Tim Conley steps down as head coach of Southfield A&T
SOUTHFIELD >> Tim Conley quietly stepped down from his job as head football coach of the Southfield A&T Warriors earlier this month, leaving behind a prestigious legacy of getting his players to the next level.
In 16 years as a head coach in the school district, Conley won five district titles and advanced two of his clubs into Division 2 final fours. He ran the program at Southfield High School from 2005 until 2015 and then oversaw the school merger and took over the A&T team (combining the programs at Southfield and city-rival Southfield-Lathrup) in 2016, leading the Warriors to a Division 1 district championship.
Most impressively, Conley has sent 99 players to the Division I and Division I-AA ranks in his head-coaching tenure. If you count Division II, Division III and the NAIA, Conley’s teams have produced 166 college players. Under his stewardship, both Southfield and A&T became can’t miss stop-ins for college coaches and scouts descending on Metro Detroit to do their recruiting rounds.
Nine of Conley’s former players went on to play in either the NFL, CFL or in the Arena Football League. Chukwuma Okafor (Western Michigan) currently starts on the offensive line for the Pittsburgh Steelers. The others include, Malik McDowell, Charles Harris, Leviticus Payne, Ron Thompson, Dominique Barnes, Collin Buchanan, Derek Summers and Vernon Burden).
Conley spreads the credit around.
“You know, it really takes a village to get to that kind of number (166 college players), it wasn’t just me,” he said. “The support system I had was just fantastic. There were a lot of different forces joining together and pushing to get those players to college. Seeing a good deal of them really flourish as football players and as men in the community after leaving Southfield is incredibly rewarding and what I’m most proud of.”
The Southfield and A&T teams Conley coached were not only known for being Blue-Chip brigades, but for also being squads with high character and academ
ics.
“We focused on developing the complete student athlete, we made sure we had the highest football team GPA in our school district’s history,” he said. “Then, all of sudden, 10 or more kids are getting their college tuition paid for every year and you begin to see there’s a correlation there between football and hitting the books.
College coaches knew the kind of kid they were getting when they were kids coming from us. I wanted to make sure the players knew how important it is to work hard, compete, hone your craft on and off the field, makes your self a multi-threat in life and sports. Those are the lessons I most wanted to impress upon them.”
Conley played at Troy High School in the 1980s and wrestled in college at Michigan State. He was an assistant on Troy’s 1994 state championship team.
While in Southfield, Conley coached and taught in a number of different capacities, even serving as Southfield High School’s athletic director for three years.
“The camaraderie, the relationships, the memories began building at Troy in the 1990s and they never stopped,” he said.
He knows what he did on the job in Southfield wasn’t done every day.
“You saw it grow and that’s what’s most gratifying,” he said. “When I got there in the mid 2000s, the program was sending five, six players to colleges at some level every season and we got it to 10 pretty quickly. Then it was at 15, 16, 17, 18. Then it was over 20,” he said. “Our best year, we had 24 kids get to go play at the next level. Those kind of opportunities are life changing. I know, that’s not just going to go away because I’m not on the sidelines anymore. The foundation is there. Someone will step up and carry the torch and I’ll wish them nothing but success.”