The Unconventional Success Story of Fairview Coach Chris Hughes

Fairview High School football Chris Hughes has had unconventional success.

The trouble with telling Chris Hughes’s story is knowing where to begin. The 50-year old Fairview High football coach has lived a fun, eventful, and certainly improbable life, and spent his summer at the forefront of the news for his flag football exploits. We sat down with Hughes this summer to discuss his unusual story.

The off-the-script beginning

Hughes’ football career ended over three decades ago—or so he thought. The pinnacle of his career as a youngster came as a third-string eighth-grader in his hometown of Fairview.

“[The coach] told me I was the meanest player on the team, pound for pound. But I only weighed 40 pounds,” Hughes laughs.

Genetics brought his formal career to a halt. But the desire never left. Hughes and his buddies frequently played backyard tackle football until high school graduation.

“It was all of us who didn’t play on the high school team… and I played quarterback on one of the teams. We played every day from 13 years old, all the way up,” he remembers.

Fast-forward to college life at MTSU, when Hughes organized a flag football team for a school intramural league. 

“I organized a dorm team and got it together,” he recalls. “We had a guy that played quarterback in high school who started playing, but wasn’t very good. I ended up quarterbacking and falling in love with the game.”

Playing wasn’t enough. Hughes wanted to win—and soon, recruited a team to do that. The next year, his squad won an intramural title at MTSU. 

The rise of the Mean Machine

That team was the first version of the Mean Machine, the squad that’s brought Hughes to national prominence as an adult. Soon, Hughes discovered a vast universe of flag football beyond Murfreesboro, and wanted to be in the middle of it. 

Hughes has played many versions of flag football. The Mean Machine played the 7-on-7 kind, within the National Intramural Recreational Sports Association. It made the national semifinals twice, and even received a subsidy from the school to finance travel costs and tournament entry fees. 

“We played in Nebraska, we played in Florida, we played everywhere,” he recalls. “It was a club sport sponsored by MTSU. We took a 12-passenger van and we drove all over the country playing flag football,” he said.

Hughes was having the time of his life. He wanted it to last. He spent nine years at MTSU, the last two, in graduate school. 

“Two years, I took a one-hour racquetball [class], just so I could play intramural [flag football],” Hughes said.

With Hughes at quarterback, the Mean Machine became a nearly-unstoppable force. And that presented a road block.

“I was at the nationals every year, and they decided to make it four-year eligibility because the older teams were running it,” he recalls.

Reality check

Hughes’s compromise between not being a student forever, while still pursuing his passion, was working with the campus recreation center. He helped organize leagues and run tournaments. 

This was the mid-1990s, and Hughes had a clear vision of his future. He was directing intramural sports and planned to stay at MTSU in that capacity. But Hughes got passed over for a promotion and started to look elsewhere. 

Fairview coach Chris Hughes poses with his young son.

“I had some sour grapes,” he admits. If it wasn’t for that, I might not have left.”

Hughes interviewed to teach in the Williamson County school system. The county videoed interviews, and late one summer, he got a call from a stranger at Fairview Middle School’ who’d seen his.

“Larry Large was the principal, and he said, ‘Can you coach football?’ Hughes remembers.

“And I said, ‘Well, my background is baseball.’ I said, ‘I never played football, but I think I can do it.’

“And he goes, ‘Well, I hired a coach out of Indiana, and he hasn’t shown up, and we’ve got a game Thursday.’ And it was Tuesday.”

The thought of coaching football hadn’t crossed Hughes’ mind—but that day, he became the Fairview Middle coach. 

Fairview Middle went 1-7 that first season. When it was over, Hughes knew he needed a philosophy. He attended multiple coaching clinics and picked the brains of many football people. Unsurprisingly, he picked an unconventional approach in the end.

“I figured out what I wanted to do, which is, run the Hugh Wyatt double-wing. We ran ‘zero wedge’ and ended up playing with Brentwood and Grassland. We were able to play with teams we were nowhere near as good as, and from that point, I stayed 12 years at the middle school.”

By this time, his flag-playing days had taught him plenty.

“A lot of the sets that we run, a lot of the things we do, I got from other [flag] teams over the years” he said. “[Some teams] don’t even play any more. So it looks new because in 1987… when I was getting beat, they ran it on us. Now, we were running it and these new people haven’t seen it.”

A different kind of scheme

Hughes was still actively playing flag football, including the co-ed version. Skilled female players are a scarce commodity. One night, Hughes spotted a prospect at an MTSU intramural game. 

“I saw her and [asked] one of my buddies who played with me, and said, ‘Who is that?’ and he said, ‘Stephanie,’ and said, ‘She’s super fast.’

“She was playing intramurals with her sorority. And I said, ‘Why don’t you see if she’ll play co-ed with us?’”

