High school football coach logs 130 wins: Secret to his success
SAN DIEGO — After 130 wins, Morse High School football coach and athletic director Tracy McNair has made an impact in the San Diego sports world.
But what you can’t put a number on is the sheer amount of lives he has changed along the way. Brandon Stone sat down with the longtime southeast San Diego resident to learn more about the journey that made the man.
Always charting the course is the mark of a coach — but in Tracy McNair’s world, so much more.
“Right now, I think more than anything else, [my role] is mentor, father, coach, teacher, athletic administrator, babysitter, car driver,” McNair said. “I probably can’t put it on a resume, but what you see is what you get.”
“Sitting here in this classroom brings back memories of times when I didn’t have that teacher,” McNair continued. “There were times in class where the teacher told me, ‘You won’t make it to see 21.’ But now I’m 52.”
And still going strong running Morse High, the model of hard work was set long ago through family.
“Me being a young kid, not understanding all of the stuff that my grandma went through,” McNair said. “She only had one hand that only had two fingers on it. When she was a minor, she was pushed into a fire as she was the maid of a family. And at that time, her fingers melted together. She’d tell us, through all she did with that one hand, that hard work pays off. Perseverance will always pay off.”
He took that lesson first to Crawford High School, then back to the school he graduated from — taking the baton from his legendary head coach, a five-time CIF champion.
“A lot of people want to say they want to go to the NFL. That was never my focus,” McNair said. “My focus was I wanted to be just like Shack. I wanted to be at Morse. I wanted to be a head coach. I wanted to be an athletic director. I wanted to affect kids’ lives and affect change within my own community.”
Stone asked McNair how much it changes the perspective to be able to learn from someone that looks like them and understands what they went through.
“I think the biggest attribute of all that is I went to Morse,” McNair said. “I can see these families and these kids on a day-to-day basis walking through their own community. I know their parents. I know their grandparents.”
A blessing paid back in full in 2018, when three old teammates — David Dunn at Lincoln, Charles James at San Diego and Coach McNair — made that same CIF history.
“One of the most wonderful things I’ve ever seen in my life is to have three Morse Tigers go to CIF at the same time. And then all of us win CIF,” McNair said.
The Morse name continues to be strong to this day. When San Diego State University hired their new coach, Sean Lewis, he credited a Morse alum, Dino Babers, as a mentor to him as he was learning the college game. Lewis was an assistant to Babers at three different stops in the past decade.
“So what is my job as a coach? Get kids to degrees,” McNair said. “Because 20 years from now, ain’t nobody gonna care who won the CIF, except for us as adults. Those kids want to see those degrees. Those parents want to see those degrees.”
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