FAIRBORN — A beloved football and track coach is leaving his legacy on and off to former players. Roy Thobe’s funeral was this week.
News Center 7′s Malik Patterson went to Greene County to talk to three student athletes and coaches who remembers Thobe.
He started his coaching career at Fairborn schools in 2022, coaching till 2017 made him the longest tenured coach in the school’s history.
Making everyone feel wanted and needed was one way Thobe will be remembered.
“My brother never played football. He wasn’t associated with the football team. He would run home from school and say Coach Thobe stopped me in the hallway. Coach Thobe knows my name,” said Fairborn alumni Lee Skinner.
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Skinner played for Thobe in 2010. He said the way coach Thobe carried himself was a daily reminder of what an upstanding man looks like.
“You didn’t have to be in Coach Thobe’s math class, you didn’t have to be on the football field to be influenced by him or pick up on that contagious energy and that’s what I’ll carry with me. More than anything he was a phenomenal mentor, coach, and guider,” Skinner said.
Thobe also wanted to pull the best out of everyone he met, and his former players and coaches called him “Coach Thobes Project.”
“Coach Thobe actually persuaded me to go to college, which was a pretty hard argument. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was the first person to go to college in my family, Coach Thobe changed my life,” Fairborn alumni Matt Cline said.
Cline had the privilege of coaching with Thobe after high school. Out of all the coach’s sayings these two sayings stuck with him.
“Leave it better than you found it. Sit in the first row in all college classes because statistically the first row is a grade higher than the last row,” Cline said.
Thobe stopped coaching in 2017 due to health reasons but even after dealing with personal issues, he still made time to stay in contact with former players.
“He always made an effort to reach out to past alumni and it’s so impressive because of the mass amount of people he coached,” Brandon Easterling said. He points to Thobe’s passion for people that will last forever with him.
“I just texted one of my former coaches the other day. I just let him know that for that coaching staff, I would’ve run through a brick wall for all of them but especially Thobe,” Easterling said.
Fairborn High School has started selling Thobe shirts. The coaches and players will wear them next Friday with half the proceeds going to the family.