Greg Wyant
A predisposition to coaching would have been quite understandable for Greg Wyant, whose late father, the well-regarded Gary Wyant, had been a football assistant at household programs that included Florida State, Georgia, Texas Tech and, most enduringly, the University of Tennessee.
Instead, Greg Wyant – a five-time, state championship-winning assistant football coach in the Volunteer State – first discovered his own love for coaching as a high school senior, when he skippered his own Little League squad.
Some four decades later, Wyant still is giving back to youth – now as Rutherford County Schools’ athletics director – and in the process being honored as a TSSAA Distinguished Service Award recipient for the 2026-27 academic year.
“When I coached Little League Baseball in high school, I discovered that I really, really loved it,” Wyant, an MTSU grad whose TSSAA football championships came during assistant coaching tenures at Riverdale and Smyrna. “My sophomore and junior years of high school, I was an assistant but my senior year I had my own team.
“I kind of drifted around a little bit after I graduated high school, took about 10 years to finish at MTSU, but I got the bug and came back to coaching and education. I guess I really got the bug when I was in high school in being able to coach and watch the kids flourish.”
Through some 16 years in biology classrooms, countless hours in weight rooms and a seven-year stint as Siegel High School’s head football coach, Wyant continued to helped shape the futures of youth in the Midstate.
Once he permanently hung up his whistle for athletics director’s duties, he continued to service an even broader array of students.
That lasted for a decade at Siegel before earlier this year Wyant nailed down the countywide A.D. role in Rutherford County, where he’s been a staple in the school system alongside his wife, Brooke, also a biology teacher.
But it was from first seeing the impact his father had imparted on others that helped Greg Wyant hone the perspective that has shaped his service.
“When Dad got out of (collegiate athletics), Eddie Brown, David Parsons, Conrad Graham, some of his former Tennessee players, they all bought him a trout fishing boat,” Wyant, who's served nearly a decade on the TSSAA Legislative Council, recalled. “They’d get together down on the river and I got to go with them a couple times. It really hit me what a coach is. It was cool to sit and listen to those guys tell stories.
“That's one of the greatest things, when you're a young coach I don't think you ever really realize what job you have. I’ve been to weddings of former players and students, always neat to see, but to watch your guys grow up and be productive citizens in society, that’s what it’s all about. I was at a baseball game and one of my former quarterbacks came up to me with his brand-new baby son, and I got to hold him. That’s what it’s all about: building relationships that last a lifetime.”
TSSAA proudly salutes Greg Wyant for his many years of dedication to student-athletes in Tennessee.
