Back in 1982, Smith County High School in Carthage, Tn., finished the football season 0-10.
It was the first year as a head coach for a young man who had returned to his high school alma mater as coach after six years as an assistant at Warren County High in McMinnville.
Despite that inauspicious start, though, he would enjoy an auspicious and even legendary career. In fact, he is now by far the winningest football coach in Tennessee high school history, with a 486-85 record and an .851 winning percentage.
And that includes his last two years at Boyd Buchanan, where he quickly turned around a once-proud program by reaching the playoffs both years, with a state championship game appearance in 2023 before losing to Christ Presbyterian Academy of Nashville.
The person, of course, is Gary Rankin, whose total number of wins puts him well ahead of the coach with the second most wins, the late Memphis area coach Ken Netherland, who had 368 wins. (The late former Central and Baylor coach E.B. “Red” Etter – who faced coach Netherland in the state championship game in 1973 when Baylor played Memphis Hillcrest -- is sixth with 324 total wins, the highest of any other Chattanooga area coach).
This is all not bad for a coach who did not win his first game until his second season.
“It’s pretty amazing and hard for me to believe,” said coach Rankin in a recent interview. “I have friends who are good coaches and never got the chance or just got there once. I’ve been fortunate to get there a lot of times.”
Despite all his success, though, many Chattanooga high school football fans are just now learning about coach Rankin. That is, even if they are at least somewhat familiar that Alcoa and Murfreesboro Riverdale, where he also formerly coached, have had outstanding programs over recent decades.
As coach Rankin sat in his office in the fieldhouse at Boyd Buchanan below the Brainerd Levee and across North Moore Road from the landmark First Cumberland Presbyterian Church one day last week, he seemed content and at ease in his hoodie. And that is not just because football has ended for this year, as he deliberately tries to relax and not overdo his work during the first two or three months of the new year, when only the pros are still playing football. His players are taking weight and physical training as part of a school class under other staff, and he seemed pleased with the strength of his team in other ways, too.
“We turned it around a little quicker than expected,” he said of his first two years, adding that he also has a good nucleus returning for next year. “We still have so many other things that are not solid, but for the average fan, Boyd is back.”
Surrounded in a windowless room but with quite the sports scenery of two dozen-plus state championship game football trophies -- which looked like a large collection secured more by a hobbyist than a successful coach -- coach Rankin was quite upbeat. He was as energetic in his tone as a 30-year-old and quite accommodating as he talked. While those might be traits appealing to Buccaneer fans and parents and the media, he also had a noticeable pair of eyes that could likely get the attention of a 16- or 17-year-old player as well.
Coach Rankin actually draws retirement now for his decades of public-school coaching and teaching, and he came to Boyd Buchanan almost like someone who is fully retired and for the same reason as others – to be near his family. His son, John Tucker “J.T.” Rankin, teaches strength and conditioning at Boyd Buchanan, although he does not work directly with the football team in game preparation and game day coaching, he said.
Another daughter, Addie Rankin, is also in the Chattanooga area, and a younger son, Zeke Rankin, has been a recent kicker for Middle Tennessee State University. Coach Rankin and his wife, Sandra, also have grandchildren.
So, it was family and football to which he also gives a family-like focus that brought him to the Chattanooga area. It was not the area mountains or the downtown Chattanooga offerings alongside the Tennessee River, as is the case with many other newcomers.
“It could have easily been Nashville,” he said, adding that he lives on a mountain in Marion County after finding out about the property while initially interviewing for the South Pittsburg coaching job. “I’ve got two grandkids here. You don’t just walk away from Alcoa football for another football job.
“We’ve enjoyed it. For the reasons I moved, it’s been wonderful,” he continued, adding that he has been able to spend more time with extended family in the last two years than in the previous 10. “More family time is the best. I haven’t been out a whole lot other than to the school.”
But in his overall career, he has gotten almost as good a view of large parts of Middle and East Tennessee as an elected official holding statewide office. It began as a youngster growing up in the Carthage area as a cousin of Carthage’s most famous family – the Al Gores. He even later got to once attend as an invited guest a Washington, D.C., event while the younger Al Gore was vice president.
