Thompson head football coach Mark Freeman has had quite the successful career in Alabama. That includes the recent 2022 season, when eighth grader Trent Seaborn made headlines by taking over for injured starter Zack Sims and leading the Warriors to the Alabama Class 7A state championship.
But that success may not have happened if Freeman hadn’t experienced a couple of life-changing events earlier in his life.
If you think Freeman was ready to play the role of football coach all along, you might be surprised. You see, there was a time when he was standing at a crossroads.
“I had no desire to coach football,” Freeman says, reflecting back on a time when he wasn’t sure where God was going to lead him. His father passed away when Mark was young, a tough time that he says left him wondering what exactly he wanted to do with his life.
Freeman was a scratch golfer and thought maybe golf was going to be part of his future. Following a five-year stint as an apprentice golf pro at a local country club, however, he decided to try his hand at real estate.
“You reach a point in your life when you feel like maybe it’s time to try something different,” Freeman says.
It was during his time selling houses that he met his wife, Vicki, with whom he would go on to have a daughter, Kori.
“Meeting my wife changed my life,” he says.
After a friend persuaded Freeman to come work at his Toyota dealership, Freeman says he began spending his spare time coaching a youth football team, for whom Kori was a cheerleader.
Freeman says that although he enjoyed working with the young players, he “really didn’t want to be a football coach. I just had no desire to do that,” he recalls.
But, as Freeman puts it, “the Good Lord had other plans.”
As he was coaching the 12-year-old team, he began to realize how much he enjoyed working with the quarterbacks.
“I realized that God was throwing me nuggets and I started to realize he was opening these doors for me,” Freeman remembers.
He began to see that maybe this was his path after all. Looking back now, that certainly seems to be the case.
Freeman’s first head coaching opportunity came in 1998, when he was named the head coach at Bessemer Academy. Things began to take off pretty soon thereafter for the new Rebels coach, as he would lead Bessemer to a state championship in 2002, followed by three more titles in 2004, 2006, and 2007.
Freeman would go on to become head coach at Gulf Shores and then Spanish Fort High School, winning a pair of state championships between the two schools before being named the head coach at Thompson. He has led the Warriors to four state titles, including the most recent one last year, thanks in part to the heroics of Seaborn.
For a coach who said he never wanted to coach football, Mark Freeman has a lot of Thompson supporters who are glad he changed his mind.
