The only HS football coach in SC who works for free wouldn’t have it any other way

Every Monday through Friday from May through October, Padgett Johnson wakes up at 5:15 a.m., gets to his desk by 6:30 a.m. and crams in a full day of work by lunchtime as president of a South Carolina electric company.

By 12:30 p.m. he’s on the road, traveling 50 minutes from one Upstate office to another and “working until the minute I roll up” via phone call.

Then he changes clothes and starts the first leg of his second job. After wrapping up P.E. class, practice and any other lingering tasks, he’s lucky to get home by 8 p.m. For his time at Walhalla High School, he earns a whopping $0.

Johnson calls this a “typical day.”

Research indicates it’s anything but.

Johnson, 54, is the longtime president of Easley-based Johnson Electric Co. Inc. For the past six years, he has also served as the football coach at Walhalla, a mid-sized high school nestled in the foothills of South Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains.

But in a state where prep football coaches will earn a median annual salary of $85,400 in 2022-23 and 34 will take home over $100,000, Johnson is a monetary unicorn, according to a salary database compiled by The State via S.C. Freedom of Information Act requests.

South Carolina has 198 public high school football coaches across five classifications but only one who operates exclusively on a volunteer basis, according to The State’s research.

Since hiring Johnson to rebuild its program in January 2016, Walhalla hasn’t paid him a dime.

“It’s very unique,” athletic director Allan Seigler said.

It’s also been a relative coup for Walhalla, which had won just 27% of its football games from 2000 to 2015 before rolling the dice on Johnson, who to that point had only coached at a recreational league level. Even the former principal who hired Johnson recognized, via press release, “that this is not a traditional hire.”

“The first couple of years, there was a lot of skepticism,” said Seigler, who spent two years on Johnson’s staff as an assistant coach. “Even some ‘that’ll never work’ type of thoughts.”

Now, the Razorbacks are enjoying one of the best stretches in program history, on track for their fifth regular-season record of .500 or better and fifth South Carolina High School League playoff appearance over the past seven seasons.

At the helm is a coach who goes for two, rarely punts, devours film and invests as much time into off-field mentorship as he does on-field preparation … all while running a full-service electrical contracting business on the side.

Talk about a hometown discount.

“I have all the credentials any other coach would have … they treat me pretty much just like a normal employee,” Johnson said. “Except I don’t get paid, which is fine. That wasn’t my intention. I still feel like I’m the winner of the whole thing. I’m the one getting to coach football.”

Look up salaries of SC high school football coaches

A love for coaching

His affiliation with the sport is a lifelong local love affair. Johnson is a career upstate South Carolinian who grew up in a family of Clemson football superfans in Powdersville, played offensive line at Wren High in Piedmont and graduated from Clemson in 1990 with a degree in electrical engineering, the only field he’d ever wanted to pursue.

He has worked in some capacity for Johnson Electric, the company his late father founded in 1965, since he was 12 years old. He has been a full-time employee there since graduating college, still as happy to clock in for a shift today as he was four decades ago as a teenager.

But Johnson loved coaching, too, and always carved out time for it, even as a 20-something postgrad: little league baseball, church basketball, his nephew’s youth football team.

Once he had sons, he coached them, too, from the tiniest of youth teams through seventh grade rec league. That’s how Johnson (whose family lives in Clemson) ended up making a name for himself with the Central Tigers, a middle school rec team that serves as a feeder program to Daniel High School.

He was sharp, personable and, albeit at a youth level, undeniably successful for a team whose players were going on to star for one of South Carolina’s top prep football programs.

When Johnson’s sons finally aged out of rec ball, he realized 16 years of coaching just wasn’t enough. Leading young people and helping them develop, at that point, had become spiritual.

“We’d do Bible study on Wednesday nights and lots of other good things with our rec league teams,” Johnson said. “I felt like God was still calling me to coach, so I prayed really hard about it. I just said: ‘Put me where you want me to be.’ ”

Not long after, he got a call from Walhalla High School.

They had an electrical problem at their football field.

Paying it forward

Johnson arrived on campus that day to fix a faulty light fixture on behalf of his company. He left with a plea from one of the school’s maintenance men — an old rec league coaching buddy — to at least consider applying for Walhalla’s varsity football coaching job, which had just opened.

“That’s probably a little more than I can handle,” Johnson told him.

But his friend kept encouraging him, Johnson said, and after more prayer and more deliberation he threw his hat in the ring. And he didn’t do so halfheartedly.

Johnson approached the process with the same preparation and rigor he would trying to win a project bid for Johnson Electric. Up against 11 other candidates, he showed up for his job interview with a extensive PowerPoint presentation and a 70-page plan for turning the program around. Some major points of emphasis: spread offense, community involvement and mentorship.

