Davie AD Buddy Lowery watches football practice. Photo Mike London.
Davie wrestling coaches: kneeling: Matt Wilson from South Davie, standing: Buddy Lowery from Davie High and Ron Kirk from North Davie. Photo by Wayne Hinshaw.
By Mike London
Salisbury Post
MOCKSVILLE — Riley Belt Lowery III, the North Rowan graduate who molded Davie County wrestling into a state-level powerhouse, died on Oct. 12.
Lowery, who grew up in East Spencer, was 73. Known to all as Buddy, he was the most iconic coach in Davie’s proud athletic history.
He was important to the school as a long-time AD and as a football assistant and coordinator, but he will be remembered for wrestling.
Lowery arrived at Davie in 1976 when the school was still competing in the Western North Carolina High School Activities Association. When he retired 43 years later in 2019, he owned a mind-boggling record of 913-136-2.
Davie moved up from 3A to 4A competition in the fall of 1985, at the same time that South Rowan did. War Eagle wrestling proceeded to go 177-7-1 in the Central Piedmont Conference over a 34-year period. There were 27 regular-season championships and 19 CPC Tournament championships — 46 conference titles.
All of Lowery’s coaching statistics look like misprints.
The concept of a playoff system and dual team state championships didn’t start in the NCHSAA until 1990. Had it happened earlier, Lowery may have won several more times at the state level. Davie won 4A dual team state titles in 1994 and 2006 and was runner-up in 1993, 1995, 1999, 2000, 2005 and 2008. Davie also earned a state title for scoring the most team points at the individual state championships in 1995.
The fortunes of Davie basketball. baseball and football ebbed and flowed as the years rolled by, but there were no down years for the wrestling program.
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Buddy’s father, Riley Belt Lowery Jr., attended school in East Spencer and was working at Rowan Creamery in Salisbury when World War II changed a lot of lives. Lowery entered the service as a military policeman, receiving special training at Fort Bragg, Miami and Indiana.
The child who would become known as Buddy was born in 1952. His mother was Almeda Love.
Lowery became an athletic phenom at North Rowan in the late 1960s, starring in football, wrestling and track and field.
Most high school teams didn’t throw the ball much. Lowery was one of the two All-Rowan County offensive ends in 1969, leading Cavalier receivers with a modest 18 catches for 235 yards and two touchdowns.
Lowery also did some good work at linebacker on defense. He served as a co-captain for a strong squad and made the All-North Piedmont Conference team.
Later in his senior year, Lowery reached the WNCHSAA semifinals in wrestling, finishing third. He was part of WNCHSAA championship teams in 1968 and 1969, wrestling for coach Ralph Shatterly.
Then Lowery broke the record for the discus in the 1970 Rowan County Track and Field Championships.
Lowery graduated from North Rowan in the spring of 1970. His next stop was Fork Union Military Academy. He headed to Fork Union, along with Davie County’s Allan Barger, the son of coach Burton Barger, who had coached North Rowan football and track before moving over to Davie.
Lowery was on the track team at FUMA, smashed the school discus record (165 feet) and played end on an undefeated football team.
Cadets Lowery and Barger graduated from FUMA in May 1971.
East Carolina University was next for Barger, and he joined the Pirates at a perfect time. He was 6-foot-1, 240 pounds, and he could run. He started three years (1972-74) at Ficklen Stadium for a ferocious defense that earned the nickname “The Wild Dogs.” He played defensive end for two years and moved to tackle as a senior. The 1972 and 1973 ECU teams, coached by Sonny Randle, went undefeated in the Southern Conference. The 1973 team went 9-2 – the losses were to NC State and UNC – and Lowery played the game of his life in the 1973 battle with Richmond that decided the league title. ECU fell off a bit in 1974, Pat Dye’s first year a head coach, but the Pirates still won seven games in Lowery’s final college season.
Lowery knew he wanted to go back close to home and coach, but even after so much success on the football field, he wanted to coach wrestling more than football. “Wrestling took the most energy and the most guts,” he always said.
Davie announced Lowery’s hire in the summer of 1976. After three relatively quiet years, the War Eagles started rolling in 1979-80 and never looked back. A train of wrestlers, well-schooled before they got to Davie by Ron Kirk and Matt Wilson, kept coming, and Davie fielded an elite team almost every year. Davie had a 72-match winning streak in the 1990s.
When you win as often as Lowery did, the rare defeats came in the major matches, regional finals, state championships, venues like that, but he showed everyone how to win or lose on the biggest stage with dignity and grace.
Lowery followed Bill Peeler as Davie’s AD in 1991, but taking on more duties and a major role in field maintenance and preparation never diminished his fire for wrestling.
The perpetual scowl rarely left Lowery’s face, but he was no curmudgeon. He had a finely tuned sense of humor, but he was a fierce competitor when the time came.
Coach Barry Justus, the closest thing Rowan County has to Lowery, had this to say on social media: “Every wrestling coach, when you start, you want to have a winning program. You want a program that does it the right way, a program that looks after its wrestlers, a program that looks beyond just high school. Well, Coach Lowery had that program at Davie County. I would stand behind him with a pad and pen and act like I was taking notes. He would just snicker. He was a great man, a great coach, a great person. He will be missed!”
Lowery coached 11 different state champions. Between them, those 11 men won 15 individual state titles.
There were well-deserved accolades along the way. Lowery was inducted into the Davie County High School Hall of Fame (2006), the North Carolina Chapter of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame (2009) and the Salisbury-Rowan Sports Hall of Fame (2012).
Lowery was married to Tara Lanning Lowery for 49 years. Their sons were athletes. Patrick, the oldest, was a tremendous linebacker at Davie and at NC State. Eric was a very good basketball player at Davie and continued to play at Pfeiffer.
A memorial service will be conducted at 4:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 18, in the old Davie County High School Gymnasium (now Davie County Recreation and Parks).
