Coach’s legacy still intact at high school

Drive past the gas station with a Dairy Queen and the fields full of shrubs in Eads, Tenn., and the first sign that you’ve reached Briarcrest Christian School are the row of lights rising above the trees. Around the bend, the full athletic complex reveals itself and the centerpiece is a gleaming football field with bleachers on either side.

Go a few hundred feet along Houston Levee Road, beyond the guardhouse with two wooden gates greeting visitors, and redand-white brick buildings stretch across this 90-acre campus. A sign points to the gym, and its entryway offers a glimpse into Hugh Freeze’s rise.

There are gold trophies for the school’s state championships in football in 2002 and 2004. A couple of rows below that sits a picture of former Briarcrest star Michael Oher, the prized football recruit who inspired the book and movie, The Blind Side. To the left is Freeze hunched over beside the members of the 1998 Briarcrest girls basketball team that went 33-0. On the wall, as part of the school’s Hall of Fame, is an enlarged head shot of him.

This is where Freeze got his coaching start and his past is celebrated, for now.

But Freeze’s tenure at Briarcrest is back in the spotlight after he resigned as Mississippi football coach. Ole Miss athletics director Ross Bjork said the abrupt departure was because of a pattern of personal misconduct discovered through Freeze’s phone records.

At Briarcrest, the question is whether that pattern began at this elite evangelical school that caters to the most affluent communities in the Memphis area. Monday, a school official acknowledged the existence of a private Facebook group that describes itself as a forum for a “victim of Coach Freeze at Briarcrest” to come forward.

“Our current administration and former administrators who we’ve talked to — and we’ve talked to many — we are totally unaware of any allegations against Coach Freeze regarding any kind of inappropriate personal conduct while he was here at Briarcrest,” Briarcrest director of communications Beth Rooks said. “We would take any such allegations seriously, and we would fully investigate it. Our objective is to deal with any issues truthfully and objectively. There hasn’t been proof of anything. We’ve never had any parent or student or anybody come to us.”

Briarcrest was founded in 1973 and has an enrollment of about 1,650 students. Annual tuition ranges from $11,935 to $15,195, depending on the grade, although the school also offers need-based financial aid.

It has a tradition of competitive sports teams, with recent alumni such as Oher and McDonald’s AllAmerican and Memphis basketball star Austin Nichols. But it also carries academic prestige. According to the Briarcrest website, 99% of the student body goes on to college.

Freeze arrived there in 1992. His tenure coincided with the school’s move from East Memphis to the outskirts of Shelby County, which mirrored the population growth of the Memphis suburbs and the construction of an expansive campus.

He served as a coach for the school’s volleyball, girls basketball and football programs, in addition to his roles as a classroom teacher and dean of students. Freeze left to take an administrative position at Ole Miss under former Coach Ed Orgeron in 2004.

During that time, Freeze went 305-63 as the Briarcrest girls basketball coach and qualified for seven consecutive state championship games. He ascended to head football coach in 1995 and installed a no-huddle spread offense with great success. He finished with an overall record of 99-23 on the football field at Briarcrest, including two state titles in his final three years.

Those championship seasons were played at the sparkling Saints Sportsplex, which opened in 2000, and featured Oher and future NFL defensive lineman Greg Hardy.

A new high school was constructed in Eads by 2003 at a reported cost of $11 million, and the school’s middle and elementary schools moved into buildings there in 2009 as part of an additional $18 million expansion. By 2014, a $7 million chapel and performing arts center were added.

In many ways, it is no longer the school Freeze left 13 years ago. But he remains very much a part of its legacy.