For new FIU coach Mike MacIntyre, football is all about family, on and off the field

Trisha Rowan scored 36 of her team’s 41 points that day, an incredible performance by any measure.

But her final two points?

Those were life-changing.

The scene was Brentwood (Tenn.) Academy, where Trisha was playing a middle-school basketball game. Her team was losing 40-39 with one second left when Trisha was fouled.

Mike MacIntyre, a seventh-grader for the Brentwood boys’ team who was waiting to get on the court following the girls’ game, watched intently. He had just arrived at the school in mid-semester because his father, George MacIntyre, had been hired to coach Vanderbilt football.

This was the first time Mike had laid eyes on Trisha, but he was clearly impressed.

“If she makes those free throws, I’m going to marry that girl,” Mike said. “I thought she was really cute, of course.”

Trisha swished the first free throw, and she did the same on the second, winning the game.

Roughly one decade later — on June 17, 1989, to be precise — Mike MacIntyre kept his vow, marrying that cute blonde with the sweet shooting stroke.

This past December, MacIntyre, now 57, was hired as FIU’s football coach. He’s just the fifth non-interim coach in FIU history, following Don Strock, Mario Cristobal, Ron Turner and Butch Davis.

Mike and Trisha MacIntyre are still together, and they have three children (Jennifer, Jay and Jonston). Jennifer and her husband recently gave the McIntyres a grandson.

“It’s been awesome,” Mike MacIntyre said of his long marriage to Trisha. “She’s family-oriented and faith-based [Christian], and so am I.

“Trisha is my best friend. I’m so blessed to have her as my wife.”

MacIntyre also feels blessed to have his sons on his coaching staff. Jay, 27, is FIU’s wide receivers coach. Jonston, 23, is a graduate assistant.

Their career choice made this a three-generation coaching family.

George MacIntyre, who died in 2016 at the age of 76, played for the Miami Hurricanes as a quarterback and safety and was the head coach at Tennessee-Martin and Vanderbilt.

He won the Bobby Dodd National Coach of the Year award in 1982 while at Vanderbilt. Mike MacIntyre won that same award 34 years later, while coaching Colorado.

“It’s a special award to me because we are the only father-son combination to win it,” Mike MacIntyre said. “When my dad won the award, they gave him a Bobby Dodd coin, which I always keep in my pocket on game days.

“When I get nervous, I grab the coin. It calms me down. It just reminds me of him and how he did things.”

Miami roots

George’s first college job was as a Hurricanes freshman coach and recruiting coordinator, and it was during this time, in 1965, that Mike was born in Miami, which means that his hiring at FIU brings him full circle.

As a fifth-grader living in Tennessee, Mike wouldn’t always follow the instructions of his mother, Betty. She would tell him to take the bus straight home.

Instead, Mike would take the bus that would drop him off at his father’s Tennessee-Martin football practices.

Mike would serve as a ball boy, and the players treated him as their kid brother. That distinction came complete with pranks such as taping him to a locker or dumping him into the whirlpool.

“Traveling with the team when I was that age was a blast,” MacIntyre said.

“In those days, the buses didn’t have a compartment over your head that you could open. It was just like a shelf, and I would climb up there and sleep. The players would grab me down and pass me around the bus, and my dad would sit there, laughing.

“Watching my dad care for the players, care for me and let me be a part of that … Those were unbelievable memories.”

Watching his dad form bonds with his players is what made MacIntyre want to coach.

Mike also loved hearing his father’s stories.

“Dad was instrumental in bringing Ray Bellamy to the Hurricanes,” MacIntyre said of the first Black athlete to sign a scholarship to Miami. “My dad was the one who signed him [in 1967]. My dad convinced the coach, the athletic director and the president that they should sign him.”

Bellamy, who became an All-American at Miami, still stays in touch with MacIntyre, calling him two days after he was hired by FIU.

Tradition continues

It’s no surprise Jay MacIntyre became a coach.

Jay, who caught 86 passes for 1,035 yards during his four-year playing career as a wide receiver with the Colorado Buffaloes, couldn’t get enough football as a kid.

