'This is where my heart is.' Buchholz honors the coach who helped the school lift off
Gunnar Paulson has been on a long and winding educational journey the past half-century. A couple of days ago, he returned to where it all began.
Buchholz High School, surrounded by friends, admirers and cast iron weights.
“I’m home,” Paulson said.
The school didn’t even exist when he was hired as an assistant football coach 53 years ago. Buchholz eventually became a power in a lot of sports, and Paulson’s fingerprints were on a lot of the success.
As of this week, future generations of students will be reminded of that. Buchholz named its weight room after Paulson at a ceremony Wednesday afternoon. His name was already familiar to countless people around Gainesville.
He was known as Gunnar when he played football at Florida. He was Coach Paulson when he coached at Buchholz, Mr. Paulson when he taught math.
He was Dr. Paulson as head of the teachers’ union, and as he served on the county school board.
What was his favorite job?
“There’s nothing better than being a teacher,” Paulson said. “There’s nothing better than being a coach and having an impact on young people.”
A lot of those people aren’t so young anymore. They showed up Wednesday to share memories, like when the weightlifting team had an impromptu competition one afternoon.
Their coach couldn’t resist jumping in and winning with a 400-pound lift. That competitive edge is what helped Paulson survive as a 210-pound defensive lineman at UF in the late 1960s.
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Alachua County was building two new high schools, Buchholz and Eastside, and Heard had been hired as Buchholz’s football coach. He’d been scouting the town for help, and Paulson caught his eye.
“I needed a youngster with some bright ideas,” Heard said.
Paulson had plenty of those, including a weightlifting program. What seems so elemental now was innovative in 1970.
The hitch was Buchholz didn’t even have a main office yet, much less a weight room. Construction delays forced students to be based out of Westwood Junior High. The football team operated out of two trailers out back.
When Buchholz finally opened, the weight room consisted of one set of barbells and a homemade bench. From that sprang a cast iron dynasty.
Paulson was named weightlifting coach and the Bobcats won four straight state championships. He also coached football and junior varsity baseball. He made it back to UF as an assistant, then went to Mosley High in Panama City and helped that team win two unbeaten seasons.
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Paulson got a doctorate in educational leadership from UF and was inducted into the College of Health and Human Performance’s Hall of Fame in 2013. Figuratively speaking, he probably did his heaviest lifting after leaving the school system.
He was head of president of the Alachua County Education Association from 1998-2010. Paulson then served on the School Board of Alachua County. He retired last year at the end of his third term.
“You talk about fighting like a dog. I tell you what, there hasn’t been anybody who fought harder for teachers and for employees in our district,” said Karen McCann, a former head of the teachers’ union. “His influence goes way beyond the weight room and the football field.”
But that’s where Paulson felt most at home. The proof is now hanging on a sign above a room in the Buchholz gymnasium. It reads:
Gunnar F. Paulson Weight Room.
“This is where my heart is,” he said. “To come back here and have this honor bestowed upon me, I couldn’t ask for anything better.”
David Whitley is The Gainesville Sun's sports columnist. Contact him at dwhitley@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter @DavidEWhitley
This article originally appeared on The Gainesville Sun: Buchholz honors ex-coach Gunnar Paulson
