BY JOSEPH LOPES, Junior
BLYTHEWOOD -- Mary Hall sits at her desk which is covered in pictures of family, past students and her volleyball team, smiling while thinking about the long way she has come in her life.
Coach Mary Hall, born Mary Dorsann Wells-Hall, was born and raised in Canton, Ohio, and throughout her whole life she has had three main priorities: Family, Religion, and Education.
The first detail that pops out at a person when they walk into the room has to be the whiteboard, which proudly displays “REGION CHAMPS 10-0.”
Another is the abundant amount of newspaper articles hot glued on her wall. Last spring Hall proudly expressed: “They do not really allow this, but I would do anything for my babies.”
When someone hears the word ‘babies’ used by a person, they must assume that the person is referring to their child, but with Hall, this is not the case.
She does not only mean the three biological children she adores, one of which graduated from Blythewood High School last June, but the countless amount of students she has cared about throughout the 24 years of teaching, and the hundreds of young women whom she has coached in the past 15 years.
A Career Full of Teaching
When Hall was younger, she worked at the Professional Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio; she met a United States President while working there, but this was only the beginning of her long working career.
Hall started her teaching career at Hephzibah Middle School in Augusta, Georgia, where she taught the subjects English and Social Studies.
“Not many people knew how to spell it, and that was understood.” Good thing she taught English.
She taught there until she made her move to Columbia; teaching one semester of English at Crayton Middle School in 2000.
After teaching at Crayton, she moved to E.L Wright Middle School, where she started and broke through as a volleyball coach.
In 2006, six years after starting at E.L Wright and one year after Blythewood High School opened, she made the move across the midlands.
The memories of her coaching at E.L Wright are still alive and well, as her classroom is still full of artifacts, or memorabilia still lined on the shelves including “Coach of the Year” plaques and two miniature volleyballs bearing the E.L Wright Warriors logo.
“It’s important to keep looking forward on your life, while still looking back and remembering where you have been,” Hall said.
The Debates Were the Best Part
Kia Merritt, a junior at Blythewood High School who was one of Hall’s students second semester last year …...
“Overall experience in Ms. Hall's Class was really great. She may come off as a strict teacher but it was mainly to get us to mature a little more,” Merritt said. “When you goes into Hall’s classroom, she makes sure you know that she wants you to mature while you are in her class.”
“On the first day of the semester, she told us that she loves to see us come back to have her in her English four class in two years and see us more mature than we are now,” Merritt said.
“This made me feel very confident that I would end up loving her as a teacher, and I was right,” she added.
Another thing that makes Hall’s class so special is her teaching style.
“Unlike most English teachers she gave us easy but also challenging work and also we mainly read books, like To Kill a Mockingbird and we wrote a ton of poems.”
Kia added proudly, “The debates in the beginning of the year were the best part of Ms. Hall’s class.”
“Ms. Hall's way of teaching was so much different from other English teachers. For example, my English 3 class this year, we do a bunch of close readings and look beyond the text and also we do projects mainly on history and also we take vocab quizzes every other week. In Ms. Hall's class, we got to read books that she knew the students would enjoy instead of most. We never took quizzes or any tests and also the projects were the most fun!” Merritt said.
“I think this is why I focused more in Ms. Hall’s class. It was a traditional way of either teaching or learning, and that was better,” Merritt also added.
Her Foundation
Hall is a very religious person. She uses her faith on and off the court.
“I try to incorporate my faith in the classroom and on the court mainly by the life that I live,” Hall said.
The prayer being said before each game is not just a prayer for her, she calls her faith a foundation to both her coaching and teaching life.
In a world that every day you see someone else get ridiculed for publicly showing their faith especially in public school, Ms. Hall just brushes that to the side.
“I will say, it is sad that in a world that kids are being introduced to violence, drugs, and other inappropriate things, you have kids that are being made fun of for praying over a meal before lunch and teachers refusing to say the phrase ‘Under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance,” Hall said.
Asking Hall if she thinks she would be as successful without her faith, she interrupted before the question was finished and said,
“Absolutely not. I know I would not, without my foundation of Christ, I would not be here today, without a doubt, Hall said. “I do what I do every year, every week, every day, so I can meet the ‘Joeys’ of the world.”
“I know that one day, you will be successful and nothing would make me happier than seeing you successful ten years from now, and knowing that I might have made an effect, even if it is small, on your future,” she added.
“In your educational life, you have many teachers that seem not to care, teachers that do their job just to get a paycheck at the end of the day. Ms. Hall is not like that. When I was in her classroom, even if it was only for a semester, every day I knew I had someone who cared about me, someone who I could talk to if I needed something.” Merritt said with a smile.
“I want to be an example, and if one kid walks across the stage and grabs their diploma because I had something to do with it, I will be satisfied with my career,”
Maybe Hall has more than one foundation. Her faith of course, but the picture’s on her desk, showing the distance she’s come and the people she’s met, are her foundation as well.
