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Alcoa football coach Gary Rankin receives Knox News Lifetime Achievement Award

Will Backus
Knoxville News Sentinel

ALCOA — Gary Rankin has never made it his goal to win state championships.

When he was hired as the coach at Smith County 38 years ago, he said people would have run him out of town for even mentioning the possibility of winning a state title.

But the ring on his right hand commemorating Alcoa's four straight state titles from 2015-18 — extended to five straight in 2019 — told a different story of one of the most successful high school coaches in the nation.

Rankin received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the fourth annual Knox News Sports Awards on Thursday

His career didn't begin with an urge to coach. He just needed the money, so he took a job as an assistant at Warren County in 1976.

"I had no great desire at that time to be a head coach or see where it would take me," said Rankin, 66. "Was I gung-ho about going into coaching at that time? Probably not as much as just getting the paycheck."

Now in his 14th year at Alcoa, Rankin has won more state championships, with 15 (11 at Alcoa and four at Riverdale), than any other coach in Tennessee high school history, and he's the state's all-time coaching wins leader with 439.

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All about the kids

When he was at Smith County, he and a couple of his assistants spent three months and their own money turning an old shop classroom into the school's first weight room. 

"To them, it was a palace," Rankin said. "It was one of the nicest places they had ever been in. To just see the appreciation and what it meant to those kids was pretty fulfilling.”

Brian Gossett, who has coached with Rankin since 2008, said that he takes the time to get to know everyone on his team.

As he was leaving a practice one day last week,  he made sure to talk to everyone that he walked past. 

"I think the thing he gets the least credit for is what kind of relationships he builds with players," Gossett said. "He's hard on them, but I think they all know that he's got their back, too."

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He also allows his coaches to leave practice or events early so that they can spend time with their families. Rankin has been married to his wife, Sandra, for 29 years. He has three children— John Tucker, 26, who played for him at Alcoa from 2007-11, Addie, 24, and Zeke, 18, who recently graduated from Alcoa and was a kicker.

"Gary's always been a person I want to be like because he's a family man," said Brian Nix, who has been at Alcoa since 2004. "He wants us to spend as much time as we can with our family. ... That was a huge example to me as a young coach."

Model of consistency

Rankin has always wanted to establish consistency, and it starts in practice.

"I could pull out a practice plan from 10 years ago and it would be virtually identical," said Peggy Bratt, Alcoa's athletic trainer since 2000. "If it's not broke, don't fix it."

At Smith County, Rankin molded one of the worst teams in the state into an annual playoff contender after going 0-10 his first year. In his second, he led the Owls to the playoffs for the first time in 25 years, the first of five appearances under his tenure.

He left for Riverdale and took that team to the playoffs in each of his 15 years, appearing in nine state championships with four victories titles. 

Alcoa is the prime example of Rankin's model. When he was hired in 2006, he won five state championships in a row. In the past 14 years, 2011 and 2012 are the only years that the Tornadoes did not play for a state title. 

"I’ve never said that we’re going to win the state championship next year, but I have said that I think we’ll be one of the teams that will be in the running for it," Rankin said. 

Rankin said he's not ready to retire. He knows that when that drop in consistency comes, that's when he will start thinking about hanging it up.

"I hope to do it a few more years at least," Rankin said. "If I feel like I’m not being productive and giving this program and these coaches and these kids what they need to get, then I’m smart enough to walk away from it at that time.

"I still think I’m effective right now and I’ve got something to offer to this program and this community."