Friday in VarsityXtra
The newest class of coaches includes the latest Garry at Fort Cherry
Like father like son ... like grandfather? A Garry family tradition continues this fall at Fort Cherry.
The “generation gap” with the Fort Cherry High School football team has been closed. There’s a Garry coaching the Rangers again.
Tanner Garry is in his first year as the coach at Fort Cherry. When heat acclimatization practices start across Pennsylvania Monday, Garry will be one of 15 new coaches in the WPIAL. The City League also has one new coach. At 27, Garry is one of the youngest coaches in the WPIAL. But that’s not what makes him unique.
Tanner is a third generation Garry to be Fort Cherry’s coach. Fort Cherry opened in 1959 and a Garry has been a head coach for 53 of the Rangers’ 61 seasons. The generation gap came the past eight years when Jim Shiel was the coach.
There are no records to prove it, but it’s entirely possible that no WPIAL school has ever had three generations of a family coach the football team. For the Garrys, it started when Jim Garry was the Rangers’ first coach in 1959. He lasted 44 seasons before retiring after the 2002 season and he is still eighth on the WPIAL all-time win list with 265. (Jim Garry passed away in 2007.)
When Jim Garry retired, his son, Tim, took over and was at the helm for nine seasons before stepping down after the 2012 season.
Tim Garry is Tanner’s father. So it’s the father, son and grandson all on Fort Cherry’s coaching tree.
Welcome to Fort Garry. “Some people say everything at Fort Cherry revolves around our name,” Tanner Garry said. “That’s not true. We just happen to have tradition.”
By getting the Fort Cherry job, Tanner Garry has reached a lifetime goal. He remembers being in high school and realizing he wanted to be the Rangers’ coach someday, just like Grandpa and Dad. Tanner Garry, a quarterback, started his college career at Bowling Green, transferred to Youngstown State and finished his career in the 2017 season at Slippery Rock, where he led all of NCAA Division II in passing yardage with 3,522.
“Because of my grandfather and dad, people would always ask me, ‘When are you going to come back to coach?’” said Tanner Garry, who is a health/physical education teacher at CanonMcMillan. “In the back of my mind, I always knew at some point the opportunity might present itself. The question was would I take the job?”
Tanner Garry was the quarterbacks coach at South Fayette the past two seasons. Garry will tell you what he learned coaching at a top program under coach Joe Rossi was priceless. But even at South Fayette, Garry had Fort
Cherry on his mind.
“Just about every game when we would go to the locker room at halftime, I would pull out my phone just to see what the Fort Cherry score was,” said Garry, who takes over a Fort Cherry team that has lost 18 consecutive games.
When Garry decided to go after the Fort Cherry job, he did it under one personal condition. He wanted Dad by his side. One of Tanner Garry’s assistants is his father.
“It’s kind of always been one of the dreams I’ve had. I’ve always wanted to coach with my dad,” Tanner Garry said. “When the job opened, I told my dad, ‘Obviously, I’d like to be back at home where everything started, but I’m not even going to apply if you don’t agree helping me out.’ A lot goes into this. There are a lot of ins and outs that he has experienced and he has a wealth of
knowledge.”
Two of the other most interesting “first-year” coaches are Ryan Matsook at Western Beaver and Tim Sweeney at Baldwin. They’re really not first-year coaches because both have been a head coach at another school — and enjoyed plenty of success.
Sweeney spent the past six seasons turning around the program at Derry Area, his alma mater. The year before Sweeney took over, Derry did not win a game. But in Sweeney’s six seasons, the Trojans went 49-18 and played for the WPIAL Class 3A championship in 2018. In 2016, Sweeney was the Post-Gazette Coach of the Year.
Matsook has a state championship on his resume. He guided Beaver Falls to WPIAL and PIAA Class 3A titles in 2016, but resigned after that season. He was 101-26 (.795 percentage) in 11 seasons at Beaver Falls.
Matsook also is the assistant principal and athletic director at Western Beaver and takes over for Derek Moye, a former Steeler who resigned after only one season.
“When Derek resigned, the program in my mind was going in the right direction,” Matsook said. “I kind of tried to help him a little with getting some coaches with some experience. I think the school district didn’t want to start from scratch again with a new coach. With me kind of the person who was orchestrating things before, I just thought it was the right thing to do to step up. I don’t think we wanted three different sets of coaches over three years. We wanted to have some continuity.”
Most of Moye’s assistant coaches stayed on with Matsook. Western Beaver is a small school, but Matsook said the team might have as many as 40 players this season.
Western Beaver has been helped by a cooperative sponsorship for football with Lincoln Park, a charter school in Midland that doesn’t have football. Matsook said 12 to 15 students from Lincoln Park are expected to play this season.
“The cooperative sponsorship has been a positive thing for us so far,” Matsook said.
Matsook is one of only two new coaches in WPIAL Class 2A. Seven of the 15 new WPIAL coaches are in Class 1A — Garry, Bishop Canevin’s Richard Johnson, Carmichaels’ Ron Gallagher, Imani Christian’s Cliff Simon, Leechburg’s Randy Walters, Monessen’s Shane Swope and Riverview’s Trevor George.
This is the fourth consecutive season Bishop Canevin will have a new coach. But the turnover of coaches in the WPIAL this season is not as big as previous seasons. The WPIAL had 22 new coaches last year, 20 in 2018 and 24 in 2017.