He had earlier received another rare invitation as the first player from the formerly named Carthage High to attend the University of Tennessee on a scholarship in the early1970s. Listed as a sophomore defensive back in 1973 and wearing No. 20, he saw his career cut short by a knee injury, but he realized he was probably borderline talent of getting to play a lot for an SEC program, anyway, he said.
It would be the first disappointment in an overall playing and coaching career that did not all fall as perfectly into place as his win total might suggest.
He was at UT when Condredge Holloway was becoming the first black starting quarterback in the SEC and when Bill Battle was the head coach. He remembered that coach Battle was maybe a little too young and too nice to be successful long-term in the rugged SEC, and working with veteran assistant coaches much older maybe did not create the perfect chemistry for the staff.
While a student around the athletic department – who remembers seeing former Baylor School basketball coach Austin Clark make numerous long shots during UT basketball practice before the days of the three-point arc – he began planning a career. Like many others, he assumed as a youngster, or at least dreamed, that football would carry him to the NFL. But life did not turn out that way.
“I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do,” he said. “I got a health and PE degree. I enjoyed working with kids, but I was not sure if I wanted to coach.”
However, a fellow former Tennessee player, Steve Mitchell, the brother of former Miami Dolphins player Stan Mitchell, was a coach at Warren County High and told him about an opening there.
“I needed a job and a paycheck,” he said. “I stayed there six years.”
He not only got the coaching bug while there beginning in 1976, but also the love bug, as that was where he met his wife, Sandra.
After six years at Warren County High, he heard about an opening for a head coach at Smith County High in his former hometown. The program had fallen on hard times and had the longest losing streak in the state. Getting the itch to be a head coach and maybe wanting to be closer to his parents, who were getting older, he was one of only two people who applied.
He got the job and knew the daunting task, but unfortunately added 10 more games to the losing streak that first year. He said he remembered seeing a ranking of the more than 300 programs in the state, and Montgomery Bell Academy was first and Smith County was ranked next to last, just ahead of Sunbright. And he thought his team was ranked too high, he said with a laugh!
Amid that humbling start, though, he could foresee coaching being a No. 1 experience in terms of at least knowing it was the top vocation he wanted to do.
“It spring boarded me to where I am today,” he said of that first year. “I learned more about what to do than any other year I coached. But it was hard. I was humbled really quickly.”
After having been exposed to challenging strength and conditioning programs at UT, he focused on working the kids physically hard and getting them strong that first year, despite the disappointment on the field. And he could see the youngsters positively responding to his direction.
The next year, the team won the first game and went on to finish 8-3, which brought him and the school a lot of positive attention. He went on to enjoy success there and was enjoying being in the community of his youth, but after the 1989 season, he learned about an opening at Murfreesboro Riverdale. It was a large school in the growing Rutherford County area and which observers thought had some potential to improve its football stock. But initially looking into the job took some encouragement.
“The job didn’t even cross my mind,” he said. “A friend was coaching at Sparta and said I needed to apply. I sent my resume in. Somehow I ingratiated myself in the interview and got the job.”
After going 4-6 his first year, he went on to go 10-0 the second season. “We got it rolling,” he said. “We went 198-24. We had four state championships and were runner-up five times.” The championships occurred in 1994, 1997, 2001 and 2004, while the runner-up finishes came in 1993, 1995, 2000, 2002, and 2003.
At Alcoa, where he coached from 2006 to 2021, he would do even better, with state championships every year except for 2011, 2012, and 2014 – when his teams finished second. During a lot of those years, the only blemish was against larger Maryville High in what has been one of the biggest rivalry games in the greater Knoxville area every year.
Although Riverdale was one of the premier jobs in the state, Coach Rankin said he decided to move to Alcoa – another traditional power at a smaller level -- because of one or two mostly non-football factors, including that he was simply looking for a change.
“They had some administrative changes, and my own kids were getting into school,” he said. “I thought it was too big and I was wanting my kids in a smaller school. I looked around for the kind of school I had grown up in.”
Other than the fact that Riverdale played and still plays at a higher classification due to greater enrollment, the two schools were very similar, he added.
“It was just a scaled-down version,” he said of the Tornadoes, which were known for a unique and weather-like warning announcement over the loudspeaker before their games. “There were great athletes at Riverdale and great athletes at Alcoa. You might have 15 really good athletes at Riverdale and maybe eight at Alcoa. It was about the same socio-economic level at both. They were very similar.”
