Football coach turned insurance agent Philip Bailey recalls life lessons, loss, and how his faith helped him make the biggest decision of his career
To say that Philip Bailey was at a low point in his life in September 2022 would be a tremendous understatement.
Just a year earlier, Bailey, then the head football coach at Jasper High School in Jasper, Ala., had lost his mother in the middle of the season: “I buried my mother at 11 o’clock on Monday morning and I was at practice that afternoon—that’s how my mind was wired,” Bailey said.
Fast forward to 2022, when Bailey’s 6-year-old son, Wallace, spent 11 nights at Children’s Hospital of Alabama with an infection in his abdomen. On top of that, Bailey received the devastating news that his brother had died of a drug overdose.
“On a Saturday morning after the homecoming game when I was driving down to Children’s to see Wallace I got the call about my brother,” Bailey said. “That summer, I missed Wallace’s graduation from Mitchell’s Place.”
Mitchell’s Place is a school in Birmingham that specializes in improving the lives of kids with autism. Wallace, now 8, was diagnosed with level three nonverbal autism when he was only 3 years old. Needless to say, missing that important moment in Wallace’s life affected Bailey in no small way.
“Having those two losses of my mom and my brother during football, Wallace’s extended stay in the hospital, that really kind of shook my perspective on things on the time that we have in our lives and how we use that time,” Bailey said.
It was that realization that led him, now a father of three boys, to make the most important decision of his career: to transition from coaching to becoming an ALFA insurance agent. At the heart of that decision was his faith and the life lessons drilled into him by the men he respected most—his football coaches at Huntingdon College: Mike Turk, Charlie Goodyear, and Mike Rader.
Bailey, an Auburn native, played football and baseball through high school. As a kid, he grew up in a world largely without social media and cell phones.
“I remember a bunch of times being a kid, you would go find other kids in the neighborhood to play with, and you’d go build a fort or ride a bike,” Bailey recalled. “If you couldn’t find anybody to play with, you would just get a tennis ball and you played wall ball. I would play a whole baseball game in my head.”
Football was Bailey’s sport of choice, and at Huntingdon he joined the offensive line under head coach Turk. He played every position on the line; Goodyear served as his position coach, while Rader was the receiving coach.
“They taught me a lot about ball, and that provided me with a way to make a living for 14 years, but you know, they taught me how to be a man, and they taught me how to live,” said Bailey, “(Perseverance) is what so much of your training is geared toward; when things get difficult, are you going to be able to withstand that and continue to push forward? Responsibility to the people around you; that’s a big one. That’s one I’ve always carried with me, especially playing up front on the offensive line.”
Bailey coached college football for seven years, first at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro, Ga., where he earned his master’s degree in sports management, and later at Maryville College in Maryville, Tenn. This was followed by a one-year stint at Eufaula High School (AL), and finally, Jasper.
“I said that for a long time, that if I could ever do for anybody else what they (Turk, Goodyear and Rader) did for me, that I’d be doing pretty good,” Bailey said. “I loved it. I would not trade the memories and the relationships I had for anything.”
It was Bailey’s network at Huntingdon that led to him meeting his wife, Molly. Her brother was a trainer there but the two didn’t meet until after graduate school. Bailey and a couple of friends had gone to Birmingham to hang out with some guys (Molly’s brother being one of them) and she decided to tag along for a night of karaoke.
“Her watching me and my buddies perform ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’ and that was all she wrote,” Bailey grinned.
At their wedding, seven of Bailey’s nine groomsmen were college teammates. In 2025, the couple will celebrate their 13th wedding anniversary. Their three boys are Cooper, 12; Wallace, 8; and Beau, 2.
Of course, the Baileys’ journey with Wallace and autism has shaped their lives and challenged their faith in numerous ways.
“Early on with that (the diagnosis) I struggled a little bit, like why is my child different? Why does my child have to endure some of these things that none of the other kids do? And it didn’t take very long for the Holy Spirit to check me on a lot of that,” Bailey said. “Children are a gift from God, given to us for His glory, not ours. That will reshape your perspective.”
Among the things Wallace enjoys are Thomas the Tank Engine, swimming, his iPad and Coca-Cola.
“He loves a Coke,” Bailey said. “If you give him a Coke, you’ll be his best friend in the world.”
One of Bailey’s most important contacts in the world of autism support is David Martin, with whom he coached at Maryville. Martin’s son, Devin, has autism, and Martin played for the Miami Dolphins and was advised by the famous quarterback Dan Marino, who also had a son with autism. Marino and his wife started the Dan Marino Foundation in 1992.
“As a special needs parent, you have a certain type of connection that not everybody else understands,” Bailey said. “He’s been great, and that’s a very humbling thing for me.”
That key moment of missing Wallace’s graduation made Bailey take an inventory of what he was missing out on at home. While he loved coaching, he realized his kids needed a little more from him than they were getting.
“That equation didn’t balance for me anymore,” Bailey said. “When you experience loss in your life, and you have adversity and things of that nature, you figure out what really matters and what really (doesn’t).”
Josh Johnson, Molly’s first cousin who also had a background in coaching, had joined ALFA where he is currently a vice president. Bailey reached out to him, and Johnson explained what being an agent entailed. Bailey made the decision to leave coaching and joined ALFA in January 2023. He is now an agent in Birmingham.
“It just made far too much sense for me not to do it,” he said.
ALFA allows Bailey more freedom in his scheduling, and now he gets to drop off his boys at school in the morning or attend field trips to places like Oak Mountain State Park.
While much different from coaching, Bailey applies the same life lessons to insurance, meeting people at critical moments in their lives and when they are going through adversity.
“Whatever you do, it’s all the relationship business.If you can relate to people and love people and try to help them, then you can be successful in nearly anything,” Bailey said.
“It’s all people, every bit of it.” TG
Photos by Al Blanton
