Marion Quinn
Earning eight varsity letters as a two-sport collegiate athlete might sound like the path less traveled.
And it was for Marion Quinn, growing up in Tuskegee, Alabama, and then becoming a collegiate baseball and football stalwart at Kentucky State University.
However, that path might never have happened had a rule change not dramatically altered what sports Quinn could and could not participate in at Tuskegee Institute High School.
You see, the Korean War had flooded high schools with grown men who had served the United States and returned home as war veterans but not yet high school graduates.
“I was playing Babe Ruth Baseball and then my junior year, I started playing football,” said Quinn, a longtime school and athletics administrator in Knox County Public Schools. “Because back then in Alabama, we had guys playing high school football at 21, 22 years old. They were coming back from the Korean War and finishing up their high school (education). These were grown men and were too big for me to play.
“And, then, they put in a rule that you couldn’t play (high school football in Alabama) if you were over 18.”
That rule change not only dramatically altered Quinn’s immediate future, but it also helped facilitate a decades-long career in education, coaching and administration. A former Knoxville College football coach who also served as Austin-East’s principal and helped bring that school a football championship, among myriad other roles, Quinn is a 2025-26 TSSAA Distinguished Service Award winner.
“Well, when I went to college and played and from little league to high school to even college, I had coaches that I admired and that kind of mentored me,” said Quinn, a Kentucky State University Hall of Famer. “I saw what they were doing and I said, ‘Hey, I may want to do that one day.’ Training and mentoring young men or young guys to become men. I guess that’s what kind of pushed me that way because I always had coaches that pushed us.”
Quinn’s likewise had a long-running role as a Knox County School Systems county-wide athletics director – an endeavor he embraced as an opportunity to be a resource for more coaches and schools, as well as also an element in Quinn’s induction earlier this decade into the Tennessee Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association Hall of Fame.
“When I got the system-wide job, then I was able to help more people and even help young directors that came in, to help their coaches and show them how to help kids,” Quinn said. “It was just an opportunity to help more people.”
Unsurprisingly, with a playing career spanning the 1960s and ’70s, as well as a professional current that’s run into the 2020s, Quinn isn’t short on remarkable moments.
“There’s a lot of favorite memories,” Quinn, specifically highlighting his work as Knox County’s system-wide athletics head, said. “Winning our city championship in Babe Ruth Baseball all three years that I played, especially my first year, we were not expected to win. High school having a good year and being able to get a scholarship (to Kentucky State).
“College, I think my freshman year we won two games and then my senior year, we went to the Orange Blossom Classic, end-of-the-year bowl in the Orange Bowl against Florida A&M.
“Never will forget when I became principal at Austin-East and selecting a head coach after two years there, we won a state championship and so those are some of my fondest memories.”
TSSAA proudly salutes Marion Quinn for his decades of contribution to high school athletics as an administrator in Tennessee.
