If Tucson High wasn’t in such dire need of a head coach for its upcoming football season, Malcolm Nelson would be content working his usual gig as a medical transporter in Green Valley.
But Nelson, 50, is a coach. Always has been.
Nelson, a former assistant with the Tucson Sugar Skulls — the Old Pueblo’s IFL franchise — and the Iowa Barnstormers, was looking ahead to a relaxing fall when he learned Richard Sanchez was stepping down as the Badgers’ coach following one season in charge.
Sanchez, a two-time state champion at Sunnyside High School, left his post with just over a month before Tucson High’s Sept. 2 opener against Mesa Dobson. A TUSD spokesperson said only that Sanchez issued a notice to leave for undisclosed reasons.
“When it happened, I was like any other person looking at the news on the internet, and I’m big on community service; we were that way with the Sugar Skulls,” Nelson said. “So I put my résumé in and said, ‘Why not do what I can do to help them out this year?’ … I saw an opportunity and the administration has been great in helping me turn this around, and that’s what I came here for.”
Was Nelson willing to ask why the head coaching position at Tucson’s largest high school abruptly opened?
“No, and I didn’t ask them,” Nelson said. “My job is to turn this around and leave that up to them.”
Nelson has retained every assistant coach on Sanchez’s staff while adding Sugar Skulls kicker Logan Justus as a special teams coordinator and kicking coach.
“I just told them, ‘This is how we’re doing it,’ and everyone bought in,” Nelson said. “I helped them out and gave them another perspective on certain things.”
Nelson is a Flint, Michigan, native who played college ball at Clemson and Kent State. He has coached football for nearly two decades at the college and indoor football ranks. Nelson served as both the athletic director and assistant coach at Livingstone Stone College in Salisbury, North Carolina. While there, where he coached 2022 IFL Offensive MVP Drew Powell. Nelson spent the summer of 2011 with the NFL’s Pittsburgh Steelers as part of the Bill Walsh Diversity Coaching Fellowship for minority coaches; he coached in two preseason games. He worked for the IFL’s Iowa Barnstormers before moving to Tucson.
Nelson has been around the likes of Ben Roethlisberger, Troy Polamalu, Hines Ward, Antonio Brown and Cameron Hayward, but coaching teenagers could be his biggest task yet.
Nelson knows what he signed up for.
“The job had to be a right fit for me, and it’s a perfect fit. I’ve always done this as a coach. We’ve all gone through obstacles and journeys and had to make sacrifices,” Nelson said. “One thing that Mike Tomlin said (was): ‘Leadership through service.’ At some point, I’m going to have to lead, and I think this is my calling to do that right now.”
Nelson’s boss with the Sugar Skulls, Dixie Wooten, called Nelson “a great fit” at Tucson High.
“One thing about Nelson: he’s got many hats. He’s been an athletic director, he’s been an offensive coordinator, defensive coordinator, so I think he’s the right guy for this job to keep things afloat,” Wooten said. “If they keep him, that’ll be great, too.”
Wooten added: “The guys are going to come in, he’ll make sure they have a simple game plan, and they’re going to surprise some people.”
That “simple game plan” will have to do for now. Nelson has been impressed with “how they bought in quickly,” but noted the Badgers are expected to have a slim playbook — a play-brochure, if you will — during the season.
“As far as schemes and everything, when it all comes down to it, you’re running the same four or five plays all season, then you do certain formations out of them, so you gotta look at it a certain way,” he said. “It’s been a rush, but we can put something together pretty quickly. … It’s been great.
“The kids have a smile on their faces, and this past Monday was the most spirited practice we’ve had. I feel like we really turned a corner. You could just see that fire come back and it happened a lot sooner than I expected.”
Nelson said he isn’t expecting Tucson High to retain him for 2023, though things could change.
“My goal is to just coach this season and coach like it’s my last season, then just let the chips fall where they may,” Nelson said. “I’m keeping my options open, but for now, I’m the head coach of the Tucson High Badgers.”
