Maybe the best part about Kevin McElhaney’s momentous family accomplishment — serving as a coach on GHSA state championship teams with each of his three daughters — is that it wasn’t in his original plans.
In 2002, McElhaney returned to his hometown, Chickamauga, a small town in the northwest corner of Georgia, to coach football at Class A Gordon Lee High, his alma mater. He had been a head coach at two other high schools in northwest Georgia and was elevated to the head job at Gordon Lee before the 2006 season.
Three playoff seasons were followed by three leaner years. After the 2011 season, McElhaney stepped down to allow the school to hire a new coach.
Had the Trojans been more successful, McElhaney might well have stayed the football coach.
“Who knows?” McElhaney said. “It could have been a different story.”
At that time, McElhaney didn’t plan to keep coaching until softball coach Dana Mull asked him to join her state powerhouse program as an assistant coach.
In that role, McElhaney helped his eldest daughter Tori win Class A Public state titles as a junior and senior. After Tori graduated, middle daughter Katherine Grace won three more small-school classification state softball titles with her dad, who also was able to coach her in basketball and tennis. And in May, youngest daughter Charlsie, who veered from the family path to take up golf, helped lead the Trojans to the Class A Division I state championship in that sport with her dad as coach.
“It may have been a power bigger than me that just said, ‘You know what? This is the way we’re going to go, and I think you’re going to enjoy this,’” McElhaney said. “And I have. I’ve enjoyed it immensely.”
A most unlikely and laudable Father’s Day calculation: One dad, three daughters, six state titles together, a million memories. And he also was their Advanced Placement U.S. history teacher and even drove them to school. The family joke was that the girls could never escape their dad.
When McElhaney, 60, watched Charlsie putt out on the 18th green at Arrowhead Pointe Golf Course in Elberton, it brought a 37-year high school coaching career to a close. He has coached at least eight different sports at four different schools in the state, the past 23 years at Gordon Lee.
The highs and lows are too many to count. He has seen former athletes go on to lead successful lives. Shannon, his wife of nearly 34 years, said they can’t go out anywhere without a former player or student stopping him to say hello.
“But to enjoy the successes with my own children at the latter part of my career was something that, it’s probably as rewarding as anything I’ve ever done,” McElhaney said.
The memories are not all gauzy. Being a high school football coach in small-town Georgia can be trying. The three McElhaney girls, Shannon and McElhaney himself will attest that he was harder on his daughters than their teammates. He did not tolerate anything less than full effort. He especially could not stomach striking out on a called third strike.
In the McElhaney photo collection is a shot of Kevin giving a close-range lecture on a basketball sideline to Katherine Grace, her eyes downcast.
“He had high expectations and high standards for us that we were meant to reach,” said Tori, who Atlanta Falcons fans might know for her work covering the team on its website. (Full disclosure: Tori and I are colleagues and friends.)
But his devotion and love were equally clear. Even as he was submerged in football, he coached the girls’ youth softball and basketball teams, the former taking the family across the Southeast for tournaments. He and a friend built a batting cage in a barn on the property of the friend’s grandfather.
When the spot opened, he jumped at the chance to coach Charlsie in golf as she was starting high school — even though he had no background in coaching the sport. He consulted with other high school coaches and Charlsie’s private coach and watched countless videos. And, naturally, he built another practice structure, this one an indoor hitting bay at the high school, complete with a projection screen and technology that measures each ball strike.
“We call this the Trojans Golf Performance Center,” he said with a laugh.
The McElhaneys can laugh about getting chewed out by Dad in full view of their friends, the harsh lessons having been rooted in love. Katherine Grace’s favorite memories are the bus rides home from away softball games, her dad driving and she in the first row. With her teammates riding home with their parents, it was usually just the two of them rehashing the game and plotting the next one.
“That was always probably the highlight, because at that point, he was still my dad — he would still tell me he was proud of me and things like that — but he was still coaching me in those times,” said Katherine Grace, now living and working in nearby Fort Oglethorpe as a patient care coordinator at a physical therapy clinic.
Charlsie, who signed to play golf at Maryville College in Tennessee, cherishes “getting to go on a random day at a random time to the golf course and getting to play a round (with her father),” she said. “Even if I’m not doing good or he’s not doing good, we’re still getting to be together.”
When Tori’s softball team won the state title in her junior year — her dad’s first year as an assistant coach after he had resigned as football coach — she caught sight of her father coming out of the dugout, ran over to him and threw herself into his arms.
“It was no doubt, like, ‘This is for him — he’s a state champion now,’” Tori said. “I think that was very meaningful to me.”
Who could have imagined?
“He always said how he enjoyed watching every single minute, no matter what sport it was,” said Shannon, McElhaney’s wife, a seventh grade science teacher. “Every single minute. And there was a lot of games.”
Doors close, others open. And sometimes they send us on journeys better than we could ever imagine for ourselves.
Credit: McElhaney family
Credit: McElhaney family
Credit: McElhaney family
Credit: McElhaney family
Credit: McElhaney family
Credit: McElhaney family
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