‘It’s just a fact’: He is the greatest Charlotte prep football coach in the past 40 years
Tom Knotts, perhaps the greatest high school football coach the Carolinas have produced, is driving in his car one December afternoon.
Knotts, 67, sports a mohawk haircut and a muscular physique that belie his age. He’s talking to the traffic, coming back from an all-star game practice in Myrtle Beach — “Hey lady, slow down, you’re gonna hit somebody!” — and he’s also in the mood to talk about the long shadow he’s cast over North Carolina and South Carolina high school football since the early ‘80s.
“People will say I’m cocky or I’m arrogant,” Knotts said, “but I always thought that I would be successful. I didn’t think I knew any more, but I thought I had a good feel for it. I like kids. Kids like me, and I always thought I could do it. But I didn’t say, ‘I’m going to win X number of championships.’ I just thought I would be in the hunt.
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‘It’s just a fact’: He is the greatest Charlotte prep football coach in the past 40 years
“It’s just a fact.”
Today, The Observer is naming the best Mecklenburg County high school football players and coaches in the region since 1984, the year The Sweet 16 rankings began. Knotts — who has won 15 state championships, including seven with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools — was an easy choice as the greatest coach of the era.
In fact, if you widened the lens over the same 40-year period and picked the greatest coach in North Carolina, and maybe South Carolina, too, it would be hard not to make the same choice.
“I don’t know anybody who can do it better,” said longtime Mecklenburg County coach and state champion Bill Geiler, who worked with Knotts for more than 20 years. “I know how great [former Harding, West Charlotte, AL Brown and Providence Day coach] Bruce Hardin was, and how great [former Richmond Senior coach Daryl] Barnes was and how great [former Concord coach] EZ Smith was. And none of these guys can hold a candle to Tommy. He’s just that good. I’m lucky enough that he’s my friend and I got to work with him, but he’s the best I’ve ever seen.”
Consider this: Knotts’ first head coaching job was at Harding in 1983. His first two teams, in 1983 and ‘84, went 3-7.
He’s not had a losing season since, but there is an asterisk. Twice at West Charlotte, his teams had to forfeit games after Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools determined the school had used ineligible players, unbeknown to coaches.
But Knotts’ teams have lost nine — nine! — conference games from 1985-2023.
In the past 36 years, Knotts’ teams have played in 22 state championship games and won 15.
His overall record is 462-87-1. His playoff record? 121-23.
And we haven’t even talked about the time his Independence High teams won 109 straight games across seven seasons, the longest winning streak by an American public school football team.
“You totally have to have players to do this,” Knotts says over his cell phone, the sound of cars moving around him as he drives. “But I always thought that there were any number of schools in Charlotte, that, if you got the right system in place, if you’re doing the right things, where you could win. You can’t be a slow team running the spread. You can’t be an athletic team and be in the double wing. You’ve got to be true to football. I think I have been.”
‘Tommy can’t win it’
Knotts was born in Albemarle and lettered in three seasons at Duke, from 1975-77, before graduating with a degree in social science in 1978. In Durham, Knotts followed his father, Don, and his three uncles — Doug, Ernie and Jim — who all played football for the Blue Devils.
Knotts’ first coaching job was as a grad assistant at Duke in 1980. He spent the next two years as an assistant at Independence High School in Mint Hill before getting the head coaching job at Harding High, near uptown Charlotte, before the 1983 season.
As Knotts’ first two teams were struggling, he had an epiphany: he needed a staff that he trusted and a staff that would stay together for a long time. He needed players he could count on, even if that meant letting go of some talented kids who couldn’t meet his now-developing standard.
“That first year, he coached everything,” said Geiler, his longtime friend and assistant coach. “We did individual [positions] as coaches and Tommy coached everything else. It about killed him. His blood pressure was crazy. After that year he said, ‘We’ll do it the right way, and anybody who doesn’t like it, that’s OK.’”
