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Sunday evening arrived the way it often has at the start of another McCallie fall football camp. The team gathered in the Bill Cherry Team Room inside the Student Activities Center to listen to head coach Joel Bradford ‘07 discuss the goals and expectations for the upcoming season.
It’s a meeting that has taken place for more than a decade, first with former head coach and current defensive coordinator Ralph Potter at the helm, and now Bradford. The only difference in this meeting and those that had come before it was the absence of one family—the Gentles.
Not since 2017 has there been a McCallie varsity football team without at least one Gentle brother on it, be it the twins, Austin and Jack, middle son Carson, or Cooper, who captained last year’s squad.
“Honestly, it’s a shock,” said Bradford a few days ago. “I miss Cooper already. All the Gentle brothers’ talent on the field was obvious. Just look at all the state championships they helped win. But off the field, in the locker room, in the weight room, you could always count on them to be leaders, to do the right thing. And they were all true gentlemen, no pun intended. You wonder who is going to replace them, how we can recover from it.”
It is a measure of the Gentle brothers’ athletic versatility that not all the state titles won were on the football field. While Austin and Jack, who both graduated in 2021 before heading off to play football at Harvard, helped win Division II Class AAA football titles in 2019 and 2020, they were also an important part of the track team that won the state in the spring of 2021.
Carson, who graduated in 2024, not only saw action on three football championship teams (‘20, ‘21, and ‘23), but was also a key member of the wrestling team that won both the state duals and traditional state title in the winter of 2024, before signing with Tennessee for football.
Then there’s Cooper, who played on both the 2023 and 2024 state championship football teams, but also saw action on those wrestling championship teams of 2024 and last winter’s traditional state championship squad. To cap things off last spring before his college football career begins at Yale, he helped win a track and field championship. And just to underscore how well-rounded Cooper is, he won the Grayson Medal this past spring, which annually goes to the senior who best exemplifies McCallie’s values of Honor, Truth, and Duty.
If you’re doing the math, that’s a total of seven football titles the brothers won, two track and field titles, and five team wrestling championships, not to mention the individual wrestling titles Carson won at 285 in 2024 and Cooper won at 285 (2025) and 215 (2026). Beyond that, both Carson and Cooper wore No. 17 as seniors, an honor the coaches bestow each season on the player that best exemplifies the McCallie way.
As executive athletic director Kenny Sholl said last week, “It was always reassuring to look out and see a Gentle on the field.”
Added strength and conditioning coach Richard Henderson of the impact the Gentle giants had on the program for those nine varsity seasons: “Their internal standard was unreasonably consistent and high. They changed the operating level of those around them. They held themselves to such high standards, and that elevated their teammates’ performances along the way. But they were also never pushy or arrogant. Their humility to be coached hard was amazing. You could get after them, really push them and they always accepted the criticism and the coaching. You just don’t see many kids with that attitude.”
That attitude was present from the beginning, when the twins were choosing where to go to high school at the end of their sixth grade year.
“We knew they were going to Baylor or McCallie,” said Potter. “We hoped it would be McCallie.”
The boys’ father, TJ Gentle, had played football at Marion County with future Tennessee star and current Baylor assistant Eric Westmoreland. “I knew some of the Baylor folks and I felt comfortable with them,” said TJ. “I didn’t go into this having a favorite school.”
TJ and Greta had a good meeting with the Baylor coaches of that time. Then the parents visited McCallie, where they met with Potter and Head of School Lee Burns.
“I didn’t know Ralph and I didn’t know Lee,” TJ recalled. “Ralph said he didn’t promise anybody anything, that the best player would play. If my sons proved to be the best, they’d play. If not, someone else would. That honesty impressed me. I’ve always believed that sports is a true meritocracy, or it should be. All I asked was for my sons to be given a fair chance. And there was something about Ralph’s personality that impressed me. He was quietly confident in what he was doing.”
“Then Lee talked for a minute. He said McCallie was not just about excelling in athletics, but in academics and the arts, too. The school wanted to be good in everything.”
This was especially important to Greta, who’d graduated from Girls Preparatory School in 1992. “I tried to keep an open mind (about Baylor), but in my heart I wanted them to go to McCallie,” she said. “I thought they would have a more well-rounded experience at McCallie.”
To prove her point, she brought up a middle school art class taught by just-retired Suzanne Mortimer. “Cooper made this two-foot sculpture of a gorilla out of wire,” said Greta. “It wound up going to a museum show in Nashville. There were always opportunities for creativity at McCallie. It wasn’t only about sports.”
