By KEITH RYAN CARTWRIGHT
Rutherford County Schools
Until the spring of 1997, no girls’ softball team from Region 4 had advanced to the Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association state championship tournament.
That year, Jim Estes taught the Oakland High School team an essential life-lesson. He taught them the importance of playing to win. It wasn’t necessarily always about winning, so much as it was a lesson about always playing their best.
“Everybody says winning is not everything,” Estes explained. “Well, in a way that’s true, but playing to win is everything.”
Estes grew up playing to win.
He and his wife Sandra raised their own kids to do the same.
And as a coach – Estes has coached both softball and soccer – he wanted to instill the same virtues in his players, and as an auto mechanics teacher, he wanted his students to know the importance of doing their best.
“You hear, ‘that’s good enough,’” said Estes, who is the vice chairman of the Rutherford County Board of Education. “Well, good enough is not always your best.
“When I was in business you always had to do your best. If I fixed a car and it wasn’t right, then I had to fix it again and it didn’t cost you anything, so it’s better to do it right the first time and save time. It’s hard to make kids understand that.”
In ’97, the Oakland girls didn’t fare well at the state tournament, but by the end of that season they were certainly playing to win.
Much like his team, Estes hasn’t always been on the winning end, but he’s been playing to win his whole life.
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Except for his time in the military, Estes has spent his entire life in Rutherford County.
He graduated from Central High School in 1966 and while he was there folks like Norma York and John Walker influenced and impacted his life in ways he wouldn’t understand until years later.
York was an English teacher and Walker was an assistant football coach. Estes would have rather played baseball, but Central didn’t have a team in the mid-60s, so he played football. It was rare for underclassmen to make the varsity team and even more rare for them start. Estes made the team as a sophomore and found himself in the starting lineup.
Gale Blair — who would become the Oakland principal and later hire Estes as an auto teacher — also made an impact as a drafting teacher at Central.
“To this day, if I want to build something I can sit down and draw it out,” Estes said.
Like his father James, Blair encouraged hands-on learning.
Years later, Jim would be the same way with his own children and eventually his students.
With the country in the throes of the Vietnam War and knowing he would be drafted, Estes enlisted in the Navy Reserve. At the time, the reserves were only taking one new person a month because many 18 and 19-year-olds saw it as an opportunity to keep from being deployed to Vietnam.
After completing basic training and other reserve courses, Estes received his orders and was to report to Charleston, South Carolina.
As the war waged on, he figured he’d be stationed on an aircraft carrier.
A week to the day before reporting, Estes received a modification and was told to “get (his) things in order” and instead reported to San Diego for survival school. From there he attended weapons training at Camp Pendleton and then went to Long Beach, California, for “mine training.”
“I never figured out why, when going to weapons training, I had to run so much,” said Estes, in a dry matter-of-fact delivery, which is a primary characteristic of his sense of humor.
Estes eventually returned home from Vietnam with “a few exciting stories” of being shot at and another time when a Vietnamese gun boat rammed into a wooden nonmagnetic mine boat he was in—that barely measured 12-feet wide and 57 feet long.
“If it hadn’t been for a good boat captain,” he recalled, “we’d have sunk right there in the river.”
Estes returned to Murfreesboro, enrolled in college at Middle Tennessee State University and promptly married his wife. Sandra spent 27 years teaching language arts and another 13 years in the library at Oakland as a media specialist before retiring after 40 years with Rutherford County Schools.
Her strong English skills served Jim well.
“I was smart enough – I’m not smart about a lot of things – to marry a language arts major, who helped with English in college,” Jim joked. “Whenever someone asks why we got married, I always say I needed an English teacher to get out of college.”
All joking aside, English was never Estes’ strong suit.
Only later would he come to realize that he probably had a learning disability that went undiagnosed.
“They weren’t able to test as well as they are now,” reasoned Estes, who has a tendency to invert numbers and reads slow and carefully to fully understand the text that others might only read casually.
Again the whole playing to win and wanting to do his best is why he took the time to read everything two and three times.
It’s also why he still asks his wife to proofread emails.
He simply never let it hold him back, even if it might have slowed him down.
Nowadays educators have the means of identifying kids like Estes and yet he said kids are still falling through the cracks because there’s a sense of “hurry up” and cover as much material as possible because of state and national testing.
As a result, Estes said students have noticeable issues with grammar, spelling and punctuation. Mostly because they’re not afforded the time to stop and slow down, as Estes learned to do.
When it comes to doing their best (or playing to win, as he would say,) when it comes to writing papers, Estes asked, “Why do I know this when I struggled in school and they don’t?”
After following in his father’s footsteps and running his own auto shop, Estes spent 21 years at Oakland as an auto mechanics instructor.
He’d break his class into three groups. One might be working on a brake repair, while another was changing oil and the third would be working on another small repair. He’d have at least one senior leading each group and then work his way around from one group to another.
Estes was so popular that some of his seniors would take back-to-back classes and spend three to four hours in the shop with him.
On the other hand, freshmen were unsure of how to interpret his dry sense of humor.
At the beginning of each school year one of the newcomers would inevitably ask to use the bathroom.
Estes would say, “No.”
To which the freshman would usually reply, “Why not?”
“Because I don’t like you,” Estes would say, and then just as quickly walk away without saying anymore.
Seniors loved to play along.
“Don’t ask him that,” they would say.
Truth is, they all loved him for his sense of humor – even the freshmen, once they were in on the joke. But it wasn’t only his jokes that made his students appreciate Estes; it was that he entrusted them with hands-on responsibility.
In fact, Estes was so popular that when students were excused from other classes during state and national testing they would find their way to his shop class. He once sent out an infamous email to other teachers that read: “Please don’t send your kids to my class unless you have a signed note from me. You know I hate kids.”
It became known as the email.
To this day, folks still jokingly ask him, “Do you still hate kids?”
When he retired, fellow teachers and administrators hung a banner in the backroom of O’Charlie’s that read: Do you still hate kids?
For those who might have missed the joke, Estes loves kids and teachers.
That’s precisely why the retired educator decided to pursue becoming a School Board member.
“We have a great school system,” said Estes, who recently attended his 50th class reunion, “I’ve seen it evolve over my lifetime.”
When Tim Tackett, a longtime principal at Oakland and current athletics director for Rutherford County Schools, announced he would not seek re-election to the school board, Estes decided to run for Tackett’s soon-to-be vacant seat.
“Teachers need a voice on the board,” Estes said. “Now they don’t need seven voices, but they do need one or two.”
Estes won the election and was later joined by another former teacher, Jeff Jordan, who is currently the chairman of the Board.
Some residents might be surprised by the time commitment outside of the boardroom. Estes and other members are invited to schools and also visit schools on their own as well as reading up on issues and communicating with constituents from their respective zones.
“Really and truly,” Estes said, “that’s the best part about it.”
Well, that and memorable experiences like the art show at Brown’s Chapel Elementary School. Last spring, Estes was impressed with the drawings, paintings, clay sculptures and other projects on display in the library.
He recalled students from David Youree Elementary performing at a board meeting.
“It just amazes me the talent in this county in the kids,” Estes said. “I hope they keep it up for all their life.
“I think (Aaron) Holladay did a good job of asking for our new arts director. I understand we have to learn math, science and English – we have to do that – but the arts are something we need to think about too.”
He wasn’t joking.
Estes said arts programs create a fun environment and one that students want to be part of.
Sports keep kids in school too.
“Career and Technical Education has been so strong,” added Estes, who is still playing to win, “and (look) what it’s done for the school graduation rates.”
PHOTO CREDIT: James Evans