Asked to describe Knotts back then, Geiler chose the word “peculiar.”
“He was arrogant,” Geiler said, “and felt like he could do anything, but he knew football like nobody I’d ever been around, and he became insistent on things being done the right way. He would say, ‘If a kid can’t study, he can’t play for me,’ and, ‘If you’re not good in school, I don’t want you playing with us.’”
Knotts was big on the weight room before most other coaches, and he employed a one-back system on offense, using something he saw his favorite NFL team, the Washington Commanders, employ. A lot of high schools then had two or three running backs in the game all the time, and passing the ball as much as Knotts wanted his teams to do was rare.
But Knotts had his quarterbacks throw it everywhere.
His last four teams at Harding went 46-8 and reached the 1987 state championship game. And when Knotts left for West Charlotte before the 1989 season, he made sure to quickly reorganize most members of his staff, mainly Geiler and offensive coordinator Jon Strong.
Knotts’ Lions teams immediately won big, just like at Harding, but lost in the 1991 and ‘93 state finals. So by then, Knotts had been to three 4A state championship games in six years, but hadn’t won any.
People began to doubt him and his system.
“We always got there,” Geiler said. “My feeling was everybody can say whatever they want. But they used to say, ‘Tommy can’t win it.’”
Losing in those three finals humbled Knotts a little, but it also made him more determined. And two years later, in 1995, Knotts won his first state title.
“I started to realize how hard it was to get there and win,” he said. “We had lost three in a row and I remember saying when we finally won that we had been knocking on the door for a long time. I knew it was hard. It’s actually been easier here [in South Carolina to win state championships than in North Carolina], but I learned [in North Carolina] that it was very hard and you’re very fortunate to be able to get there.”
To Independence, a quarterback and a dynasty
After the 1999 season, Knotts’ relationship with then-West Charlotte principal Venton Bell had soured, and he was looking for a change.
He was very close to taking a job at East Mecklenburg High. Knotts called Geiler on a Friday and asked whether Geiler would go with him.
But over that weekend, Knotts spoke with Daryl Barnes, who had led Richmond Senior to multiple state titles in the ‘80s and ‘90s.
“Barnes told him, ‘If you’re going to throw the ball, you have got to go [to] Independence,’” Geiler said. “He and Barnes met for lunch and Barnes said, ‘That kid at Independence is the one you want to be with.’”
That kid was a rising sophomore named Chris Leak, who made national headlines when Wake Forest offered him a scholarship in middle school. Leak’s older brother, C.J., was a high school All-American who had signed with Wake Forest in the spring of 1999.
CJ Leak left Independence as the school’s all-time leading passer, but with Knotts and Leak’s baby brother about to join forces, those records wouldn’t last long.
“I remember all the boys at West Charlotte said, ‘You ain’t got a running back,’” Knotts said. “I had Mario Crowe, who was a tremendous high school running back, and Chris was going to be a sophomore. And having played [Independence], I knew they had talent. They had big linemen. And in second grade, Chris could throw a 15-yard comeback. It didn’t take a genius to figure out he was special.”
Knotts and Chris Leak lost their first game together, at Crest High School in Boiling Springs, but after that they started that 109-game win streak. By the time Leak graduated, he had thrown for more than 15,000 yards — an N.C. record by a mile — and led the Patriots to three state titles and three straight seasons where they finished ranked in the USA Today national Top 25 poll: No. 20 in 2000, his sophomore year; No. 4 in 2001; No. 3 in 2002.
“Coach was so disciplined,” Chris Leak said of Knotts. “He’s somebody that has high standards. That was the thing that drew me to his coaching style. It’s the same style I was brought up under. I understood that everything I did I was going to have to be accountable for.”
Leak marveled at how Knotts could build a team, doing simple things like having one player take weights off a bar and then add new ones for his teammate, spotting him during lifts.