Hughes’s Fairview team takes on Cascade in an August 2018 scrimmage.

Hughes soon had a star player. He and Stephanie became close as they traveled to tournaments together, but he wanted more.

“I couldn’t get her interested in me [romantically],” he said.

Hughes admits “I probably asked her out a hundred times.” The team was at a tournament in Pensacola, spending down time between games at a local activity park, complete with putt-putt, skee-ball, and other games and diversions.

Hughes calls Stephanie “the most competitive person I’ve ever met.” That day, he figured out a way to take advantage of that.

“I challenged her to the best out of 10 [games], that we’d bet, and I had $100 against her going out on a date with [me]. … To make a long story short, we came down to four-and-four, and I said, ‘Let’s settle it with go-karts.’ 

“And she was watching, and there was this red car that was really fast… she’s knocking kids down getting to that car, that’s how competitive she is. There’s like a 10-year-old kid who’s getting the green car, because she’s getting through there. And I get in the one behind here, and her car is so much faster, it’s not even fair. … She’s taunting me and telling me [she’s winning] right before the finish line.

“And right before the finish line, her car died, and I put my feet up, and I drove by, and I went, ‘We’re going out on a date!’ and she’s yelling. 

“But what she didn’t know, while she was in the bathroom, I gave the [go-kart attendant] 20 bucks to cut her car off at the end of the race. He flipped the switch back on [after the race] and says, ‘Try it now. Try it now.

“And she starts yelling at me. And the [attendant] goes, ‘She’s not worth 20 bucks, man, she’s crazy.”

Stephanie’s retelling of the story is consistent with Chris’s.

“He was shady, but he was honest [about what he did],” she laughs. “I probably wouldn’t have admitted it then, and I probably wouldn’t tell him, but I was okay with [losing].”

It was the best money Hughes ever spent. Stephanie became his best friend, then, his wife.

“He kind of grows on you. At the end of the day, 16 years later, here we are with a couple of kids, so I’m good with it,” she smiles.

Better than the life of his dreams

Hughes planned to leave Fairview for good when high school ended. Had life gone according to plan, Hughes would still MTSU, running the recreation center as a means to play flag football. Instead, he’s a married father and a successful high school coach. 

And yes, one who still plays flag football. He estimates he’s had over 500 teammates through the years. 

The team won national championships in 2007, 2008 and 2009, and is still going strong. The Mean Machine made it to the quarterfinals of the AFFL’s 128-team national tournament. In the midst of former NFL-turned-flag-football quarterbacks like Vince Young, Seneca Wallace and Danny Wuerffel, there was the 5-foot-8, 200-pound Hughes slinging passes with the best of them, in a game televised on the NFL Network, this summer.

Stephanie is a blessing in so many ways. She’s supportive of Chris’s unconventional lifestyle, which still allows him to travel and play flag football. She also takes a keen interest in her husband’s coaching career. Chris says he’s often quizzed when he gets home after games.

“I want to know why we ran,” she admits. “I want to know why we ran Cover-2 and what we were doing going for it when we should have punted. He’s a gambler, so he likes to do those things. He’s an offensive guy and I know he’s always gonna go for it. And sometimes, I’m like, ‘Just run the clock out. Please, just run the clock out!’

The clock isn’t running out on his football coaching career. 

Fairview High was a revolving door of coaches before Hughes was promoted to that head coaching job a decade ago. That 1-7 first season in middle school remains his only losing season in his career. 

According to high school football expert Murphy Fair, Hughes is 80-28 at Fairview. Among active Tennessee high school coaches, Hughes’s .741 winning percentage ranks 11th among the 96 men who’ve coached at least 100 games. Last year, Fairview went 9-4 overall, including a perfect 5-0 mark in Region 6-3A. 

Any thought that Hughes’s success was a fluke is long gone. The Yelowjackets are the preseason pick to win the region again. 

“He has always been so, just, game-oriented, in anything,” Stephanie said. “He thinks through everything. As a coach, you can talk to your quarterback, and they get smart quarterbacks. And [the staff] helps you think through things, but when you can do it on your own and you have that game-savvy [coaching], flag [has helped.]”

Hughes remains easygoing, grateful and humble through it all. His AFFL bio reads “third-string middle-school quarterback.” Hughes points out that’s not even correct: he was a running back. 

“I backed into my job,” Hughes admits. “I feel like God works that way. … The fact that that guy from Indiana never showed up, never called, the fact that I was in that loop, and I was a Fairview guy, and he said, ‘Let’s just hire a Fairview guy,’ [was divine intervention.]”

That sense of blessing is one he tries to impart to his players. 

“God’s been so good to me,” he continued. “I always say, I’m too blessed to be stressed. … I always say [to my players], ‘I love you and God loves you, no matter what.