How 1990s MBA friendship — including Clark Lea and Barton Simmons — is shaping Nashville football today

The original stairs are still there, relics among the lavish outgrowth and upgrades that have since reshaped the Montgomery Bell Academy campus. In another time, they led to Currey Gymnasium.

The building was bankrolled in the 1950s by one of the shrewdest businessmen in Nashville history, the late Brownlee O. Currey Sr., who, despite his financial forecasting ability couldn’t have predicted how four boys from the 1990s would use his gym to carve a chapter into the city’s football storybook.

Clark Lea, Ingle Martin, Jonas Rodriguez and Barton Simmons were sports camp counselors there in the summer of 1999. Someone asked them to coach pickup basketball games, but they did more.

They watched players compete for a little bit and then broke for lunch.

Then, “we held a draft,” Martin said.

And created league standings. And held a postseason tournament.

“We weren't going to do something halfway,” Lea said. “We were not just trying to create a fun experience for the campers, we were trying to create a dynasty among kids camps.”

Rodriguez believes that was the genesis of the four friends’ coaching careers that still shape Nashville today.

Lea, a thick-necked MBA nose guard and fullback, became Vanderbilt’s head coach three years ago and hired Simmons, a stretchy wide receiver and defensive back, as his general manager.

Martin, a four-star high school quarterback who played in college and the NFL, created a powerhouse at Christ Presbyterian Academy, where he’s won three championships as the football coach and is now also the athletic director. Rodriguez, a workhorse running back, won three state titles as a defensive coordinator and now is the Battle Ground Academy football coach.

The lifelong friends' football work got started with a basketball job. Simmons drafted a really good team, he remembers, led by a kid he thought was pretty good. That was Josh Bone, who wound up contributing to two NCAA Tournament teams at Tennessee and is now an assistant coach at Tennessee State.

Martin still chuckles about it.

“The parents probably thought we were crazy,” he said.

Clark Lea had NFL dreams, but Ingle Martin was the star

Back then, Lea didn’t envision a future coaching in the Southeastern Conference. He and his buddies were just high school football stars living one Friday night to the next.

“I wanted to be an NFL player. Kids dream that way at first,” Lea said.

Before families and careers, they had competitions — “heated competitions,” Rodriguez said — during video game matches on PlayStation’s NCAA College Football.

Before they starred in high school and college, they had to get past each other in recess.

Rodriguez and Simmons met in kindergarten, became close, and their families became friends. They took beach vacations together and brought a football so Simmons’ dad, Keith, could play all-time quarterback in their one-on-one games.

They met Martin around second grade through his sisters, who attended University School of Nashville with them. Lea came along in middle school; he and Simmons played a lot of pickup ball and got dugout access at Nashville Sounds games when Lea’s dad, Clark Sr., was the team doctor.

They were still incubating.

Simmons was the analyst type, a trait he utilized as a successful college recruiting reporter for 247Sports. He could name the starting five on a Kentucky basketball national championship team without thinking, Martin said, and understood the relevance when MBA faced Pearl-Cohn and Tennessee legend John Henderson on the football field.

Lea was business-like, organized, but with a funny side. Rodriguez was a football scheme nerd. “You had to really fight to keep up with him on the mental side of football,” Simmons said. “I’m not surprised he’s a head coach.”

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Everybody saw Martin as the future star. He was so good at soccer and basketball that MBA football and basketball coach Ricky Bowers had to convince him football was his future. Martin became one of the nation’s top recruited quarterbacks out of high school — before going to Florida, Furman, then the NFL — but he also left MBA with the school’s longest field goal record, 55 yards.

“We played a lot of games on Friday nights,” Rodriguez said. “But we played a whole lot more in the backyard.”

What Ricky Bowers said about that MBA football era

Change rumbled beneath MBA football in the late 1990s.

In 1997, the TSSAA split public and private schools into separate divisions for the first time. And the Big Red, which celebrated its program’s 100th birthday in 1998, was trying to regain relevance.

MBA reached the ‘97 state finals but hadn’t won a title since 1968, before the TSSAA went to a playoff system. Three of its previous teams were crowned champions based on rankings alone. “Mythical championships,” Bowers said. “That’s not to disparage them. But that’s what they were.”

Lea believes that Bowers was entering his most intense era around that time.

“I remember Coach Bowers, at one point, came to school with a black eye and the rumor was that it had been a pickup game at the YMCA gone awry,” Lea said. “He just lived to compete in everything he did.”

Before playing Brentwood Academy in the 1998 state championship, Bowers was asked about coaching against Carlton Flatt, the state’s winningest active coach at the time whom Bowers had once been an assistant under. “He goes to bed at 10 p.m. and gets up at 6:15 a.m.,” Bowers told The Tennessean. “I go to bed later and get up earlier.”

