now inseparable from the lore of Coffeetown:
“If that don’t light your fire, your wood’s wet.”
I knew that high school football radio calls in the South had exclamatory moments like that peppered throughout the broadcasts. Like SEC football, not much separates the passion of high school football culture from the fervency of religious fire.
So based off of that small shove, I was inspired to think up some other Appalachian-isms I’d heard through the years, and either use them carte blanche in my game calls, modify them a little bit, or come up with some on my own:
“More nervous than a long-tailed cat in a room full of rockin’ chairs”
“Mad as a hornet spittin’ vinegar”
“Tough enough to eat nails and (spit) tacks”
“Man alive”
“My knees are sweatin’”
“That’ll make your teeth itch”
“Let that turkey work!”
“Jumbo, Nacho, Bingo!”
Beyond the -isms, an indelible part of any high school football radio call is the over-excitement surrounding a two-to-three yard gain, the lack of excitement for major turning points in the game, and navigating a conversation about the academic achievements of a star player during that week’s “Off-The-Field” feature at halftime of the broadcast.
At this point, I feel it is necessary to clarify - none of the motivators surrounding Coffeetown, or the ideas contained within it, have a spirit of belittling the people behind those microphones on Friday night, or the jobs that they do.
To those people, I say this:
You are the storytellers and the mouthpieces for entire communities. Your work is largely under-appreciated, and I cannot tell any one of you enough, just how much I admire and enjoy the work that you do.
Coffeetown is a tribute to each and every one of you, as much as it is a tribute to the coaches, players, cheerleaders, bands, and team moms all across America that make it possible.
I just, ya know, hear things on these calls from time to time that I believe are accurate and universally understood by our shared audience. And that hallmark of the call - the emotion that doesn’t always match the moment, for better or worse - is the driving force that I felt would immediately be recognized when I shared Coffeetown on social media.
Add in the fact that I grew up listening to Larry Munson call Georgia football games most of my adolescent life, and you’ll understand that my desire to be passionate calling a “radio” football game of my own, even if it’s fictional, is a part of me that’s just as much a part of my being as Donnie Chuggs’ collarbone is to his.
Speaking of Larry Munson, whose audible voice is sorely missed in today’s college football media landscape, people ask me whose voice I’m “doing” (imitating).
It’s everyone’s and it’s no one’s. As I mentioned earlier with names, when you hear enough voices as you scroll the entirety of a radio dial on Friday nights, you have more than enough source material to drum up what you think the voice of Coffeetown should sound like.
In a way, it’s one of the most aggressive impressions someone can do. I’m not generalizing rural voices or making fun of Southerners. I’m literally doing a collective impression of every single radio announcer’s voice I’ve ever heard and can remember.
And that, ya turkeys, is how Coffeetown got its start in October of 2019.
Many things have happened since that first “broadcast,” in which I called a loss to Dirtville that sparked a miraculous turnaround and a run to the playoffs, before a controversial loss to Briarton.
That playoff loss was loosely inspired by my own high school (Collins Hill)’s, gut-wrenching (and by all of our accounts, controversial) loss to Roswell in the 2006 state playoffs.
A couple colleagues named Ryan McGee and Marty Smith became fans of the series, shared it on their show on the SEC Network one weeknight, and were gracious enough to give me a platform to share it live on ‘Marty and McGee’ a few weeks later. They even rep Coffeetown merch on the air from time to time.
I spent years of my career doing real, solid storytelling in an effort to work for a place like the SEC Network. The irony that a fake football team got me there first will never be lost on me, or taken for granted.
Beyond my on-camera Coffeetown persona, I’ve also done some voiceover work for viral videos from time to time. Scott Van Pelt is a fan.
A few people even created Twitter accounts based on the characters I created. I don’t know who they are, and I don’t claim responsibility for anything they say. But I love them all, and a lot of times they’re funnier than anything I could have come up with on my own.
Without a career re-adjustment, there is no Coffeetown.
Thanks for reading. Gotta run. My baby’s puking.
Let that turkey work, son.
Need a collaboration with Coach Letterman at some point
As someone who does play-by-play for high school football in Northeast Georgia, I've never felt more at-home than a Coffeetown broadcast. My crew does more of a "Game of the Week," so I don't find myself being a homer for one particular team, but suffice it to say I can see my own humorous reflection in your work all the same -- especially against those lyin' cheatin' sons-uh-guns over at Briarton. (And still wonder how I can slip Coffeetown references into my broadcast, and whether or not anyone would understand them.) Keep up the good work, Wes!