Republic file photo Glen Brown is shown speaking after receiving the Jack Cramer award at a ceremony Friday, July 28, 2017.
The late Glen Brown was a quintessential figure at Columbus East High School.
Referred to affectionately as “Brownie” by former colleagues, students and players, he’s soon to be inducted into the Columbus East Alumni Association Wall of Fame on Aug. 28.
Brown was a member of the inaugural graduating class at East in 1974 and went on to be a mainstay in the community for more than four decades working as a teacher, coach and administrator, influencing thousands of young people, and adults for that matter, those who knew him well told The Republic.
As the school year begins, it’ll be the second since Brown died in July 2023.
“He was a great friend to me and I’m truly sad that he’s passed,” said Dennis Pierce, Columbus East sports information director. “I honestly think he’d still be out there here in the next week or two because football’s coming up, that’s just the kind of guy he was, he was going to show up and do his work.”
Often, Brown would cross paths with people two, maybe three times at different points in their lives.
A standout athlete while attending East as a student, Brown played football, wrestled and was a member of the track team — three sports he would continue to devote time to throughout his life.
Brown is listed as a 6-foot, 207-pound defensive tackle in a 1972 article in The Republic, but he played on both sides of the ball.
Even as a player, teammates recognized him as a leader and coach on the field — a former teammate of Brown’s at East who played quarterback told Tony Harvey, East’s current freshman football coach, that he still remembers the protection he felt knowing Brown was in the trenches.
“He’s like, ‘You know what, I always felt safe back there when I was playing, because I knew Glen was in front of me.’ I’m like, wow — that’s 45 years ago,” Harvey said.
At Hanover College, Brown again played football — becoming an NAIA All-American in 1977 — wrestled and was a member of the track and field team, earning his business degree in 1978 and a master’s in education from Ball State in 1982.
BCSC hired the 25-year-old Brown as a teacher in 1980 and over the years he taught students at Fodrea, Clifty Creek, Southside, and W.D. Richards elementary schools, plus Columbus Christian School. He also coached football, boys and girls track and wrestling in varying roles from 1980 until 2023.
Former players described Brown as low-key and exceedingly approachable — someone who cared about athletic success but also passionately cared about the lives of students.
“He was a gentleman,” said Jonathan Martin, East assistant for football and track. “He talked to people and he’d talk to you like he knew you forever.”
Those who knew him said Brown was the type of person to pick up on small cues if someone was having a hard time or needed someone to lend an ear.
“He wasn’t, you know, I’m going to yell at you and then try to motivate you that way,” East Athletic Director David Miller said. “It was more walking up to a player, putting his arm around them and giving them a few words of encouragement.”
“If he thought you might be having a bad day, he would always try to give you a word of encouragement or tell you a joke, or just plain ask you, ‘Hey, are you feeling okay?’ He was always good at reading the room,” said Pierce, a linebacker at East while Brown was defensive coordinator.
Back in Pierce’s playing days in the mid-1980s, East would take part in a jamboree before the football regular season started in earnest. East, Columbus North, Shelbyville and Seymour high schools competed at the time.
His junior year, Pierce said, they were playing a high-octane Seymour offense the Olympians couldn’t seem to slow down.
“It was a run-and-shoot offense — Coach (Joe) Goodman at Seymour ran that thing to perfection.”
Seymour quickly put up four touchdowns in what Pierce said felt like 4 minutes.
“I was just freaking out,” he said.
The season was about to get started where they would have to play who else but Seymour again in week one, but this time for real. In a practice leading up, Pierce expressed to Brown how he was feeling.
“He said, ‘Don’t worry about it, we’ve got a plan — you just got to be able to do this, this, and this — the main thing is to read their line, and they’ll take you to the play every time.’ He didn’t worry, he was confident.”
The Olympians went on to shut Seymour out 6-0.
“All I can remember him saying was, ‘See, I told you so,’” Pierce said.
While Brown was synonymous with Columbus East, he didn’t limit his support to the school. Martin, who wrestled, was a member of the track and field team and played football at Columbus North in the mid-1980s, got to know Brown through his parents, who were also teachers.
When Martin went on to Indiana University to play football, Brown kept in touch.
“I don’t think he missed a single home game of my career, and even went to a couple of bowl games that we went to,” Martin said.
Later on, after Martin began as a student teacher in the early 1990s, he ended up taking over for Brown in his position as East’s shotput and discus coach.