“Your job was to be accountable to and for your teammate,” Leak said. “Small stuff. Normal coaches say, ‘Rack your own weight.’ But that is what separates Tommy from a lot of coaches. It starts in the weight room with how he changes the mindset of a team and the players and why it happens so quickly. A lot of coaches try to make changes on the field with scheme. No, he makes changes in the weight room, which I can tell you transitions to the classroom and to what you do on the field.
“He changes a player’s mindset first. To me, that’s where his foundation has always been.”
To Duke and back again
In the middle of the run at Independence, Knotts left for Duke. It was after the Patriots won the 2003 state title.
“Everybody was saying high school isn’t good enough, and people would say, ‘Why don’t you go to college?’ ” Knotts said. “People make it seem like high school is not as good as college, but it’s twice what college is. It’s such a business in college. It’s not fun. Recruiting is ridiculous, and now with the transfer portal, I wouldn’t want to get anywhere close to that.”
Knotts said it took him about a month to know that coaching quarterbacks in the ACC wasn’t for him.
“Somebody interviewed me and I said, ‘There’s three winnable games, and I’m looking forward to being 3-0,’ ” Knotts said. “I got called into the office and they said, ‘You can’t say things like that.’ I said, ‘That’s bull.’ ”
That went against Knotts’ belief system. And Knotts always thinks he can win.
“You’ve got to believe,” Knotts said. “Some believe, but not everybody. I don’t think everybody believes in themselves and their program like we do. I have four or five assistants with me always. I had Geiler and [Jon Strong] and Hal [Brown] back in those days and they bought into what I was saying and preached the same message.”
Geiler led Independence to a 15-0 season in 2004, while Knotts was away. That Patriots team outscored opponents by an average of 54-7. Knotts came back and Independence won the 2005 and 2006 state titles.
The 109-game win streak finally ended in Ohio, when Independence was upset by Cincinnati’s Elder High School, 41-34, in overtime on Sept. 1, 2007. Independence eventually reached its eighth straight state championship game in that 2007 season, but lost.
It wouldn’t get back there again.
“I didn’t ever say we would win 100 games in a row, but when it started getting to the 40s and 50s, I’m like, ‘Why not keep on winning?’ ” Knotts said. “We had kids coming in and a lot of support. Why not? That’s probably one of my most proudest things. All those Friday nights and we never slipped once. You would think in six or seven years, you would have an off Friday night, but everybody kept believing.”
On to South Carolina
In 2008 and 2009, Independence got to the state semifinals, but lost to Richmond Senior and Butler, the eventual state champions.
After the 2009 season, Knotts decided to leave for Dutch Fork, where he more than doubled his salary — and change his day-to-day responsibilities.
“I’m allowed to be a coach rather than be a teacher-coach,” Knotts said. “Coaching is teaching, but it doesn’t have to be teaching in a classroom. Whereas when I was teaching history, there were so many 18-hour days during the West Charlotte and Harding days, and I coached other sports then, too. That was a recipe for wearing your [butt] out pretty quick.”
So in 2010, Knotts left for a new state and his fourth high school.
He compared the makeup of Dutch Fork to Charlotte’s Providence High, an affluent school in southeastern Mecklenburg County, but he wasn’t able to take his staff with him, so he had to start over.
“He said his first year he had to coach coaches because they didn’t know how to work like we did,” Geiler said. “And then he got some coaches around him that had his philosophy and could do what he wanted done.”
In his third season at Dutch Fork, in 2012, Knotts’ team was state runner-up. In 2013, the team won the state title. The Silver Foxes would go on to win five state championships in a row from 2016-2020, and they’ve won the past two 5A state titles.
This year’s team started 0-3 and was 2-5 at one point, but Knotts kept believing. His quarterback returned from injury and Dutch Fork eventually won eight straight games and Knotts’ eighth S.C. state title.
In the second round of the playoffs, Dutch Fork was down 10 points to Greenville’s JL Mann High. There was 2:22 left to play.
