David Payne
It’s nearing the time of year when racing season is about to wind down. It’s also not far from the time in which basketball season is about to fire up. For many, those two happenings have very little to do with one another. However, both have significant meaning for David Payne.
The Murphy, NC resident is the current leader in the Southern Nationals Bonus Series points standings. And at the same time, Payne serves as the head boys basketball coach for Murphy High School.
“I’ve been coaching at Murphy High School, this is my nineteenth year now, and this is my twelfth year as the varsity head coach,” Payne said during an interview with InsideDirtRacing.com. “We’ve done well in that we’ve won our league in about half the years that I’ve been coaching. We’ve been down for a few years here lately, but we’re looking to get back up this year.”
Like many kids, Payne grew up playing sports. At the same time, however, he was also drawn to Dirt Late Model racing.
“My dad was into racing so as a kid I stayed at the racetrack with him and laid under the car and tried to just watch what he was doing,” the driver of the No. 8 machine explained. “His influence and involvement just led me into it. In 1992, my senior year, I talked him into letting me hot lap a car he had there, as he was driving for someone else, then we just built on it from there.”
But after graduation from high school, Payne found himself very busy with other things. As a result, his time behind the wheel of a race car was somewhat limited for a few years. And to some degree, that’s still true today as his coaching responsibilities take often precedence over racing during certain times of the year.
“My first year of college, I went to what is now Southern Wesleyan University in central South Carolina, I played a year of baseball and a year of basketball and tried to race on the weekends when I wasn’t involved in that,” the driver stated. “But trying to play two sports was pretty time consuming. In the summer I didn’t have too much involvement with other sports so I was able to race for a couple of months. Since then, we just try to balance it. I’ve got camps that I have to go to and take my team to so I just don’t race on those weekends or I try to race close to home.”
Both racing and coaching basketball demand a great deal of passion and are very time consuming. So how does Payne manage both?
“Well, it’s that third shift when everybody else is usually laying down to go to bed, we get the kids done with their homework, my wife is great about taking care of them and allowing me to chase this,” Payne said. “They’ll go to bed a lot of times and I’ll go to the shop and work a couple of hours so it’s usually twelve or one o’clock before I wind down to get a few hours of sleep each night.”
Aside from his coaching duties, Payne teaches physical education at an elementary school, a high school, and a college prep school.
“Once basketball starts, I have to really back off and don’t really do any racing,” he explained. “We typically do the Gobbler at Cleveland then that wraps us up. But when you get to the games and the film sessions and stuff, you don’t have enough time for racing other than getting things lined up with sponsors.”
With now only three races remaining on the Southern Nationals Bonus Series, Payne holds the lead in the standings. But there is one thing he would very much like to accomplish before the end of the 2015 campaign.
“We’ve been fortunate. We’ve ran well, but not exceptionally well. We’ve been to all the races and been able to maintain and finish. We’ve had some bum luck where we felt like we might have got a win, but we’re still looking for that first win. We’ve got four more opportunities counting tonight.”
