Home Fields: Coast Guard Academy Football Coach Recounts the Unfulfilled Lives of World War II
In the fall of 2014, Bill George is entering his sixteenth season as the head football coach at the United States Coast Guard Academy. He has a wonderful wife and young daughter and is caregiver for his father, Casper, who is slowly slipping away. As Bill’s daily challenges mount, Casper shares fascinating childhood stories of growing up in the small Syrian immigrant village of Myers, New York, during World War II.
Bill George’s memoir covers coaching football, the challenges of caregiving while also being first-time parents, and the loving interactions between an eighty-seven-year-old man in hospice care and his redheaded granddaughter. Visit New London, Connecticut, on game day and Myers, New York, starting in 1935, brought to life by a dying man’s memories.
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Bill George was born in Glens Falls, New York. He received his undergraduate degree from Ithaca College and holds master’s degrees from the Ohio State University and the State University of New York at Albany. George is a member of the Ithaca College and the Glens Falls High School Athletic Halls of Fame. Prior to entering the coaching field, George spent three years as a special education teacher in Upstate New York.
George served as an assistant football coach to Jim Butterfield at Ithaca, as well as at Princeton (1984) and the United States Military Academy Preparatory School (1987–89), and as a graduate assistant at Ohio State (1985–86). George retired in 2020 following twenty-one seasons as the head football coach at the US Coast Guard Academy.
George resides in Salem, Connecticut, with his wife, Nancy, and daughter, Lila.
