Gig Harbor football coach George Fairhart stepping down after five seasons
Gig Harbor High School football coach George Fairhart is stepping down after five seasons coaching the Tides, citing a desire to spend more time with family. Fairhart lives in Morton and while he doesn’t commute daily to Gig Harbor, he makes the commute often enough.
“My home and my family are in Morton,” he said. “I have an apartment (in Gig Harbor), we were going back and forth. I need to focus more on family right now. I’ve been (coaching) for a while. It doesn’t stop. It’s year-round.”
Fairhart, 60, compiled a 26-18 record at Gig Harbor, after spending the bulk of his career coaching at Eatonville. He has an 198-110 career record. He notified the players at Gig Harbor of his resignation on Tuesday. He’ll continue teaching at Gig Harbor for the time being, where he teaches weight training, health and other subjects.
“There’s always that, I wish we could have done more,” Fairhart said of his time at Gig Harbor. “But I feel good about it. I wanted to challenge myself to re-establish a program and see if we could develop our team-building philosophy and take those things to a different school. We were able to do all that. Of course, we wish we could’ve won a few more games. The reality is, there’s a reason there’s sports in public schools.”
Fairhart said the life lessons from football have always been more important to him than the wins and losses.
“I don’t think there’s a better classroom than the football field to teach kids about dealing with adversity, following rules, how entitlement can be a team killer,” he said. “We can teach those things through the game. Really, the goal is to make kids better people first, and then better football players. I think we were able to accomplish a lot of those things.”
Certainly, Gig Harbor was a different experience than coaching at Eatonville.
“I had a chance to work with some phenomenal athletes at Gig Harbor,” he said. “That was fun. It’s a larger program. The league we coach in has some top-notch coaches, established programs. It was fun to go and coach against some different people in a different league. We had an opportunity to play in the 4A SPSL last year, see other leagues and coaches. As a coach, that was fun to get a variety there.”
Fairhart said he isn’t sure if he’s done coaching for good, but is looking forward to stepping back and enjoying more time with his wife and his youngest daughter, who is in eighth grade.
“I’ve been away for the past five years, driving back and forth,” he said. “I want to be around my daughter more and be part of her life. I want to be that kind of dad.”
Fairhart replaced Aaron Chantler, who is currently the head coach at Auburn. Chantler put together an impressive stretch in his time at the helm, leading Gig Harbor to four consecutive state appearances and five years, winning two league titles.
This story was originally published January 21, 2022 at 1:22 PM.
