New Myers Park football coach: ‘We can be ‘the premier program in North Carolina.’
New Myers Park High football coach Jason McManus said he wants to stay with the Mustangs for the rest of his career.
After going through three coaches in the past three seasons, Mustangs fans will probably enjoy hearing that.
“Myers Park is the premier academic and athletic public school in the state of North Carolina, I really believe that,” McManus said Friday morning, “and it has a great tradition. With the parental support and resources there, I feel like everything is in place for it to be the standard and premier program in North Carolina.”
McManus will replace former NFL assistant and NFL player Curtis Fuller, who coached the Mustangs for one season. Fuller left to take a college assistant’s job in Texas. Prior to Fuller, Myers Park was coached by Mark Harman in the 2021 spring season and by Scott Chadwick before that.
Despite having new coaches again and again, the Mustangs have kept winning, grabbing at least a share of conference titles in each season, including a run to the N.C. regional championship game.
Fuller’s team was 8-4 last season and reached the second round of the playoffs before the N.C. High School Athletic Association ruled that the Mustangs would forfeit all of their games for using at least three ineligible players on a roster that included student-athletes from California, Georgia and Texas. Those athletes had moved to Charlotte and lived in three houses rented by the parents of the Myers Park quarterback, who was from California. NCHSAA commissioner Que Tucker said some of the ineligible players were from out of state and some from the immediate area.
New Myers Park principal Robert Folk, who started in January, self-reported the eligibility issues to the NCHSAA and said that with this hire, it’s time for the Mustangs to move forward.
“We are positioned and ready now,” Folk said. “We self-reported ineligibility from this past season and it was the right thing to do, and my purpose was to kind of set a new course and direction for Myers Park football, and part of that is hiring a new coach and making sure that individual is one who comes to us with high standards of excellence and integrity and will help us build a program moving forward that will build young athletes, a program that is successful.”
Folk said he picked McManus from a group of four finalists and was impressed with the 44-year-old coach’s resume, which includes 14 years as a college assistant and five at Rock Hill’s South Pointe High, where McManus helped turn the Stallions into a national power.
During his time in Rock HIll, South Pointe won four straight state championships, set several school records and won The Charlotte Observer’s Sweet 16 poll in 2017, when the Stallions finished nationally ranked.
“Jason has formed a lot of relationships in the region as well as nationally in the sport of football,” Folk said. “He has worked with and for some very successful coaches throughout his career. His hometown is Newton, NC, and he had a desire to get closer to home, and he was really, really excited and energetic about helping us rebuild our football program.”
In February 2019, McManus was a finalist for the South Pointe head job, which ultimately went to former Independence and South Pointe star Devonte Holloman. After the 2019 season, McManus worked at Spartanburg High for a year and spent the past season at Georgia 7A national power Grayson, which reached the state semifinals.
McManus notes that Grayson, with 3,500 students, has about 100 fewer than Myers Park.
“I knew the head coach at Grayson through the coaches’ clinic circuit and felt like I could go there and learn how things are done at the highest level (of high school football),” McManus said. “And a lot of the things we do at Grayson, I’ll model the program at Myers Park with.”
He expects to run what he calls an “air raid spread offense” and a “three-man front defense.”
“Everything we do will be quarterback-driven,” he said, “so we’ll have to develop multiple quarterbacks.”
McManus said it’s too early to know what his staff will look like, but said anytime there’s a change in leadership, he expects there to be some changes with the staff.
Mostly, McManus said, he’s really ready to get started. He thinks Myers Park has the potential to be really great, and he wants to help the Mustangs get there.”
“There’s been some adversity here,” he said, “and I’ll hit head on and set a path. We’ll use the adversity as a learning opportunity and move on. It does not scare me. I could not be more excited about the future of Myers Park football.”
The Jason McManus file
Age: 44, single
High School: Played football at Newton-Conover High (graduated 1996)
College: Played football at Gardner-Webb University (graduated 2000, degree in physical education)
College Coaching: Grad assistant Middle Tennessee State; assistant at Sewanee (Tenn), Tusculum (Tenn), UT-Chattanooga, Troy (Al)
High School Coaching: offensive coordinator at South Pointe, Spartanburg and Grayson (Ga.). In 2019, McManus was named OC for the East team in the US Army All-American game, the nation’s top high school postseason all-star game. He coached future North Carolina star Sam Howell that season.
He said it: “I grew up in this area. I was raised up in the Hickory area. I remember when Paul Cameron was sports anchor for WBTV. This area provides me with such good memories and I always said I wanted to get back to this area. So when the Myers Park job opened, it was a no-brainer for me.”
This story was originally published April 29, 2022 at 9:42 AM.
