New UTC football coach Rusty Wright, left, speaks with Cecil Hammontree after Wright's introductory news conference Friday.
Mark WiedmerIt was early afternoon this past Wednesday, and Rusty Wright was struggling to reach his wife Kelley on the phone. She had a good reason for momentarily ignoring him. The family's 13-year-old beagle was suffering from an abscessed tooth.
Finally, on his third attempt, she answered.
Said Wright to his wife: "You can start that kitchen remodel you've been wanting to do."
Replied an excited Kelley: "You got the job!"
Yet what's most instructive about that conversation is not Wright's witty way of telling his wife he had just been named the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga's football coach. It's that the kitchen that Kelley - a former UTC volleyball player - has been wanting to fix up is already in the Scenic City, despite Wright working the past two seasons at Georgia State.
"We bought a house in Council Fire in 2011," Wright said. "Some people want to live in the mountains. Some want to live at the beach. I want to live here. That house is where (daughter) Maddie always knows she can come home."
With the exception of the temporarily transplanted Yankee Joe Morrison, UTC's best football coaches have always strongly embraced Chattanooga. Scrappy Moore spent his entire life here. Buddy Nix may have been dismissed as the Mocs' head coach, but he and Diann have never moved, despite his later NFL administrative stops.
Russ Huesman, the coach before the coach whom Wright replaces (Tom Arth), played for the Mocs during JoMo's time, and one suspects that when his career at Richmond is up, he'll retire here.
And both Huesman and Nix - who signed Wright and was one of Wright's three UTC head coaches, the others being Tommy West and Buddy Green - might have felt a lump in their throats if they'd heard the new Mocs coach say with great gusto and emotion during his introductory news conference Friday: "I'm home."
This program needs someone to put down roots and stay for a while, much as Huesman did for eight seasons before rumored frustrations with the administration at that time reportedly drove him to leave.
"It was important to me to hire someone with a grateful spirit," said UTC athletic director Mark Wharton, who wasn't the AD when Huesman departed and Arth came aboard. "I also wanted someone who wants to be here in Chattanooga."
A quote to tell you how much a lot of people wanted Wright: "Just the outreach," said the coach. "Phone messages, text messages. Just people I met in Sunday school 20 years ago."
There was also this from former Mocs defensive back Lucas Webb, whom Wright coached for three years: "Coach Wright's been under Huesman. He knows what it's like to do it the right way."
Webb also told a story of one day switching jerseys with Tae Davis before a meeting not long after Wright had returned for his second stint as a UTC assistant.
"He was yelling at me, but he thought he was yelling at Tae," Webb said with a grin. "I just said, 'Yes, sir.' Afterward, we told him what we'd done and we all laughed about it. He's one of those guys the players love."
How can you not love a guy who still knows where he keeps the South Carolina high school state championship ring he won with the Silver Bluff Bulldogs back home in Petticoat Junction?
"There were 24 of us total on the team," Wright said. "A lot of us played both ways."
How can this area's high school coaches, who haven't always felt much love from UTC staffs, not love a guy who said Friday of his recruiting style: "I don't care if some coach in this area hasn't had a prospect in 20 years, we're going to visit him, because that's what we're supposed to do."
Then there was last Monday night at McKenzie Arena. He had come home briefly Sunday to treat Maddie and her Belmont University basketball teammates to dinner at Olive Garden. He had returned home from Georgia State - "I often worked out of the house when I was at Georgia State," he said - to cheer his daughter against his alma mater and the school that would be interviewing him less than 15 hours later.
"But I got to be a good dad," he said with a smile.
Wright long ago proved he could be a good football coach with the Mocs. UTC won or shared three SoCon titles during his time under Huesman. He developed all-conference players. Asked what he most learned from two years under Georgia State coach Shawn Elliott, whose wife Summer grew up in Chattanooga and played tennis for Girls Preparatory School, Wright said, "He taught me how to be true to myself."
Now he's once more able to be true to his school. And satisfy Kelley's dream of a new kitchen. And make a whole lot of Mocs maniacs happy one of their own again is directing the football team.
Or as one former employee of the athletic department wrote to me in an email Wednesday night: "A great day for Chattanooga football."
Wright on!
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.