And, of course, no stipend. Johnson would maintain his full-time job as president of his electric company and simply rearrange his schedule around the football calendar (for the past five years, he’s also volunteered as a physical education teacher). Walhalla’s leadership was sold.

“I think God’s blessed me, and it’s inherent for me to pay that forward,” Johnson said. “Not that God has given me some great talent as a football coach. But whatever your talent is and whatever level of talent you have, he finds a way for you to use it.”

Since being hired in 2016, Johnson has rolled his annual coaching stipends as Walhalla’s head coach and offensive coordinator directly back into the football program’s budget.

Johnson’s defensive coordinator and longtime friend Bob Thomas, a former Florida State linebacker who runs an Edward Jones investment office in nearby Seneca, also doesn’t take a stipend.

The School District of Oconee County’s annual football coaching stipends for 2022-23 are $14,500 for a head coach, $6,270 for an offensive coordinator and $6,270 for a defensive coordinator, according to Seigler, the Walhalla AD.

That adds up to $27,000 this season — and about $162,000 over the six seasons prior — that Johnson and Thomas have essentially donated back to the program.

Across Johnson’s tenure, Walhalla has used those extra funds to replace its royal purple and white football uniforms, travel to Florida for its 2019 season opener, boost the annual stipends of other football assistant coaches and purchase a third set of orange and blue uniforms, which Walhalla brings out once a year on “throwback night” to honor the school’s old color scheme.

“Whatever’s needed program-wise on an annual basis,” Johnson said.

The football team always gets the first crack at the money, Seigler said, but in some years he’s been able to use leftover funds to assist other Walhalla teams and coaches. It’s a small but helpful bump for the school, which competes in Class AAA, the state’s third-largest classification.

“We certainly get more from it than we give,” Thomas said.

‘They’re gonna be there’

And what better place to give than Walhalla? Given its remote location in the northwest corner of South Carolina, closer to Georgia and North Carolina than most of its own state, “you’ve gotta want to get here,” Thomas joked.

But this small city of 4,000, which brands itself as the “Main Street to the Mountains,” is a special place, Johnson said. Naturally, the hometown football team plays a huge role, with community members showing up in droves to Razorback Stadium on Friday nights each fall and traveling well for regional road games, too.

In comparison with past years, Johnson’s tenure has given them plenty to cheer about. Walhalla is 38-29 since 2016 and qualified for the playoffs four of the past five seasons. The Razorbacks (6-4, 3-2 region) are in the 2022 playoffs, too, with a first-round game this coming Friday at Walhalla at Belton-Honea Path.

Walhalla also offers a fan-friendly on-field product, one rooted in the math and logic that Johnson also utilizes day to day while overseeing operations at his company.

This season, Johnson’s team has attempted a two-point conversion after every touchdown instead of kicking an extra point, gone for the majority of fourth downs instead of punting and pulled out mid-game onside kicks, all soundly backed statistical strategies, according to Johnson’s team-specific research.

“That’s the way we go about what we do at work,” Johnson said. “What’s most efficient? What’s the most cost-effective? That sort of thing. That’s inherent to doing our business, so it came very inherent to the way I coach.”

Even when they’ve lacked the sheer depth or athleticism of other top-tier programs, the Razorbacks’ progressive playing style has allowed them to hang tight with more talented opponents and send some 20 recruits off to play various levels of college football during Johnson’s tenure.

Johnson’s proud of Walhalla football alums such as Patrick Nations, an all-conference kicker at Eastern Kentucky, and Noah Zaire Scotland, the leading rusher at Benedict College, and Adam Thorsland, who attended Alabama on an academic scholarship and is now a walk-on tight end.

But he’s just as proud of former Razorbacks thriving in non-football settings, he said. One player has worked for him at Johnson Electric for five years. Another, a welder, still comes back to help out on Friday nights. Others, with the help of Thomas, have pursued careers in finance.

Bryce Payne, Walhalla’s senior starting quarterback and middle linebacker, said that’s indicative of the family culture Johnson has created and “how much he cares for the team and for the boys.”

“We’ve had several kids with flat tires and stuff at 11 or 12 o’clock at night, and they’ll call one of the coaches and they’re there to pick them up,” Payne said. “I mean, they’re just great about off-the-field stuff … they’re gonna be there for you.”

Endorsements like that are why Johnson is finishing his seventh season as a volunteer coach and P.E. teacher at Walhalla, taking on electric projects by day and zero-dollar coaching duties by night and squeezing a phone interview for this story into his commute from one office to the next.

“I can’t emphasize that enough — I just want to try to help some people and make a difference,” Johnson said. “It’s not that football is earth-shattering or life-saving. Nobody really even remembers if you won a game last year or not, you know? Hopefully, we’re just having a positive impact on the kids in the community. That’s really the whole purpose of everything.”

Minutes later he arrived at Walhalla High School and headed into work, ready to tackle another “typical day” that was really anything but.