How Hayesville football's father-son duo has built up their relationship on and off the field

HAYESVILLE — Taylor McClure’s coach holds him to a higher standard than his Hayesville football teammates.

McClure leads his team in rushing yards with 397 and tackles with 25. As one of Hayesville’s best players, he gets pushed hard on and off the field.

Of course, when the head coach is your father, that means those standards and expectations follow you home.

“You don’t want to treat him any differently than you do other players,” Chad McClure said. “Then again, you’re his dad. You want to see him do things the right way.”

The McClures have coached and played Hayesville to a 4-1 start, trying to get the Yellow Jackets to back-to-back seasons at .500 or better for the first time since 2006-07.

Taylor said he benefits from the added expectations his dad places on him, and it motivates him to perform better to make his dad proud.

Chad has now coached both Taylor and his other son, Blake. Both were on the roster in 2020, Taylor’s freshman year.

“It’s harder on them than it is on me,” Chad said. “I think they feel more pressure to perform at a high level. But it’s rewarding to see them be successful.”

Because they are a football family at heart, it’s hard to avoid talking about football at home. Sometimes conversations about how the week went will come up.

Mostly, football-related talk at home is about Taylor’s recruitment.

Taylor visited Duke early this month. He’s received offers from Anderson (S.C.), Elon and Gardner-Webb, along with three military academies — Navy, Army and Air Force.

“They’re doing stuff no other college in America is doing while still playing football,” Taylor said. “They have to be even more disciplined, and they have to show up each day to put in the dedication and hard work.”

Chad knows he can’t pick a school for Taylor because he won’t be the one playing there. Instead, he’s been encouraging Taylor to lean into his faith for his decision.

“(My dad) has done really good telling me to pray about it and let God lead me,” Taylor said. “If I pick it’ll be a mistake, but if I let Him pick it’ll work out.”

Chad encourages Taylor to play multiple sports, not only to help with conditioning in the offseason but because a school the size of Hayesville needs kids to play multiple sports to fill out teams. It helps with college recruiting, too, because coaches like seeing multisport athletes.

Taylor is a forward on Hayesville’s basketball team and played during the 2021-22 season, when the Yellow Jackets went undefeated to a state championship. On the track team, Taylor runs the 100 and 200 meters and the 400 relay. He also throws shot put.

Taylor beat Chad’s school shot put record last spring with a throw of 49 feet, 6 inches. Chad’s record had stood for 28 years.

“Beating it was great, especially because he got to watch it,” Taylor said. “We’ve had a couple kids close to it, but none of them — one was like an inch off — but it was pretty cool to beat it.”

Offseason conditioning, in the form of other sports, has left Taylor stronger and more consistent this season. He’s nearly reaching eight yards per carry, up significantly from 4.8 yards per carry last season. His tackles per game are lower than years past, but Taylor said he expects that to change when Hayesville goes from facing spread offenses in the nonconference slate to run-based offenses in Smoky Mountain play.

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“His work ethic in the weight room has been really, really strong,” Chad said. “He got so much stronger in the offseason. He’d be out on the turf running and doing agility drills.”

Once practices and games are over, the McClures try not to take football home. They bond over movies, with their favorite to watch being Adam Sandler’s “Waterboy” — a football movie, of course.

“It’s important in the position I’m in as the coach and his dad to make sure he knows my love for him is not football- related,” Chad said.

Evan Gerike is the high school sports reporter for the Asheville Citizen Times, part of the USA Today Network. Email him at egerike@citizentimes.com or follow him on Twitter @EvanGerike. Please support this type of journalism with a subscription to the Citizen Times.

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: How football built Hayesville's Taylor and Chad McClure's relationship