Family brought Chad Grier home to Charlotte, to Providence Day. Now he plans to win big.
New Providence Day football coach Chad Grier said one of the hardest things he’s ever had to do was tell his old team he was leaving.
Tuesday morning, he met with the players from Oceanside Collegiate, a 2A South Carolina public school about 30 minutes outside Charleston. Grier told them that was he was leaving to return to Charlotte, where he once built a regional power at Davidson Day School.
“That was tough, man,” Grier said. “I opened my mouth and the words didn’t come out. It took a minute.”
Grier, 52, will replace Adam Hastings at Providence Day. Hastings coached at Providence Day for five seasons, going 31-22. The Chargers were N.C Independent Schools Division I state runner-up in 2017 and Providence Day won the Division II state championship last November.
Hastings, 37, left last month to become head coach at Indian Land, a S.C. public school near Ballantyne.
Providence Day athletic director Nancy Beatty said more than 100 people applied for the job and she interviewed three of them, including Grier, who laid out a vision and plan for the Chargers that Beatty found instructive.
“His experience and reputation and success and just passion for football impressed me,” Beatty said. “When I met with him, I originally kind of fell in love with his vision of what he thought Providence Day football could become and obviously that excites me for where we can go.”
In three seasons, Grier developed a small school power at Oceanside, which went 8-5 last season and reached the S.C. 2A semifinals. The Landsharks averaged nearly 50 points per game.
Before heading to South Carolina, Grier coached six seasons at Davidson Day, where he was 65-9 overall and won four state championships. Along the way, he developed several all-state players, including his son, Will, now a quarterback with the Panthers.
And at Providence Day, Grier wants to keep doing the same thing he’s always done: Win, and win big.
“With the basketball team being nationally ranked a couple years ago,” Grier said, “they’ve proven they have the ability to do that kind of thing, and with the students the caliber they are at Providence Day, from a football perspective, (being a nationally ranked team) is a realistic and attainable goal. It may not happen overnight. It won’t happen fast enough for me, but that’s where we’re trying to go.”
Grier, who played high school football at Charlotte Latin, has 184,000 Twitter followers and is the head of a famous family.
Will was a star quarterback at West Virginia and a national high school player of the year. His younger sons, Nash and Hayes, are social media superstars and actors who have more than 25 million followers on Twitter and Instagram.
Chad Grier said one of the things that helped him with this decision is the same advice he gave his boys as they were trying to make key career choices themselves.
“You have a big decision,” Grier said, “you seek wise council and you pray on it. I did both. I agonized over it probably too much but at the end of the day, the final piece of the decision that tipped the scale was I have a soon-to-be 1-year-old son, Hank, and just as a parent, I felt like the best thing to do for Hank was to bring him to where all of our family is and provide him an opportunity to go to a school like Providence Day. Clearly, they’ve got 41 National Merit scholars. It’s a special place.”
And Grier wants to make football special there, too.
“I’m dying to meet the kids and talk to them and get to know them,” Grier said. “We’re in the kid business. I might be called a football coach, but I’m really in the kid business. My mission is working with young people; getting to know them and getting to be part of their lives beyond just the season and beyond just high school.”
This story was originally published March 17, 2020 at 10:22 AM.
