A key to Coach E. B. “Red” Etter’s remarkable success has always been his fine character, best illustrated in his own words: “Whatever honors and awards that have come my way, I was always on the sidelines. The real heroes are the hundreds of young men who have toiled on the practice [and] playing fields week after week.” Certainly, many of those young men would respectfully disagree as to who was the true hero. One of Tennessee’s winningest high school football coaches of all time, Etter guided Chattanooga Central for twenty-seven seasons before moving on to Baylor High School for fourteen years. His Central teams won a staggering seven state championships, while his Baylor squad took the title in 1973. That Baylor team also had the distinction of being ranked number one in the nation by a Minnesota rating service. In 1984 “Red” received the “National Coach of the Year” award presented by the National High School Coaches Association, based on career achievement. Not just a brilliant football mind, Etter may be one of the few coaches in history to teach Latin and Plane Geometry! “Red” and his wife Helen have two sons, Gene and Bob, both excellent athletes. Gene played baseball for the Chicago Cubs farm teams, while Bob was place kicker for the Atlanta Falcons. “Red” retired in 1984 at the age of seventy, after fifty years of teaching and coaching. That same year, to no one’s surprise, he was honored with the governor’s “Outstanding Tennessean” award.