“I’m like, ‘What’s wrong with y’all?’ ” Knotts said to his team during a timeout. “’I’ve got three timeouts. We’ll get the ball back and we’ll win.”
Dutch Fork won 31-28.
Belief, again.
How much longer will he do this?
Knotts talks as if he can see the end on the horizon.
“You’ve got to find different ways to stay on top of the mountain,” he said, “which is why I’ve always said 10 years is about the limit [to stay at one school]. People think it’s easy. The administration thinks it’s easy. The student body thinks it’s easy.”
Knotts’ son, Jaxon, is a freshman quarterback on the team. At minimum, Knotts said, he’ll coach until his son graduates.
“Unfortunately, or fortunately, I have a blue-chip guy ahead of [Jaxon],” Knotts said. “He’s one year older and one of his best friends. So Jaxon, barring injury, won’t be a starting quarterback until his senior year. I have had a couple people reaching out to me [about other coaching opportunities] but money would be a factor. Dutch Fork was the perfect storm. You walk around and see good-looking kids, a huge stadium. The superintendent wants it. The principal wants it.”
But what does Knotts want now?
Former Olympic High and Wilmington Hoggard head coach Scott Braswell was defensive coordinator, at 33 years old, on Knotts’ first state championship team. Braswell’s son, Scott Jr., was defensive coordinator for one of Knotts’ Dutch Fork state title teams at the same age. The elder Braswell has also potentially shown Knotts a path to pursue in retirement: Move to the beach and volunteer.
The older Braswell was volunteering on the Hoggard team that lost to Weddington in the N.C. 4A state finals in December.
“I think I’d like that,” Knotts said. “So wherever I am, I can lend a hand.”
You can hear Knotts’ car accelerate when he’s asked about how he’d like to be remembered when he’s done, about what his legacy might be.
For a guy who’s always been quick with a memorable quote and never shied away from much of anything controversial, Knotts pauses for a beat.
And then another.
“Maybe,” he finally said, “maybe that I did it my way, you know? But I haven’t thought a whole lot about it.”
The Tom Knotts file
AT HARDING
TOTAL: 52-22
1983: 3-7
1984: 3-7
1985: 11-1
1986: 11-3
1987: 14-1
1988: 10-3
▪ Harding’s 1987 team reached the state final and lost to Garner. It was the first of 22 trips to the championship round for Knotts.
AT WEST CHARLOTTE
Total record: 113-32 (129-16 on field)*
1989: 8-3
1990: 5-6* (10-1)
1991: 14-1
1992: 11-1
1993: 14-1
1994: 9-2
1995: 15-1
1996: 13-1
1997: 0-13* (11-2)
1998: 12-2
1999: 12-1
▪ *Knotts’ 1990 and 1997 teams at West Charlotte forfeited 16 games because of inadvertent use of an ineligible player. Knotts’ ‘91, ‘93 and ‘95 teams reached the NC 4A state championship, with the ‘95 team winning Knotts the first of 15 state titles.
AT INDEPENDENCE
TOTAL: 132-7
2000: 15-1
2001: 16-0
2002: 15-0
2003: 16-0
2005: 15-0
2006: 16-0
2007: 13-3
2008: 13-1
2009: 13-2
▪ Knotts’ teams won state titles from 2000-03 and 2005-06. The Patriots lost in the 2007 state final. Knotts went to Duke in 2004 and that Patriots team finished 15-0 under his longtime defensive coordinator, Bill Geiler.
AT DUTCH FORK
TOTAL: 165-27-1
2010: 10-3
2011: 10-3
2012: 11-3
2013: 12-2
2014: 12-3
2015: 9-4
2016: 15-0
2017: 13-1
2018: 13-0
2019: 14-0-1
2020: 10-0
2021: 12-1
2022: 14-1
2023: 10-5
▪ Knotts’ teams at Dutch Fork has won eight state championships in 11 appearances.
