Growing up in the middle valley for Aaron Nance was always filled with sports, namely football, and baseball. He then attended high school at Soddy Daisy where he starred on the football team as a defensive back and graduated in 2011.
Now, how did he get into coaching you might be wondering?
“It was a funny little deal, a guy named Courtney Braswell was my high school coach. He took a job at East Ridge high school on the other side of town, and he needed an assistant coach, I’m still a high school student but he called me up like hey I need you to come help me with spring ball to coach the DBs (defensive backs). So, I would get out of school like 11:30a and drive over there still in high school and coach the defensive backs over at East Ridge that year and had a blast with it.”
A high schooler helping a high school team as an assistant coach, wow, I don’t know about you but I’ve never seen or heard of that before. I can imagine it had to be a little strange for the high school kids he was coaching to be around the same age, right? Unless they didn’t know…
“I think he lied to the kids about how old I was…”
What an interesting way to get your start in coaching!
From there, he made a stop at Notre Dame here in Chattanooga for four years while he was in college at UTC and he ended up coaching Super Bowl Champion, Kareem Orr as well as Patrick Johnson who now plays for the Philadelphia Eagles.
From there he went and spent the next eight years at various Georgia schools, holding different positions at each stop as an assistant.
He began at North Paulding where he spent three seasons (2016-2018) as the offensive coordinator. Then, he had a very successful two-year stop at Grayson where the team went 25-2 including a GHSA AAAAAAA State Championship before landing at Pickens as the OC in 2021.
He now gets an opportunity to return home for his first shot at being the head coach of a high school football program and he truly couldn’t be more excited.
In fact, one of the men who was responsible for hiring Nance was the principal Brent Eller who was actually his principal back at Loftis middle school.
Check out the entire conversation with Aaron Nance here from our Inside High School Sports show which airs every Tuesday and Thursday on ESPN Chattanooga 95.3.
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