While at Alcoa, he would also regularly scrimmage local power McCallie and coach Ralph Potter, whom he also faced as the Riverdale coach in 1995 at Baylor in the regular season when coach Potter was beginning his career there.
When he left Alcoa, coach Rankin also had family reasons, as mentioned. He said he was not finished with coaching but was looking for a place closer to his children and perhaps with fewer non-football responsibilities.
He said he is enjoying being at Boyd Buchanan, a Christian school that is his first private school coaching venture in his long career.
While he said the parents and interacting with them might be a little different at a private school like Boyd Buchanan, and youngsters everywhere these days are into video games and self-promotion on social media and maybe many have a small sense of entitlement, coaching is still coaching. And that has not changed for him at different schools or over different decades, he said.
“I’ve coached them all the same,” he said. “I still get the same kids I did 35 years ago. They want to be disciplined and they want to be successful. Kids who are looking to succeed are looking for the same things they did 35 or 40 years ago.”
As to any advice he would give regarding being a successful high school coach, he said the keys are maybe good support at the administrative level and being able to have plenty of assistant coaches and having control over the assistants that come into the program. “It’s impossible to coach a football team without multiple people,” he said. “There are so many moving parts.”
He also thinks going into a program that has had past success and a strong tradition, as was the case at Alcoa and to a smaller extent Boyd Buchanan, is important. Coach Rankin is also a firm believer in strength and conditioning, saying he thinks he was a little ahead of his time in that realm when he started coaching, but that most other coaches have that as part of the philosophy these days.
He also enjoys working enthusiastically on all the game week preparation.
In this era of specialization, he also encourages his players everywhere he has been to also play at least one other sport, adding, “It’s all about competing.”
Despite all his various teams’ successes over the years following these philosophies, coach Rankin said he has only had about two players who have gone on to enjoy celebrated major college careers and play in the NFL. They were Fernando Bryant and Randall Cobb, both of whom he described as good people with good attitudes, which he feels are important ingredients to reach those next levels and are typical of those at that level.
Mr. Bryant played for coach Rankin at Riverdale and then was a standout at Alabama from 1996-98 before enjoying a career as an NFL cornerback for Jacksonville, Detroit and Pittsburgh. Mr. Cobb played for him at Alcoa as a quarterback and then played for Kentucky, getting to play against Tennessee in Neyland Stadium as a running style quarterback in 2010 and leading the Wildcats to a win over Georgia in Athens in 2009.
Since 2011, he has been a receiver for Green Bay, Dallas and Houston, and was with the New York Jets this past season.
“That’s a testament to how hard it is to get to that level,” said coach Rankin. “That’s why I tell the students to work on their grades. If you are doing your job and doing it correctly, you’ve got to be honest with the kids and say, “Most of you are going into the work force.”
Coach Rankin is also trying to be honest with himself about his own future and knows he is not going to be coaching for an unlimited amount of time at his age. “I hope to keep coaching two or three or four years, as long as I stay healthy and productive,” he said. “I still work out and stay healthy. I don’t fish and I don’t hunt. And I don’t teach any classes. Coaching is my first priority. It is my retirement.”
He said he also enjoys continuing to coach his way, by taking an active part in the practices and not letting his assistants do everything. “I still get on kids, and I do tell them the things they are supposed to do,” he said with a smile.
He also said he does not want to keep coaching for the sake of coaching if he feels his effectiveness or success is beginning to wane, adding, “I hope I’ll know when the time to step aside comes.”
Before then he hopes – as do Boyd Buchanan fans – that he gets to continue his unintentional hobby of collecting encased footballs recognizing state championship game performances. It was a collection that began when someone at Riverdale gave him a game ball and a special case was made after his first appearance in 1993 as a runner-up. And he hopes to add at least one or two more before hanging up his coaching clothes.
Regardless, he has already enjoyed a rare experience of winning a lot of games after starting out losing a bunch of them.
“The Lord has blessed me for sure,” he said.
* * *
To hear Coach Gary Rankin briefly discuss the enjoyment he gets from coaching, Click here.