MANSFIELD– After just shy of four decades of coaching, legendary Mansfield track and field coach, John Mackey is retiring. The coach that led Mansfield to 14 state titles in the sport, will leave behind a void that will be impossible to replace.
Known as a coach who is dedicated to the smallest details of his constant thought and planning that always went into his coaching and administration of track meets, Mackey has produced not only state team titles in the sport but has produced athletes who have gone on to have great success in college. He is a tireless worker who was always seen at school on Sunday afternoons, working on his classes or preparing for the upcoming weeks’ events in athletics. Mackey served as athletic director for the district for many years, and he managed every detail with endless hours, days, and weeks when others had long since gone home. If it had his name on it, he was going to do whatever it took to see the task completed in the right way.
In the classroom, Mackey was an excellent teacher of higher mathematics. For many years, he taught Algebra and was as dedicated to teaching his classes as he was to his coaching. In full disclosure, I worked with him for a number of years as his principal, and I can openly share with our readers that John is an excellent teacher, and his loss in the classroom will be perhaps lost more or as much as his coaching will be felt.
So last week, I had the pleasure of interviewing John for this story. Since my retirement in 2019, we had visit some on some different occasions, but this was the first conversation we had the opportunity to have in sometime since my retirement. It was a pleasure to reconnect with him, and I hope you enjoy his story as much as I did.
After growing up in Greenwood and later attending the University of Arkansas, John met his future wife, Debbie who lived in Mulberry. The two then moved to the Northeast Arkansas community of Corning where John worked as began his coaching career. Mackey coached in Corning three years before he began to look for an opportunity to return to Western Arkansas where he grew up and was more familiar. That opportunity opened up in Mansfield, and for the next 35 years, Mackey called the Home of the Tigers his home. Over the years, he has had several opportunities to take other jobs based upon the success he had at Mansfield, but he never left. He always felt that it would be foolish for him to leave a community that had been so good to him and had given him the opportunity for success. Mackey was fully invested into the program he had built at Mansfield, and in short, he didn’t want to leave. He was always mindful of the athletes in his program, and he felt a sincere sense of obligation to them.
It is no secret that both John and his wife Debbie are extremely organized and have a keen sense to details. In fact, Debbie used to joke with me that she re-arranged the furniture in their house often. When I asked him about this, John laughed and said, “Debbie is the world’s best housekeeper. She doesn’t just clean, it is a spring cleaning almost every time. She is the kind that will lay down on her back and put her feet on the side of the piano and scoot it. She would not wait on me. I had to be really careful when I came home. I learned early coming home in the dark to turn a light on after stubbing my toe or tripping over a piece of furniture.”
But it was this attention to detail that served Mackey well and earned him the reputation across the state of not only having great teams at the state level but hosting well-organized and managed track meets. Mackey said, “I would cover every scenario in my planning and would try to cover those bases. I would worry a little bit sometimes about who is going to do this or if they have thought about everything that I have. It may be putting out buckets with tennis balls for exchange zones, putting ice chests out with water for whoever is running the benches down to the smallest details, sharpening the pencils, etc. There are so many tasks that need to be done and I would play every scenario over and over again to have a back-up plan and to put the puzzle together. It may take me a little bit, but I would figure out how to do it. For players, I would think about what if this happened, or that happens, and would always have a backup plan.”
Track has been Mackey’s passion for a long time. When I asked him about this, he shared, “It’s not what I started out doing. I loved football and basketball. Jerry Efurd who ended up being a principal at Greenwood High School, was the track coach when I was in high school. I really didn’t want to be a part of track back then. Around my tenth-grade year, he caught me in the gym trying to dunk a basketball. I just wanted to spend every moment in the gym. He came up to me and said “I need you to come high jump.” I told him that I didn’t know about that, and he said, “I’ll teach you.” He talked me into high jumping and that got me hooked on it for the next three years. Eventually, I would fill-in and run or do whatever it took for the team to be successful. We had a pretty good program, so I had a good backround in that (track).”
But when John started his coaching career, track was still not what he wanted to coach. He explained, “I loved football because that is what I was probably best at, and I wanted to coach basketball. So I started volunteering with the football program (at Corning) and with basketball that first year. By the time spring showed up, they needed someone to help in track with the high jump, so I just started working there.”
After the move to Mansfield, opportunities came his way with turnover in various sports. “I had never coached all of the other events in track. I had just coached my high jumpers. So, after all of the other avenues of coaching football and basketball at Mansfield, I felt that track was a “landing spot” for me, and my position was that I would coach whatever. I went to clinics and learned that there was much more to coaching track than running hard. There is strategy involved, managing the athletes, maximizing scoring, and can be a challenge. Some people think I am a decent teacher enough, and I always felt that track, in some ways, required more teaching than some of the other sports. Seventeen events and each one is unique, and I had to learn how to teach event. I took over track at Mansfield in 1999. My first goal was to be match the previous year of being at least second in state. We were second for a couple of years, in fact, four years in a row. Then I thought my goals were high enough if all we were trying to do was to finish second.”
