By Loyd McIntosh
Chris Yeager is celebrating a milestone in 2025.
It was 20 years ago when Chris Yeager was promoted to Head Coach of the Mountain Brook High School Spartans football team following the unexpected departure of Joey Jones.
Yeager’s longevity is rare in a business where the average stay in one place is less than five years. During his two-decade run at Mountain Brook, Yeager has built an impressive résumé: 186 overall wins, 25 playoff victories, 15 winning seasons (three of them during Mountain Brook’s five years in 7A), four semifinal appearances, and advancing to the 6A championship game in 2022.
Winning games and vying for region championships and state titles are important, of course, but Yeager doesn’t gauge success by those metrics. Instead, Yeager is more concerned with the legacy of the young men in Spartan green and gold. “I feel like now, where I am in my career, I’ve learned things from being a head coach that I think I can offer players,” explains Yeager. “I haven’t thought of it much in terms of championships and things like that, but I have thought of it in terms of building lives and equipping players for life after graduation.”
That desire to help players after graduation is one of the reasons why Yeager almost didn’t come to Mountain Brook. But first, a little backstory.
Yeager played college football at the University of North Alabama, immediately jumping into coaching after graduation. In the college ranks, he made stops as an assistant coach at Austin Peay and Troy State before jumping into work as a high school coach.
Yeager was an assistant coach at Peach County High School in Georgia when he received a call from Jones, newly hired as the head coach at Mountain Brook, with an invitation to interview for an assistant coaching position. Yeager says Peach County was on the cusp of becoming a championship-caliber team, and he felt that he could have a greater impact on players in that lower-middle-class community. “Football, for a lot of the kids there, was their only ticket out,” says Yeager. “We were doing everything we could as a staff to try and get one more player a ticket to a better life.”
Regardless, Jones persuaded Yeager to meet with him and a few players, but Yeager initially had the impression that Mountain Brook was the wrong fit. However, as he was driving back home to Georgia, he thought maybe he could make a difference in Mountain Brook after all.
“They knew what they wanted to do in two years, three years, five years. They had a plan for their lives, whereas a lot of kids I was coaching didn’t,” Yeager says. “My initial thought was, ‘you know, these guys don’t need me.’ But It occurred to me while driving back home that these guys can reach people I’ll never reach. They can reach thousands. My thought was that, through the sport of football, maybe we could train these guys to invest their lives in other people.”
I’ve had the opportunity to cover many Mountain Brook games over the years, but one in particular sticks out—the second-round playoff game against Clay-Chalkville in November 2023, a team that went on to win the 6A state title a few weeks later with a perfect 14–0 record and multiple players signing SEC scholarships.
On this night, Mountain Brook was the better team in every way—except the final score. The Spartans went toe-to-toe with Clay-Chalkville, even holding a 13-10 lead late into the third quarter before things slipped away in the fourth, losing 17-13.
I’ve also interviewed many coaches after games like this over the years. Last season, as I was attempting to interview the coach of a team that had lost a close game, an assistant coach stopped me at the door of the locker room and warned me that I need to be careful and not poke that bear.
This wasn’t how Yeager handled the loss at all. On the contrary, Yeager was positively beaming with pride. He knew he had gotten everything possible out of the young men on that team—many of them freshmen and sophomores—and when the tank was all but empty, they found more within themselves and almost beat what is regarded as one of the best teams ever.
“When I walked away from that game, I said, ‘you guys fought like a warrior poet,’” Yeager says. “There are so many things about the outcome that you cannot control but you can control how hard you fight.”
Yeager adds, “We emphasize that you play and fight for the person beside you. If we feel like we played as hard as we can for the person beside us, I’m good with that, and the scoreboard takes care that, most of the time.”
Congratulations on 20 years, Coach Yeager.
