Nation Ford hires accomplished NC coach to take over its baseball program
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The Falcons think they’ve found their answer on the baseball diamond.
Jeff Stack, fresh off a successful four-year run at North Carolina’s Sun Valley High School, has been hired as the Nation Ford baseball team’s head coach. He’ll be replacing Michael Lewis, who stepped down in May after three seasons of leading the Fort Mill school.
When asked what he liked about Nation Ford, Stack took a moment to search for an appropriate answer: “I mean, what’s not to like?”
“The community is wonderful,” Stack told The Herald on Wednesday. “I live in Waxhaw currently. My wife and I are looking to move to the Fort Mill area. The athletic department continues to get better. There’s just a lot to like.”
He added that the Nation Ford baseball program, in particular, is good. There is high-level (and college-bound) talent on the varsity team, and the junior varsity and Fort Mill School District middle school programs are on the come-up. The Falcons went 8-20 in 2022, yes, but they did so against “probably the hardest schedule I’ve ever seen on paper,” Stack mused.
“At the end of the day, NaFo… it’s a special place,” Stack said. “And you can tell that when you walk on campus.”
Stack, 32, grew up in Union County, just north of the Carolinas border. He graduated from Sun Valley High School in Monroe in 2008.
He played college baseball at Stanley Community College before finishing his career at now-closed Virginia Intermont College with a degree in history.
In 2013, out of school, Stack returned back to North Carolina and went directly into high school baseball coaching — bouncing from Piedmont (assistant), to Parkwood High (assistant), to Carolina International School (as a head coach for public charter in Concord), to Marvin Ridge (assistant).
Stack said he learned everything he knows about the coaching craft from the coaches he worked under in that span. It’s also clear that baseball gave him more than just professional purpose: Stack proposed to his now-wife and biggest supporter, Aly, right before one of the last Marvin Ridge games of the 2018 season.
Stack’s first head coaching opportunity at a public school arrived in 2019, when he inherited the helm at Sun Valley. Taking the job at his alma mater meant a lot to him, he said, and he helped turn the perennial .500 Spartans into a North Carolina 4A power.
In his four years at Sun Valley, he accumulated a 44-24 record and finished as the Southern Carolina 4A Conference Coach of the Year in 2021 and 2022. Each of his last two seasons were special: In 2021, the Spartans won three playoff games and made the Final Four in the state tournament — and in 2022, Sun Valley earned a conference championship for the first time since 1996.
Stack made the decision to move to Nation Ford earlier this summer. He’ll be teaching social studies. He said he plans to meet a handful of his players on Tuesday, summer schedules willing, and that he can’t wait to get started — because “the work you put in from August to January and February is when you win games.”
“We’re going to work extremely hard from Day One,” Stack said. He added, “Hopefully we’ll win a bunch of games, but we will work hard every day.”
This story was originally published July 14, 2022 at 7:00 AM.
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