ennis coach enjoys his golden year at Eastern High School
By Dyuce Woodson
April 20, 2023—There's an old saying that goes, "If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life." For Eastern High School tennis coach Richard Cotton, that saying has proven true for the past five decades that he's spent coaching JCPS students on the tennis court.
“Tennis has been good to me,” Cotton said.
Cotton has been a coach at Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS) since 1974, making this season his 50th with the district.
“I created the [tennis] team at Central High School,” Cotton said. “I put out a feeler if anybody wanted to play tennis, and four boys came up and said they could play ping-pong, they could sure play tennis!”
He’s been at Eastern since 1986 and was the head tennis coach until 2018. Over the last 50 years, he’s also coached volleyball, girls basketball, and boys and girls swimming.
Interacting with the kids is what keeps him coming back after all these years, he said.
“Every spring, at the end of the season, I’d say that’s my last, but I always seem to come back,” Cotton said. “My daughter laughed when I came to practice, I said, ‘You know, this has got to be my last year, and I get too tired,’ She looked at me and said, ‘Sure. That’s what you say. That’s what you always say.’”
While the chances of him going for year 51 are low, he says being with the kids is what he’ll miss the most when he officially retires.
“That’s what keeps drawing me back,” the retired math teacher said.