Transitions -- even the most successful of them -- can often be bumpy. When Jerry Moore arrived in Boone in the spring of 1989 to coach Appalachian State's football team, he knew predecessor Sparky Woods had been popular. But this popular? Before Moore coached his first game later that year, 52 players had either quit the team or transferred to South Carolina, where Woods had just taken over. "There was a lot of stress," said Moore, whose Mountaineers play Northern Iowa for the NCAA Division I-AA title Friday in Chattanooga, Tenn. "It was a revolving door." Moore was unknown in Boone. He was a lifelong Midwesterner who had been a head coach at North Texas and Texas Tech, and an assistant at Southern Methodist, Arkansas and Nebraska. Woods had left town a hot coaching prospect after leading the Mountaineers to two Southern Conference championships in five seasons. Woods' departure for Columbia was a shock to the Mountaineers' system, and Moore paid the immediate price when faced with a massive players exodus. "All those guys probably felt a little jilted," Moore said. "Nobody who had recruited them was still around. We didn't know them by name. I think a lot of those kids said, `We ought to go to South Carolina, too.' But they didn't need all those guys. "I bet 90 percent of those guys have called me (since then) and said, `Coach, that was the biggest mistake I've ever made.' " Moore quickly went to work, but losing all those players and a lack of sufficient football facilities at Appalachian gave him pause about his new job. "Probably deep down, when I first got here, I didn't think I'd be here very long," said Moore, who has gone on to be the Southern Conference's all-time winningest coach. "The coaches' locker room was like a closet. We had no meeting rooms." But the school was in the process of upgrading its field house into one of the finest in the country. The Mountaineers were 9-3 in Moore's first season of 1989, the program never missed a beat and today is one victory away from the school's first national championship. "This is a difficult business," said Wofford coach Mike Ayers, a close friend of Moore's. "To have him still there after all these years shows that if you have a guy who's willing to work -- and he's given a chance and some time -- that most of the time things can develop into something that will work." So Moore is now a Boone institution. His Texas folksiness plays well in the High Country and with his players. Moore also understands the hold Appalachian football has on the region -- at least until it collides with similar passions in Cullowhee, and especially during this week of the biggest game in school history. He was touched when a group of preschoolers came to the football office this week with a good-luck banner they wanted to hang in the locker room. An impromptu, Munchkin-sized pep rally broke out. "Whether you're getting gas in your car, or if you're at the grocery store, everybody's talking about this," Moore said. "If you live anywhere around here -- even 100 miles from here -- you adopt this school. You can raise Christmas trees here and live in Florida. This is still your school."