Doctor is in: Multifaceted coach Dale Stott has 6-1 Ironwood Ridge HS football fit as a fiddle

After a “painful” 2022, Ironwood Ridge football is one of Southern Arizona’s feel-good stories.

Led by second-year head coach Dale Stott, the Nighthawks are off to a 6-1 start after they went 1-9 last season.

Formerly a medical doctor (he was a football coach, too, in other locales before moving back to Southern Arizona), Stott returned to the Tucson area after he retired from medicine to be close to his family. But when he took IRHS job, he inherited a program that returned just one starter from 2021.

He said his reintroduction to Arizona football was miserable.

“It was painful, but that fueled our fire and made us hungry for wins and we worked our tail off in the offseason and summer,” Stott said.

According to AZFootballArchives.com, 1-9 is the Nighthawks’ worst single-season mark (other than the 2020 COVID-19 season, when they went 0-2). The Ironwood Ridge High School campus on West Naranja Drive, just west of North La Cholla Blvd., opened in 2001.

This season, Stott’s team has been able to get off to IR’s best start since 2016. That year, the Nighthawks went 9-3, reaching the state quarterfinals.

“It’s fantastic. It’s fantastic,” Stott said. “6-1 is a great feeling — a lot better than 1-6.”

This season, they won five games in a row to rise to No. 8 in the rankings. That’s right in line with another quarterfinal opportunity — or better.

“Oh, incredible. After something like that, all glory to God I gotta say,” IR senior quarterback/free safety Dominic Norris said when asked about the 2023 start after last year’s struggles. “It’s just incredible, it’s a great feeling to do this but we know we were capable of this the whole time with all the work we put in.”

Stott went to Amphitheater High School, winning a state championship as a player in 1975. He has coached since 1983, when he was an assistant at Santa Rita while in med school.

In 1998, Stott moved to St. George, Utah, where he and his wife Deborah, a critical care nurse, founded Zion Pain Management Center. Then, in 2012, he opened a second clinic in Henderson, Nevada.

He said it was tough to balance coaching and his clinic. He said his medical experience doesn’t really help in football, except in that one area.

“Not really,” Stott said with a laugh. “Maybe in helping people recover from injuries because I was a pain specialist, so injecting shoulders, knees, things like that probably help but most it gave me the liberty to be able to set my own schedule and that’s what allowed me to coach.”

Working at Ironwood Ridge also means he returns to Amphitheater Public Schools.

“It’s great, I love it,” Stott said. “I’m happy to be back in the Amphi school district; great district; good tradition. We want to get back to winning ways.”

Stott was an assistant coach for 20 years at Pine View High School in St. George and head coach of the semi-pro Zion Lions. He was also at one point the head coach of the Mastini Canavase Italian Professional Football Team.

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“It’s amazing, he’s one the greatest coaches ever,” Norris said. “He’s smart, intelligent, high IQ and it’s easy to have confidence in us with a person like that.

“He’s just very smart, a very smart man.”

Norris passed for 502 yards in the Nighthawks’ last game, a 37-22 win over Tucson High, which, according to AllSportsTucson.com, is the Southern Arizona single-game passing record. He passed former Marana signal-caller and current ASU quarterback Trenton Bourguet, who threw for 477 against Cienega in 2017.

He passed for that much despite only practicing that Thursday due to an ankle injury.

“I just stayed to watch the film and just stuck to the plan and it went as we planned, to come out with the dub,” Dominic Norris said.

Junior Aiden Norris, Dominic’s brother, caught three passes for 115 yards and two touchdowns against the Badgers.

“It’s amazing. He’s one of the best coaches I’ve ever had — probably the best coach I’ve ever had,” Aiden Norris said. “He’s helped me get so many opportunities to get on the field and get touchdowns.”

In St. George, the doctor/football coach added another slash to his title: cookie bakery co-owner, though he doesn’t think they’ll open up a southern branch of Sloth Cookies. He opened Sloth Cookies in 2019 with his son Logan.

“Probably not,” he said, laughing again. “A little busy but yeah that Sloth Cookies was a fun thing.”