But sports played a big role in the brothers first being interested in McCallie. All four boys had gone to sports camp at McCallie in elementary school. They were familiar with the campus and many of the teachers and coaches. Cooper, the youngest, even remembers when the twins were visiting Baylor and thinking, “Why are they doing that?”
Said Jack of winding up at McCallie, “It was an easy decision.”
What has followed, from the twins’ enrollment as seventh graders in the fall of 2015, through Cooper’s graduation last spring, is the stuff of both fairytales and the dreams all parents have for their children.
“From the beginning, McCallie was filled with guys I aspired to be like,” said Austin. “Just the values McCallie embodies. On the school front, academically, it really prepared me for the Ivy League. But it’s the friends I made there that mean so much to me. I still keep up with so many of my classmates. It changed my life. The principles I learned there still guide me today and will for the rest of my life.”
Said Jack, “I wouldn’t be half the person I am today without McCallie. Such a transformative experience for me.”
Added Carson, who begins fall practice at UT on August 5 fighting for a starting spot at defensive end, “The brotherhood is what will always stand out to me. I looked forward to going to school every day I was there. Just seeing my classmates, teachers, coaches. It wasn’t just a school, it was a family. To know there are no more Gentles there is kind of sad. We all love McCallie so much.”
Having been on Yale’s campus less than three weeks this summer, Cooper has already felt what McCallie’s academic standards will mean to his college studies and his Biology major.
“I’m taking two courses this summer, and McCallie has prepared me so well,” he said. “Even at an Ivy League school like Yale, I’m much better prepared than my classmates for how to study. And in the weight room, Coach Henderson’s workouts, how to properly power clean, the proper technique, have me ahead of the other players. I’ll always value the connections and friendships I made there more than anything. The brotherhood is real and those guys will be my best friends for life. But McCallie also gives you so much room to grow. The faculty goes that extra mile to help you reach your potential.”
Bradford is fond of sharing a story about how the twins helped McCallie reach its football potential.
“We played at Knox Catholic one night and William Riddle was our quarterback,” recalled Bradford, who was the Blue Tornado’s offensive coordinator back then. “He was on his back the whole game, and it wasn’t the line’s fault. The backs and wideouts were missing blocks. William never complained, but the next week I showed the offense film. Afterward, the Gentle brothers, Austin and Jack, came up to me and said, ‘As long as we’re here, that will never happen again.’ And it didn’t. They didn’t just talk a good game, they backed it up every time. That says as much about them and their character as anything.”
Another story, from the day after the 2023 state championship football win over Baylor at UT-Chattanooga’s Finley Stadium. The morning dawned with a steady rain. Thanks to media interviews, getting back to campus, grabbing a late meal, most of the players didn’t get to bed until well after midnight. Had they played hooky the next day, a Friday, everyone would have forgiven them.
But Carson had previously committed to lead the student body in the Pledge of Allegiance at that day’s chapel gathering at 10:45 a.m.
“I’d given my word,” said Gentle. “It was a standard day. We weren’t calling off school just because we won a football game. Besides, this was my senior year. Why wouldn’t I want to share that moment with friends and family and the faculty?”
At the end of writing tuition checks to McCallie for the first time in 11 years, TJ said, “No place is perfect, but McCallie never stopped trying to improve itself, which was what Lee Burns told me the first time we met. Even after state championships, the school was never content. It was always looking for ways to get better. From the beginning, our boys saw the school provide character development, a strong academic environment, and a safe space where they learned it was all right to fail as long as you got back up and tried again. Sending our boys to McCallie was the best decision we ever made.”
Nothing lasts forever. Even as Sholl noted, “In my 44 years here, there have been so many great McCallie families, but I can’t remember one family contributing so many aspects to McCallie life, and in such a humble way,” Bradford added, “We’ll find new leaders. Someone always steps up.”
And they no doubt will. But you wonder how many future McCallie men will watch, as Jack Gentle has, “Every football game (online) since graduating five years ago.”
Or as Carson, who’s run through the ‘T’ at Tennessee, who’s played in Southeastern Conference stadiums against the best teams in the country, said of his seven years on the Ridge, “Nothing’s quite like high school football, especially at McCallie.”
Perhaps that’s why at some point late last spring, Cooper about to graduate and no more Gentles on the horizon, Bradford told TJ and Greta, “McCallie needs to put up a statue of the two of you.”
