Retiring from coaching was not an easy decision for Temple High School volleyball and girls basketball coach Donna Johnson, who will remain on as a teacher.

But a few weeks after basketball season, she decided to move on from coaching, in part to have more time to see her son, Matt Johnson, play baseball and daughter, Christina Johnson, play volleyball, both at Shorter College in Rome.

“I’m wanting to devote some of my time to them because they’re not going to be in college many years,” she said. “And I want to be able to give some time to them because I don’t want my heart to be divided into two different places.”

And after a long career of coaching basketball, as well as volleyball, softball, tennis and track and field along the way, she sensed it was the right decision.

“I feel like it’s just time,” Donna Johnson said. “After coaching for 27 years, you know, you do something for so long, there comes a time when you just know it’s the time.”

With her retirement from coaching, the school will see the consummate Tiger fade from the spotlight after 23 years of coaching at Temple, which followed her basketball and discus state championships as a senior at the school in 1978.

Boys basketball coach Steve Robinson, who is entering his 10th year at Temple, said it won’t be the same without Donna Johnson on the sidelines.

“Since I got to Temple, you know, she’s always been like the mentor and the guide, the rock of the high school,” Robinson said.

Tim Gribben, who is taking over as girls basketball coach, also wonders what it will be like when fall practice starts.

“It’s going to be interesting when that ball starts bouncing in October, you know, not having her in the gym,” Gribben said. “And I’m sure she’ll stay around in some capacity doing something.”

For Robinson, one of the most impressive things was that Donna Johnson ultimately came back to the Tigers after playing college basketball for two years at Berry College and for another two seasons at the University of Alabama.

“I respect her with everything I’ve got because I understand she’s seen big, she’s seen better,” Robinson said. “But she’s still willing to bring the teachings that she learned while she was away back to Temple, Georgia, and to relay that to some kid who wanted the help or needed the help.”

When she got out of college, Johnson was a girls basketball assistant at Carrollton for a year and then head coach for three seasons before returning to her alma mater, where she coached the seventh and eighth-grade team for two years before serving as varsity head coach for the past 21 seasons.

In all her years at Temple, her husband, Michael Johnson, has served as her assistant.

It’s been a meaningful experience for both of them, in spite of how some people through the years have wondered how a husband and wife could work well together in coaching.

“Really, our interests are so similar,” Michael Johnson said. “And I think our personalities complement each other so that it’s been a very workable arrangement and very enjoyable.”

Even when Donna Johnson went away to college and was coaching at Carrollton, she was always hoping to get back to what was home to her. That was Temple, where she started playing basketball as a sixth-grader.

“It’s something that I always had a desire to do, to come back to Temple and continue what I had started as a sixth-grader because I’m black and gold through and through from the time I started to the time I’ve ended,” Donna Johnson said. “But I’ve been a Tiger for a long time, and I live in this community and graduated from here. So it’s just something that’s easy to do, to support the Temple Tigers.”

And the way her husband saw it, her goal of getting back to Temple was always about more than a ball and a hoop.

“It’s always been a labor of love, anyway,” Michael Johnson said. “It’s more than just a job. It’s life.”

It was also about being near family and being able to get help from relatives in raising the children while coaching.

“They have been there from Day One helping to raise my two kids,” Donna Johnson said. “And I couldn’t have done it without them.”

One of the biggest things she saw when she played college ball was the way her coaches cared. To this day, it is something she has made a focus, as well.

“You care about your kids. If you don’t care about the kids, then you don’t need to be coaching because the bottom line is basketball is just a part of life,” Donna Johnson said. “And if you make it all of your life, then you’re going to leave out the most important component of the game, and that’s the player.”

Robinson said Donna Johnson is “dynamite,” the kind of coach whose passion and ability to instruct made her successful.

“You’re not going to find anybody to match her intensity level, you know, just on any level. She’s a firecracker. She goes hard, and she always teaches,” Robinson said. “So I think her ability to teach even when others of us are not thinking rationally, her ability to teach really I think helped a lot of people listen to her. (When) things were going hectic, she was always that calm voice.”

He also noted that Donna Johnson has been a great model of loyalty to her school.

“She really exemplifies what it means to have Temple pride, you know, and bleed black and gold,” Robinson said.

That goes back to her earliest days at the school, when she was part of an “Iron Five” that played most of the minutes on the 1978 state basketball championship team that had only nine players.

She nearly claimed another state title when she coached the school’s state runner-up softball team in 1998.

“I’ve had a lot of successes here. As a coach, as well as a player,” Donna Johnson said. “And it’s something that you treasure in your memories.”

Her pride in her work and her school continued to show even through her final school year of coaching, when she coached the volleyball team to a 34-8-1 mark this past fall, by far the most wins in the program’s seven-year history.

“All that hard work and the dedication that those girls put in paid off. And it’s kind of like a storybook ending,” Donna Johnson said. “No, we didn’t win the state championship. But in my mind, you know, we won a lot. And these girls can remember that.”

While Donna Johnson has always strived for wins as a coach and looked to learn from failures so she could do better the next time, she has also put a premium on her student-athletes getting their diplomas.

“A lot of people want to leave out the academic side of it. I never did,” Donna Johnson said. “That was my top priority was that they walk that stage and graduate.”

It will be a change for her in the fall, not being in the huddle with the girls she has coached for so long. But she will not be disappearing from the school by any means.

“In all the years that I’ve coached, I’ve just tried to touch their lives,” Donna Johnson said. “And I’m going to continue to do that no matter what.”

Gribben, for one, is glad she will still be around to help him should he ever need any advice.

“It’s not like she’s leaving,” Gribben said. “She’s going to be here, so it’s going to be a valuable resource.”

Though she and her husband are sure to be making plenty of trips to Shorter College, Donna Johnson knows Temple will remain a big part of her life.

“We’re going to be going toward Rome a lot,” Donna Johnson said. “But I’m going to be here supporting these Tigers as much as I possibly can.”