And that’s when his historic run of state title began. Mackey’s team won 17 conference titles in 25 years, including six runners-up. We had a fourth-place team in 2019 and then COVID hit in 2020. So, once I figured out that I didn’t want to be second anymore, we started winning. “
So legendary for the Tigers, coach John Mackey is the only Mansfield head track coach that has ever coached in the Tigers’ current stadium. The next coach will have gigantic shoes to fill.
Mackey’s run included state titles in both indoor and outdoor track and field. “We had kids that believed in themselves. “We did everything from the ground up (building the track program at Mansfield). I am not saying we didn’t have some good help.”
Often times, at many schools, the district may prioritize other sports and add track coaching as a secondary responsibility to a newly-hired coach’s job description. Football and basketball are the primary sports at both schools, and this can be seen at many schools. So for the district moving forward, I am sure great care is being considered in Mackey’s replacement. Not only will he be very difficult to replace as a classroom teacher, but the next track coach will be inheriting a program that has been extremely successful and has brought Mansfield more state titles than any other sport at the school, and that coach will almost certainly feel the pressure to maintain the success of the program that Mackey built.
And a big part of that success was his involvement of athletes who did not necessarily meet the profile or skills of playing in other sports. On the girls side of the athletic program, athletes who may not necessarily translate to good volleyball, basketball, or softball players, often found a home in John’s track program and later went on to become good track athletes. One such example is Meghan Rose who became and outstanding distance runner in high school under John’s coaching and later went on to run in college. A program alumnus such as Rose, in my unsolicited opinion, would be a good consideration to continue John’s legacy in the Mansfield track program.
When asked about his track athletes, John said, “We’ll take anybody. Everybody has talent. I would tell our athletes that there are no starters in track. Everyone could make a contribution to the team’s success. I found that success is in the relationships with others and genuinely caring about others.”
Student-athletes like John and his approach to the program. His program always had good participation numbers, even with the end of basketball season and the start of softball in the spring. Students found a home in track where they knew he cared about every athlete.
Mackey also knew that students participating in track were also developing skills that would help them in school and later in life. “Time management is critical for students.” He knew that travel time to meets, practice time, etc., students had to still maintain their grades in school, and he would not let them use the sport as an excuse to miss school or to miss assignments. If a student had an assignment, for example, the day following a meet, he expected the student to plan for it and to have their work done so that they met the classroom deadline just like any other student was expected to do. Such expectations pushed students to be successful in both school and in the sport of track and field, and more importantly, later on after graduation.
Life after retirement for an educator and coach of 38 years will be the next challenge. Mackey is open about the challenges of retirement. He is going to miss his students, athletes, colleagues, and the many friends and supporters of not only him and his program, but also the many others around the state. After working seven days a week and 16 hours a day, it will be difficult for him to just slow down. He will concentrate on their grandson, reuniting himself with his wife Debbie, and taking the opportunity to travel. But retirement will be an adjustment, and he is aware of this and is thinking about how to address the rest of his life.
John is an excellent writer, and one day you may see a book he has written on a variety of topics that were inclusive in his career. But for now, in his words, “We are going to do stuff when we want to. We may actually go see the world a little bit. Other than that, our plans revolve around our grandson. We are the ultimate helicopter grandparents.”
But as much as things change, with all of the changes that result from legends such as John Mackey who retire, and the changes that occur for other reasons, the facts remain the same. The spirit of competition and championship success that John Mackey brought to Mansfield lives on well into the future. The principles of success, and the work and commitment that are necessary to achieve success, remain the same. When I think of Coach Mackey, I think of a quote from perhaps the greatest distance runner that has ever lived. In the sport that Mackey loves so dearly, Steve Prefontane, who ran distance at the University of Oregon and for the United States Olympic team in the Munich Olympic Games in 1972, is thought to be one of the greatest runners of all time. Prefontane, or “Pre” as he was known to his teammates and competitors, was always known for giving his all in every event he ran. And in the same way that John Mackey coached his many champion runners and field event athletes, the words of Steve Prefontane come to mind, “To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift.”
Coach John Mackey has a gift and a passion for coaching, and he gave his all to every athlete he coached. He did not sacrifice his talent for teaching and coaching every child who came to him. But that is what the great ones do. Coach Mackey has the gift, and he has never sacrificed that gift.
On behalf of everyone at RNN Sports, and as someone who had the privilege to work alongside of him, I wish him a very happy and well-deserved retirement. He will be missed by so many. But we are all happy for him and his wonderful wife Debbie who now have the time together that they have given so much of to others over the years.
Well done, John Mackey. You should be in the Arkansas Hall of Fame of Coaches. You have earned it.