Bowers coached six combined football and basketball titles at MBA, before starting those programs at Ensworth and winning nine more championships in the two sports.

The 1998 team mirrored that whether it wanted to or not. Bowers said Martin, a sophomore that season, was carefree to the point of being lackadaisical. He got blamed for breaking a practice rule one day and had to get in The Box — a punishment tool Bowers used with four cones placed a few yards apart on the field, in the shape of a square.

When Bowers played players in The Box, the had to take one tackle from every senior on the team. Martin claims to this day that he was framed by a senior in practice and didn’t deserve it: “They were looking for an excuse to put me in The Box,” he said.

“I do remember Ingle being particularly nonchalant as a sophomore,” Bowers said. “He was super talented and could do most everything better than everyone else without trying. So my job was to get him to try harder. I don’t know all the methods I used, but I'm sure I pulled them all out.”

Lea talks to his Vanderbilt players about how “shared suffering” creates a bond. But Martin didn’t share his experience in The Box.

He might be better because of it.

“When I hear stories of guys who played with (Martin) in the NFL, they talk about how competitive he is,” Simmons said. “That was something he was still … evolving through in high school, sort of finding his competitive demeanor. It took some refinement in his early days.”

MBA football has arguably greatest team in 1999

Hunter Hillenmeyer doesn’t think MBA’s 1998 team was supposed to win the Division II-AA state championship, but it did.

Simmons made the game’s decisive play, tipping away a pass that went for an interception on Brentwood Academy’s final drive, securing MBA’s 21-19 victory for its first state championship in 20 years.

“If they scored a touchdown we were probably cooked,” said Hillenmeyer, who was an MBA senior linebacker at the time. He went on to star at Vanderbilt and play eight NFL seasons. “We beat a team that was probably better than us. We had some good players in our class obviously, but it was really the two classes behind us ... that were stacked.”

MBA’s success exploded in 1999, which was Lea, Rodriguez and Simmons’ senior season. Martin was a junior and the starting QB by that point, buried in letters from colleges. Many believe that group to be the best football team in school history and one of Tennessee’s best ever.

It won nine of 12 games by 30 points or more, the outlier being a 26-21 victory over nationally ranked Bolles School out of Florida. MBA ran Christian Brothers right out of the state championship game, 49-15. Martin ran for three touchdowns and threw for two more. Rodriguez, who missed games down the stretch due to a hamstring injury, returned and ran for a score.

“That was one of those games where … We knew that team could be good, but I think that even surpassed expectations,” Rodriguez said.

MBA won state titles in three of the next four seasons. Rodriguez and Simmons soon went off to Yale. Lea played college baseball first, but returned to play football at Vanderbilt. They were also part of a 1998 basketball state title and Martin was also on a 2000 basketball championship.

Martin led another unbeaten MBA football state title team in 2000 before going to Florida.

Life came pretty quickly after that.

How the four friends stay connected

They aren’t the kind to assemble each autumn, squeeze into old letter jackets and clink glasses to the glory days. The past stays exactly where it’s supposed to be, Martin believes.

But like the stairs below Currey Gymnasium, the boys are still here.

Simmons can’t believe they stuck with football. “You assume everyone is going to phase out of it,” he said. “If you’d told us at 12 years old that we’d all have these jobs, that would have been a dream, honestly.”

All agree they would have lost touch if they worked in different cities.

Their current setup allows Martin and Rodriguez time to visit Vanderbilt practices. Lea can see them when he recruits locally. Three of Martin’s former CPA players — Langston Patterson, Kane Patterson and London Humphreys — are on the Commodores roster this year.

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Humphreys’ senior season in 2022 was stuff of legend, with him belting home runs one day and winning track championships the next. Lea, Simmons and Martin followed along in a text thread together.

They’re all married with children now. Rodriguez and Simmons were the best men in each other’s weddings. Rodriguez has four kids. Simmons and Lea have three and Martin has two.

“I see Ingle more at youth basketball and football and soccer games more so than any other time,” Rodriguez said.

Martin drove home recently with his 11-year-old son, Williams, in the passenger seat following a baseball practice. It was the end of a 14-hour day. One of Martin’s other friends had watched the sun set with him earlier and remarked how they were living in their “wonder years.”

Because one day, “you wonder where they went,” Martin said.

Reach sports writer Tyler Palmateer at tpalmateer@tennessean.com and on the X platform, formerly Twitter, @tpalmateer83.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Clark Lea, Ingle Martin and friends' MBA era shaped Nashville football