Why Concord Christian football wants Steve Matthews to mold team, and Knoxville Catholic's response

Concord Christian wants its football program to be exceptional. 

That fact it has not fielded a varsity football team since 2018 has no bearing on the program’s aspirations.

“We believe we can build a premier football program in the state of Tennessee,” Concord Christian athletic director Daniel Head told Knox News. 

Its biggest step toward achieving that goal was hiring Steve Matthews as its coach on Monday. He served as co-interim coach of Knoxville Catholic for one season and coached Catholic from 2013-20.

“I had an amazing nine seasons at Knoxville Catholic, really, really just respect the people immensely over there and love everything about the place,” Matthews told Knox News. “But you know, kind of looking into the Concord Christian situation and being able to build a program from basically the ground up was something that was very attractive to me. Got to learn about the school over there and all the things that it provides and decided this was the best move ultimately for me and my family.”

Head said Concord Christian will have varsity football in 2025; Matthews will coach the junior varsity team in the 2024 season, and the varsity team after that.   

Why Concord Christian and Steve Matthews were a match

Head said they are aware its football program is essentially a “start-up.” To lay the foundation, it wanted a coach with experience building a winning program and a commitment to development. He said Matthews' “track record speaks for itself.”

Matthews was 81-33 overall at Catholic, including state championships in 2015 and 2017. This season, he and Philip Shadowens led the Irish (7-6) to the Division II-AAA semifinals. their best season since joining the division in 2019.

Catholic was 3-7 in 2022 and lost in the first round of the playoffs. 

“All around, he has a standard of excellence that we found really attractive here at Concord because that's what we strive for on a daily basis too, both in the classroom and then on the athletic fields,” Head said.

Concord Christian dropped its varsity team so it could focus solely on its middle school program after going 0-29 in its first three seasons. The Lions' middle school team was coached by Brandon Barber last year, and the junior varsity team, which had its first season this fall, was led by coach Jay Graham, a former Tennessee Vols running back. 

Graham left Concord Christian last week to become the tight ends and special teams coach at East Tennessee State. The middle school team finished the year 1-7. 

Matthews said he was contacted by multiple schools following Catholic’s run in the playoffs. What lured him to Concord Christian was the challenge of “putting his fingerprints” on a program that is in its infancy of what he thinks can be greatness. 

“Obviously (there's) going to be a lot of challenges ahead, but I thought this would be a great situation for me to kind of go through the next step in my career,” he said. “Hopefully help build a program that everyone can be proud of and make it one of the top spots in the state of Tennessee.”

“We're going to provide him all the support and resources that he needs to be able to do exactly that,” Head said. “So that's really the plan moving forward and he thinks he can do that pretty quickly.”

Knoxville Catholic's coaching situation

Jason Surlas, Catholic’s athletic director, said he wishes Matthews the best. Matthews communicated with Catholic that other schools had reached out; nonetheless, it is a change that Catholic is still "processing." 

Matthews, who was hired Feb. 6 to be Catholic's offensive coordinator, became the co-interim head coach with Shadowens after Dean Cokinos resigned before the start of the season on July 10.

The school was pleased with the success of 2023, and Surlas said he told the players Monday that this year’s coaching staff was the best he has seen since he started being involved in 2000. 

Before Matthews left, there was a thought of him and Shadowens returning together as coaches. 

“We talked kind of informally about keeping things the same but we really had not gotten to that point, so this was kind of a surprising announcement," Surlas said. "Coach Matthews . . . kind of informed us last evening what he was going to do.”

Matthews’ first stint at Catholic ended with his resignation in 2021, a day after he was arrested on drunken driving and drug possession charges. The drug possession charge was dismissed and he pleaded to a lesser charge of reckless endangerment on the DUI, according to online court documents.

A day after Matthews' departure, Surlas and Catholic's president Dickie Sompayrac decided to move forward with Shadowens as its lone head coach.

Toyloy Brown III is a Knox News sports reporter. Email toyloy.brown@knoxnews.com. On X, formerly Twitter, @TJ3rd_.