At first blush, it looks like Morehouse Faculty tying the soccer knot with Terance Mathis is the right marriage.
He’s a identified determine within the Atlanta space, having performed highschool soccer in close by Stone Mountain, Georgia, and was a star huge receiver for the Falcons.
Mathis additionally checks the field of a candidate with expertise as a play-caller and head coach.
However it’s the teaching background — a restricted and unsuccessful one — that ought to create not less than a little bit of hesitation within the notion that Mathis can take “the soccer program to the subsequent degree,” as athletic director Harold Ellis mentioned in a press launch on Friday.
In 2011, Mathis landed his first collegiate gig as offensive coordinator at Savannah State. The expertise didn’t go properly. The Tigers, then within the MEAC, scored 92 factors that first season. It was the bottom complete within the convention for a group that completed 1-10 general.
The next yr was marginally higher. Savannah State scored 147 factors, or 13.4 per recreation, in a yr that noticed the Tigers end with one other double-digit loss season.
Some 5 years later, after leaving Savannah State, Mathis spent 4 years as head coach at Pinecrest Academy in Cumming, Georgia. Pinecrest went 7-25 beneath Mathis and he was not retained after the 2019 season. His final identified teaching stops have been at excessive faculties Blessed Trinity in 2020 and Fellowship Christian in 2021.
Regardless of his prolonged expertise as a university and highschool coach, it issues that Mathis wasn’t a part of a profitable program in these roles.
It’s very true for a Morehouse group that hasn’t been above .500 since 2018 and is coming off a 2023 season by which it went 1-9 and fired alum Gerald Wilcher eight months after he took the job.
That context alone ought to most likely place Morehouse beneath the identical scrutiny for hiring Mathis because it was for going after ex-Grambling State coach Hue Jackson, who additionally didn’t fare properly as a head coach.
Morehouse is in determined straits to show round its soccer fortunes and has tried to place acquainted names over some degree of teaching accomplishment to execute a fast repair that seemingly gained’t come.
However Mathis is probably going on this scenario as a result of the pool of accessible coaches, notably so near Nationwide Signing Day, was not plentiful. And that immediately falls on the administration for the way its dealt with the search.
By no fault of his personal, Mathis is positioned in a difficult scenario that his expertise hasn’t signaled he’s outfitted to deal with or overcome.
Getting the Maroon Tigers to that subsequent degree will begin at sq. one.