“We just became coaching colleagues and our friendship blossomed from there,” Martin said, describing a dynamic also seen among Brown’s former players.
When Pierce was named head coach of East’s freshman football team in 2017, it certainly registered with him that it was odd for his former defensive coordinator to be one of his assistants.
“I think he understood that I thought it might be difficult — not difficult — but just weird,” Pierce said. Brown must have noticed and told Pierce simply that he was there to help him in whatever way possible.
“There was no big me, little you or anything like that, it was always he treated you as an equal when maybe he didn’t have to,” Pierce said.
Three years ago, Ed Vogel, the current head football coach at East, asked Harvey to become head coach for the freshman football team. It wasn’t a hard decision for Harvey, who knew he’d have a longtime friend helping him out.
“It took me literally a millisecond to answer, because I knew Coach Brown would be there,” Harvey said. “… I think about him every day, what he would do. People think, ‘Well you’re doing a good job coaching,’ No — it’s Coach (John) Stafford, it’s Coach Brown, it’s Coach (Bob) Gaddis.”
Chris Cooper, East’s assistant athletic director and head wrestling coach, played football at the school in the late 1990s and also wrestled, although it took some convincing at the time from Brown, then the head wrestling coach.
“He tried to get me to wrestle when I was a freshman,” Cooper said. “I had in my mind I didn’t want to do it — I finally did as a junior.”
Cooper also played offensive line at East, the unit Brown coached.
“If something wasn’t working right (in football practice) or he needed to know something about the team, it was like, okay I can go to Brownie, he would listen,” Cooper said. “I want to be known as that coach just like he was, where you can go and tell me things, we can talk, we can work things out and make sure they’re having the best possible experience they can have.”
After Brown stepped down as wrestling coach, Martin coached the team and Cooper was his young assistant. Martin stepped away later on and then Brown, now East’s athletic director, hired Cooper into the role he has now held for more than two decades.
“It came full circle, I remember in the interview I was like, ‘Glen, you got me into this, you talked me into wrestling.’ It totally changed my life,” Cooper said. “… If he had not gotten me involved in that, who knows how it would have turned out.”
Aside from coaching and teaching, Brown made significant contributions as an administrator, working as East’s assistant athletic director in 1997-98 and athletic director from 1998 to 2005. In the latter role, Brown made a number of crucial hires, maybe none more impactful than hiring of Gaddis as head football coach.
“He was the reason why East was so successful from 2004 to 2019, because he hired Bob Gaddis. He was the reason — he saw it in Bob that, that is the guy we need,” Harvey said.
Harvey played football at East while Brown was defensive coordinator, graduating in 1985. He recalls the lengths Brown would go to in order to care for his players, something he’s come to appreciate even more as he’s gotten older.
Harvey lived just on the edge of Bartholomew County when he was a kid, so when two-a-days came around, it would’ve involved quite a bit of driving.
“He goes, ‘You’re not driving,’ and he would pile me and Mark Ziegler in his car and drive us out to Mineral Springs,” Harvey said. Brown’s wife, Sue Ellen, would make the two sandwiches. Harvey would take the couch and Ziegler the sofa.
“We would nap and Sue Ellen would get us up, we get our stuff and out the door, we go back to afternoon practice,” Harvey said. “He would literally feed us and make sure that we were rested because he didn’t want us to take the half-an-hour drive home.”
Harvey wanted to keep Brown’s legacy alive and has done so in part with the Coach Brown MVP Award, given to the freshman football team’s most outstanding player over a season.
“I’m so glad he got inducted into the wall of fame because I was afraid that his name would maybe get lost and these kids wouldn’t know who he was,” Harvey said. “I know that there’s one thing that will go on, hopefully for forever, because it needs to happen.”
Throughout his long career, Brown accumulated numerous accolades — he was the inaugural winner of the Judson Erne Mental Attitude Award; was the recipient of the Jack Cramer Award for Ideals of Athletic Competition in 2017; served as a leader in various coaching organizations; and was an assistant on the 2013 and 2017 Columbus East state champion football teams.
But most of all, he’s remembered by those who knew him for the person he was.
“No matter what position he was in, being a coach, a mentor, an administrator, a teacher, he was just Glen Brown,” Martin said. “He was Brownie — and that’s how I’ll always remember him.”