“Growing up in a coaching family, you live and die with your dad’s wins and losses,” said Jay, who is in his fourth years as a receivers coach, including two at Tennessee-Martin and one at Southeastern University, an NAIA program in Lakeland..

“As I kid, I Ioved being around the team. The players were my heroes. So, in the back of your mind, you grow up thinking, ‘I can do that [coaching].’ ”

Jay said he thought about different career paths, but he was hooked by his first year at Southeastern.

“I just fell in love with taking all the ups and downs that I’d had as a player and using that with the guys,” Jay said. “I was able to reach them in ways that I didn’t know I could, and they reached me, too.

“They changed my life. Hopefully, I changed theirs. I still in contact with all of them.”

Jay, whose playing career was slowed by five concussions and other injuries, appreciates the bonds he’s formed in the sport.

“It’s a brotherhood,” he said. “The X’s and O’s — that’s part of it. But I coach because of the guys in that room.”

Younger brother Jonston is a graduate assistant who works, in essence, for FIU offensive coordinator David Yost. Jonston played quarterback at Chapman University, a Division III program in Orange, California.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in communications at Chapman, Jonston is studying for his master’s in hospitality through an FIU online program.

Jay and Jonston live together, just a couple of minutes away from their parents’ Kendall house.

“We have an awesome relationship,” Jonston said of his brother. “It’s been great to be able to work with him every day.”

Family aside, Jay said he feels the responsibility of getting the most out of his FIU wide receivers, a group that includes NFL prospect Tyrese Chambers.

“As a position coach, that’s your room,” Jay said. “You’ve got to make sure your guys are on time and are performing. You see stuff that the head coach doesn’t.

“It’s good that I’m close with the head coach. I’ve got to tell him what’s going on with different players. Who can we trust, who can’t we trust and who’s giving everything he possibly can to the program.”

The anchor

FIU is MacIntyre 14^th coaching stop, and Trisha has been there every step of the way.

MacIntyre started his coaching career as a Georgia graduate assistant and then as Davidson’s defensive coordinator. He also coached one season in Germany for the Plattling Black Hawks.

From there, he was an assistant at six more stops over the next 17 years: Tennessee-Martin, Temple, Ole Miss, the Dallas Cowboys, the New York Jets and Duke.

That led to his two previous stops as a head coach: San Jose State from 2010 to 2012 and Colorado from 2013 to 2018.

McIntyre was 20-17 his last three seasons at Colorado — including the coach of the year honor for his 10-4 season in 2016 — but was fired in November 2018 after a six-game losing streak.

Bouncing back, MacIntyre served as defensive coordinator at Ole Miss and Memphis before landing the job at FIU.

Through it all, Trisha has been the family’s rock.

“She’s independent, which is good for a coach’s wife,” MacIntyre said. “When I took the job at Ole Miss [the first time, in 1999], we had three kids, including Jonston, who was just two weeks old.

“I just dropped the kids off in the apartment with Trisha, and I had to go recruiting. But I knew she would figure it out, and she did. She’s incredible.”

Besides raising children, Trisha has worked in different fields, such as marketing and financial. She also started a foundation, “Hike For Her”, in honor of her mother, Jenny Rowan, who died of ovarian cancer Nov. 11, 2015.

“We started [the foundation] seven years ago to promote awareness of the symptoms of ovarian cancer since there is no specific test to detect it,” Trisha said. “September is Ovarian Cancer Awareness month.”

Trisha said she never minded moving around so much for her husband’s job, and that’s partly because she saw how her in-laws, George and Betty, handled the nomadic life of a football coach.

“I saw their example, and I caught the vision of it,” Trisha said. “I saw the impact they were able to make on young people’s lives, and so it wasn’t hard for me.”

Mike MacIntyre said whenever he made one of his coaching moves, the community reaction was always the same.

“Trisha makes so many friends,” he said, “that when we moved, people were always sadder about her leaving than me.

“She makes a positive impact on people’s lives. It’s so great to have a well-grounded family, including a wife who really loves you and supports you, and she’s a fighter, too.

“It’s a blessing.”

Indeed, thank goodness Trisha made those free throws all those years ago.