Playing for Overtime: The David Lee Herbert Story

by Al Ainsworth, Rick Cleveland (Foreword)

He was handed a terminal diagnosis. In what could have been his final game, he made a call that reflected the resiliency of his life...

Tishomingo County, Mississippi, 1985. David Lee Herbert was passionate about coaching high-school football. But one night driving the team bus home from a game, he came upon an accident that had claimed the life of his daughter. Two years later, the devoted Christian was diagnosed with ALS.

Despite his personal death sentence, Coach Herbert and his wife clung to faith and persevered when others might've thrown in the towel. And he achieved the legendary status in his final season, famously calling an improvised play with seven seconds left that delivered a miraculous playoff win.

In Playing for Overtime, author and sportscaster Al Ainsworth documents the remarkable dedication of an ordinary man overcoming extraordinary odds. Showing much more of the coach than his well-publicized gameplay, Ainsworth reveals an inspirational account of the incredible impact a single person can have.

Be moved to tears and laughter in this tender and profound run to the end zone.

Playing for Overtime: The David Lee Herbert Story is a captivating sports biography. If you like real-life challenges, heroic achievements, and moving stories, then you'll love Al Ainsworth's tale of football, family, and faith.

Buy Playing for Overtime: The David Lee Herbert Story to triumph over tragedy today!

314 pages, Hardcover

Published August 10, 2019

About the author

My stories center around three values: family, story, and legacy. Written in various genres, my clean and inspiring stories land in the following genres:

Chrisitan Fiction (under pen name A. Ainsworth):
Lonesome, Party of Six
Lonesome Reunion
Two of a Kind: Working on an Empty House
Twenty Years Gone: Lonesome in the Heart of Texas
Broken Pane
Everybody Else's Wedding

Inheritance Wasted: The Prodigal
Heritage Restored: The Father
Legacy Scorned: The Older Brother

Biography:
Playing for Overtime: The David Lee Herbert Story

Memoir:
Lines in the Gravel
Stories from the Roller Coaster

Sports Fiction (for youth baseball players, parents, and coaches):
Coach Dave Season 1
Coach Dave Season 2: All-Stars
Coach Dave Season 3: Middle School
Coach Dave Season 4: Travel Ball
Coach Dave Season 5: The Next Level

Thanks for reading!

Reviews

[Michael Lacey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Redefining What it Means to Win as a Coach!

Ainsworth has done an incredible job with this book. Not only is his research on point, but he is a true sports fan, one who knows the game he is writing about. That brings an authenticity that is rare in such biographical accounts.
On top of that, the man—David Lee Herbert—was clearly a man of great character amid a turbulent southern climate. In one of the most segregated times of Mississippi history, Ainsworth cites that David Lee Herbert “treated all people with the same respect, regardless of color or ability.”
The stories from DHL’s family and friends really put you into that time and place, as early as the forties and fifties. It’s a fascinating portal to another time with its own challenges, heartaches, and triumphs, even redefining what it means to be a winner as a coach.

[Linda Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a story that warms the soul. Family. Faith. Trials. Tribulation. It’s real life done well. Maybe not perfectly, but certainly admirably. Playing for Overtime is comfort food for the soul!

[Lisa Bonner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing testament

What an amazing story of my junior high basketball coach!! His family and their love of God is absolutely beautiful!!

[Susie James · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Playing for Overtime: The David Lee Herbert Story" by Al Ainsworth is a somewhat integrated telling of high school athletics as they change through the decades in which the late David Lee Herbert and men and women like him lived, mainly in the small towns of the Southern United States. It's a story too of the challenges of whites and blacks as integrated schools -- and teams -- evolve. Of course, the key player in this story is the late David Lee Herbert, who not only lived as long and as well as he could, physically and spiritually boosted by his wife, the late Linda Staten Herbert, as they reared their children and coped with Coach Herbert's Lou Gehrig's Disease. I have known members of the Herbert and Staten families for most of my own life, though I didn't meet Coach Herbert until after his family returned to the Carrollton, Miss., community well after his diagnosis and after that famous "playing for overtime" football event in Tishomingo County, Miss. He had followed another tough football coach and school administrator, Coach Tackett, an ex-Marine, into public school system after teaching for some time in private schools. As Ainsworth shares the hardships that were peculiar to Coach Herbert's life before the onset of Lou Gehrig's, the heartstrings are plucked most unmercifully. Rightly so. This is a book worth reading, for sure, not only for the humanity it holds but also for Ainsworth's working in the changes in high school athletics in his home state of Mississippi, in which Herbert and his generation figure. The losses and the wins -- but the power over all is that of God.