By Andy Lohman

Even after a life of coaching football, Scott Nady had never seen anything like it.

On one of his annual trips to Mexico, the eighth grade club team he was helping coach won their championship against a team that hadn't lost in six years. After the game, parents wheeled a grill onto the 50-yard line to cook carne asada, hooked up a generator to play music and danced salsa until one in the morning.

"I was there for every minute of it," Nady, SMU football's Special Teams Quality Control Analyst, said. "It was fantastic."

While the postgame celebrations may have been different, Nady's time in Mexico, where American football is surprisingly popular, taught him that the game brings out more similarities than differences between the two cultures.

"Even though the language barrier seems daunting, it's nothing. They want the exact same things as our boys here in the states want," Nady said. "I just learned that sports unite. Sports even the playing field. Sports teach people acceptance and tolerance. It doesn't matter where you're from or how much money you have or what language you speak. It matters whether or not you want to compete, whether or not you want to work hard."

Those values are what have driven Nady through his coaching career. After playing football at Cal, he coached at San Leandro High School near Oakland, California. The Pirates went from being the team everybody scheduled for homecoming to a 48-4 record in a four-year span.

Nady loves facing challenges; in fact, he describes himself as a "challenge junkie." Looking to move back to his hometown of Dallas, he was presented with a challenge to coach football at Parish Episcopal School.

"I got a call that said there's a place called Parish Episcopal, they don't own a football, they have no football field, they don't have any uniforms, but they want to start football," Nady said. "I said 'Absolutely. Yes, I'm in.'"

Nady flew back to Texas to meet Gloria Snyder, his eventual boss.

"We talked for two and a half hours and didn't talk about football once," Nady said. "We talked about kids and how education and athletics are so vital. She hired me on the spot. I didn't even know how much I made or where the school was."

He hit the ground running to raise funds, which was enough to build Parish Episcopal a new stadium with a turf field in what was a cow pasture. The school took its first varsity snap in 2007 and won the state championship in 2010, the fastest such rise in state history. After another state title in 2014, Nady felt himself plateauing.

Nady never really had any desire to be an assistant coach or work on a collegiate staff; he had been a head coach for his whole career. He also never really had the desire to coach at the collegiate level; what he perceived as a transactional business didn't align with his value of developing young people through football. But he had a huge amount of respect for how Sonny Dykes ran the program at his alma mater, Cal, which led to discussions about joining the Bears' staff.

"I told him when we first started talking about working together, 'I say this in the most respectful way: you're a high school coach coaching college,'" Nady said. "Meaning you care about your players like a high school coach does. Which is atypical. That's not very common."

Dykes and Nady agreed for him to join the staff, but as Nady was about to head west, Cal and Dykes parted ways. Nady stepped away from Parish and took the year to focus on public speaking. In December of 2017, Dykes was hired as SMU's head football coach, a mere 12 miles from Nady's home in Dallas.

"I called him and told him 'Hey, you're in my backyard,'" Nady said. "He called me a week later and said 'our special teams need help.' I said 'I'll be there at 8 a.m.'"

Working with a team in his hometown is a special feeling for Nady.

"When I was a little boy, my sisters would come to cheerleading camp here. I ran all over this campus every summer," Nady said. "Now to be working here is kind of a dream for me, in the city I grew up in and the city I love."

Another value that Nady embodies is service. For years he has worked with New Friends New Life, an organization that helps formerly trafficked girls and sexually exploited women and children in the Dallas area. That sense of service aligns with Dykes' philosophy, and his team spends time volunteering in the community on a weekly basis.

Now that he's at home on staff, Nady can get to work transforming the lives of young football players. Because at the end of the day, football is so much more than a game to him.

"Football done the right way is the answer to so many of the ails of our society," Nady said. "In a two-hour practice, you're going to face disappointment, you're going to face anxiety, you're going to face fear, you're going to triumph. Every practice, let alone game, is a microcosm of life. If done properly, it reinforces values that are so important and lacking in our society right now."