MANSFIELD, Ohio — The walls of the nondescript second-story office overlooking Park Avenue are a muted baby blue, no doubt painted that color to put at ease the men and women who visit it.
Sunlight floods the room through the partially drawn shades, casting a glare on the picture frames hung from an interior wall. One of those frames is considerably larger than the others and hangs prominently beside the shelves mounted above the massive three-sided desk that dominates the room.
The matted photo illustration inside the black wooden frame features a group of smiling young men wearing their home white Mansfield Senior basketball uniforms, their arms draped over each other’s shoulders. In the bottom left corner of the photo is the giant Tyger mural that adorns Pete Henry Gym and in the bottom right is a photo of Effie James wearing a tan sweater vest that would make former Ohio State football coach Jim Tressel proud over a crisp white shirt and tie.
The snapshots stand as reminders of James’ former life.
“I would have been the head coach at Mansfield Senior High for 50 years. I would have stayed forever,” James says. “But I wouldn’t trade my path. I feel like God is directing me in certain ways.”
He may not be prowling the sidelines at Arlin Field or sitting on the bench at Pete Henry Gym any longer, but Effie James is still coaching. As a drug and alcohol counselor for Mansfield Urban Minority Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Outreach Program (UMADAOP), James is a life coach.
“The one thing that I have found is, as a former coach, I can deal with so many aspects of people. That is what you have to do as a coach,” James says. “You can meet people where they are. As a coach, if you aren’t able to do that you will be lost because you get kids who come from the best of situations and the worst of situations.
“That is the same thing we get here. The drug problem is not prejudiced. It goes after the well-off as well as the poor. That’s what comes through my door every day.”
A football and basketball standout, James graduated from Mansfield Senior in 1994. He earned a football scholarship to Bowling Green State University, but a back injury ended his career and he was back in Mansfield before his 20th birthday.
Not sure what direction his life would take, James returned to what he knew best. He joined Stan Jefferson’s football coaching staff and soon found himself on the bench with basketball coach Gregg Collins.
“I was 19 years old,” James says, “and I was learning from two of the best in the state.”
When Collins stepped down after the 2007-08 season, he openly campaigned for James to become his successor. James got the job in June of 2008 and in four seasons as head coach led the Tygers to two Ohio Cardinal Conference championships, four sectional titles and a pair of district runner-up finishes. He resigned in the spring of 2012 after learning his one-year supplemental coaching contract would not be renewed for the following season.
His career record was 69-21 and his .767 winning percentage ranks second behind only Collins (235-49, .827) in the modern era.
But wins and losses only told a fraction of the story.
“The thing that I hung my hat on was I wanted my kids to be well-rounded, productive people,” James says. “When people want to talk about my coaching record, I always point out that every kid that I coached as a varsity head coach graduated from high school. We didn’t lose one kid to academic ineligibility. That means more to me than my win-loss record.
“For some of those kids, education wasn’t high on the priority list. We would keep kids on the team who, under normal circumstances, we might not have kept. But I felt like those kids needed the team more than the team needed them. They ended up getting discipline and structure out of it and I still get phone calls from those kids and their parents and they are so grateful to get that one opportunity.”
Out of coaching for the first time in almost 20 years, James returned to school. He earned a degree in business administration from Mount Vernon Nazarene University, but it turns out James still had some coaching to do.
“I enjoy this line of work strictly because of the results you are able to affect in people’s lives. That has always been important to me,” James says. “It makes me proud when I see a client walk through the door and he is beaming because he has a week clean.”
According to a December 2015 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Ohio had the second highest number of drug overdose deaths nationwide in 2014. Statistics provided by the Ohio Department of Health show there were 31 accidental drug overdose deaths in Richland County in 2014.
James doesn’t need to read the reports to see the toll drug dependency has taken on his hometown.
“Unfortunately, our agency is doing well — and not just our agency. Any agency that is doing drug and alcohol treatment is seeing a lot of people come through the door,” James says. “The heroin epidemic has got ahold of this area and it’s sad.
“But it is encouraging to see a lot of people getting the help they need.”
James is happy to provide that help. His previous career as a coach has lent itself well to this new endeavor.
“When we coached kids, a lot of the things they learn during that period of their lives they take with them. Something we said sticks with them,” James says. “It is the same here when we counsel people. I would like to believe when they are faced with the choice whether to use or not, something that I have said or one of the other counselors has said sticks with them and that can help.
“It’s fulfilling to have success stories and we have a lot of them here.”
Of course, not every story has a happy ending.
“I believe everybody who comes in wants to break the cycle of addiction, but it’s not easy,” James says. “It’s probably the toughest thing they will ever do in their lives.
“In the groups that I facilitate, I tell every group — and a lot of them look at me funny — but I tell them that not using drugs is the easy part. The hard part of recovery is changing your lifestyle, which is necessary to gain complete sobriety. You can stop using for weeks or months or even years, but if you still live the same lifestyle and go to the same places and do the same things, it’s only a matter of time. Changing your life is what we talk about here more than anything. That is the core of who we are. We want to change lives.”
