Phil Ziglar, an Orlando-area high school football coaching fixture for nearly three decades, died Wednesday night from health issues that led to multiple organ failure. He fell ill and was hospitalized three weeks ago at Halifax Health in Daytona Beach, a short distance from his home in Port Orange, where he lived with his wife Catherine.
He is also survived by his son Heath and daughter Stephanie.
Ziglar, who was 74, played football at Boone High and then coached for the Braves for 23 years, before retiring from Orange County Public Schools in 2012. He then took the same position at Hagerty High, where he coached for six more seasons, retiring after the 2018 season.
“This is the worst. It makes no sense in many ways to me,” Heath Ziglar said. Heath is a full-time caddie on the LPGA tour, currently on the bag of Briana Chacon. “Because I’m on the tour and I’m on the road, so like hearing how quickly the deterioration of his health was, it still hasn’t really sunk in for me.
“If it gets any worse than it feels right now it would be the worst kind of devastating.”
Hagerty football coach Phil Ziglar to retire after 43 years on sideline
Stephanie Ziglar, an executive director at Orlando Mainstreet who is running for Orange County District 3 commissioner, said she has been more of the messenger for all of Ziglar’s former players and coaches and friends throughout the community and beyond.
“It’s been enormously challenging as he has been ill. And to have to tell decades of players and decades of coaches and teachers and staff and friends he grew up with who are now our personal friends that he has passed,” she said. “It’s gonna be something that we have to live with. And it’s been really a struggle for me.”
Ziglar was an Orlando coaching icon, earning high respect from not only all of the coaches and players he mentored, but also those he coached against.
Photos: Phil Ziglar, Through the Years
“It’s not a good day. It’s a tough loss, man,” said Jimmy Buckridge, longtime friend and former coaching assistant to Ziglar at Boone, and coaching opponent at Timber Creek. “I just talked to him three weeks ago and we were talking about going fishing. … then he took a turn for the worse. He was such a good dude. He’d give you the shirt off his back.”
For Heath and Stephanie, it was always football in the Ziglar household.
“Being the daughter of a football coach is not easy. A lot of football analogies are used in your life and I would frequently hear him say, ‘My daughter can hit harder than you,’ and things like that,” Stephanie laughed. “I recently filed to run for county commissioner, and I called him first. I told him I was worried about it. I didn’t know if it was a good idea.
“He said, ‘Of course it’s a good idea. All you need to do is get in that three-point stance, drive those feet and you need to push and there won’t be anyone you can’t block.’ I laugh about it, but it’s sort of the philosophy that he’s taught me my whole life. He was really able to apply the game to life every single day. I’m grateful for those lessons.”
Even in the hospital, Ziglar remained his old self in his decline.
“He had some dietary restrictions but he was not hesitant to reach out to me to ask me to smuggle him some diet Pepsis or a Frosty. He was his feisty self,” Stephanie said. “The decline happened so quickly. We were chatting on the phone, me my brother and him … and it’s honestly shocking. He was always smiling at the nurses and always conversing.”
Making people aware that he was ill was not the Phil Ziglar way.
“He didn’t like people to know that he was struggling,” Stephanie said. “A couple of coaches came to visit him yesterday, and they asked him how he was doing. He wasn’t speaking much, but his response was, ‘I’m good.’ That’s just how he was.”
“A lot of people didn’t know about it [the illness], and I think that was kind of by design,” Heath said. “He’s always worried about everyone else. He was like, ‘Don’t worry about me.’ If anyone worries about him, that’s not a comfort area for our father.”
Ziglar played at Maryville College in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he was a two-time All-American. He later played for the Calgary Stampeders in the Canadian Football League.
Always positive and always looking at the bright side of things, Ziglar had a way of motivating people.
His crowning achievement was probably the 2007 season when he guided a 14-0 Boone squad into the state championship game, where the Braves got blown out by a Miami Northwestern juggernaut 41-0.
Ziglar, however, would not likely categorize reaching the state final as his best moment. He was all about the players and teaching. It wasn’t just football but it was about moving teenagers into adulthood.
Boone football fixture Phil Ziglar doesn’t want to let go
When he retired from Boone in 2012, Ziglar said: “If you base your coaching on wins and losses you’ve missed the boat. You’re only doing 15% of what it’s all about. The important thing is what the kids do after they leave me.”
After going 139-112 in 23 seasons at Boone, Ziglar took over at Hagerty, which went 2-8 the year before he arrived.
“Dad had like five schools he could choose from. He just had to be outside Orange County (due to his Deferred Retirement Option Program). Everybody wanted him,” Heath said. “But he wanted to pick a place where he could validate himself. So he was like, ‘What would be the biggest impact? What’s the wow factor?’ ”
After going 3-7 in Ziglar’s first season on the job, the Huskies started winning. He was 37-26 in six seasons — including a 9-2 season in 2016 that still stands as Hagerty’s most wins in a season.
The next-to-last game in his 2018 final season with the Huskies was among his favorite games.
Hagerty was facing an unbeaten Edgewater team and the way Ziglar saw it, everything was set up perfectly. Having played and coached at Boone, Ziglar had built up a great for Edgewater. With the district title on the line, this was his chance to go out with a bang.
“When he had to leave Boone because of the fine print or whatever, I knew whatever program got him was going to get the biggest fire under him,” Heath said. “So to get to beat an undefeated Edgewater, which was his all-time rivalry at Boone, was so ironic.
“Not only did he get validation (as a coach) but he also got revenge against a team he always had to chase. He just did it with a different colored shirt on.”
ZIGLAR RETURNS TO BOONE AS FOOTBALL COACH
Ziglar was absolutely thrilled and proud of his squad. No one gave the Huskies a chance against Edgewater, not even Heath, who was working for ESPN radio at the time and picked Edgewater to win.
“Whenever I did that, he wouldn’t talk to me. He’d just give me a nod,” Heath said.
His father talked about what the victory meant.
“I was sitting in the parking lot thinking about it after it was over and just couldn’t believe how fulfilling it was, a win in a game like that, to end your career with a district championship,” Ziglar said of the Edgewater game.
But he couldn’t stay away. He still had that coaching itch. He always joked, “If I didn’t coach, my wife would probably divorce me from being around the house too much.”
Catherine was Ziglar’s second wife. His first wife, Carol, died after a bout with cancer in 1999.
In 2019, Buckridge was there to give Ziglar the same opportunity the old coach gave him. Ziglar joined Buckridge’s staff at Timber Creek. Ziglar was right back in his, what he called, “wheelhouse,” coaching the offensive line for the Wolves.
Ziglar used to spend a few weeks every summer coaching offensive line at FSU camps when his good buddy Rick Trickett was offensive line coach for the Seminoles.
Coach Phil Ziglar, at 64, still a breath of fresh air
“When he came back to coach with us, that was a blast,” said Buckridge, who resigned from Timber Creek last year. “Phil was buddies with everybody. He was such a good dude, and when you coached against him, you knew you were gonna get everything. You always respected him.
“Everybody who coached against him respected him. When you get out of the business, that’s what you want, and I don’t know one person who did not respect Phil Ziglar for the way he did it.”
Memorial and funeral arrangements have yet to be determined.
Chris Hays can be found on X.com @OS_ChrisHays.