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<\/a><\/p>\nMcLaury, who has spent the previous 13 years at Independence, announced earlier this week he\u2019ll be the third, following Hawks\u2019 retirement at the conclusion of the 2026 season.<\/p>\n
\u201cI grew up with Jack Jolly coaching them, and when I was at (Middle Tennessee State), Jack was (scouting) with the White Sox. We\u2019d go see games together,\u201d McLaury recalled. \u201cWe\u2019d take his Lincoln and drive all over Tennessee.<\/p>\n
\u201cCoach Hawks, I don\u2019t know how many years he was there. I don\u2019t want to guess. \u2026 The tradition\u2019s there. They\u2019ve got great facilities.\u201d<\/p>\n
And in a couple of years, they\u2019ll have McLaury\u2019s son, Judd, a rising eighth-grader at Oakland Middle School.<\/p>\n
\u201cOakland High School is about 10 minutes from his house,\u201d Independence athletics director Mary Beth White said. \u201cThe move was more for his family than anything.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re very excited for Mike, but very sad for Independence. He did way, way more than coach baseball here. There\u2019s so much stuff that he did behind the scenes for all of our programs, for the school as a whole, and he\u2019s been a great friend. Oakland is definitely getting the good end of the deal, and we\u2019ll just have to get to work to find our next baseball coach.\u201d<\/p>\n
A 2014 Tennessee Baseball Coaches Association\u2019s Hall of Fame inductee, Hawks won 760 games over his career at Oakland, leading the Patriots to consecutive state championships in 1999 and 2000 \u2013 the latter team ranked sixth nationally by Baseball America after finishing 40-3. Oakland made five other state tournament appearances and 13 sectionals, with seven region championships and nine district titles.<\/p>\n
At Independence, McLaury succeeded founding Eagles coach Bill Moore upon his departure for Brentwood in 2013. Under McLaury\u2019s leadership, the program made state tournament appearances in 2019, 2023 and 2025.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s not a bad decision,\u201d he said regarding the two programs. \u201cIt\u2019s just tough. There\u2019s great people at Independence. (Principal) Niki Patton, Trae Weiss, the rest of the admin there \u2013 they\u2019re unbelievable. They helped me out a lot. We had some good times there, made some really good friends.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a good group of guys there, good players. It\u2019s hard. I don\u2019t get choked up too much, but it was hard to hold it back with those guys. I\u2019m just kinda excited to see what we can do at Oakland.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mike McLaury, who has spent the past 14 seasons as baseball coach at Independence, has accepted a similar…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":345832,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[143,145,144],"class_list":["post-345831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=345831"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345831\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/345832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=345831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=345831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=345831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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Mike McLaury, who has spent the past 14 seasons as baseball coach at Independence, has accepted a similar position at Oakland. McLaury will be the successor to Tennessee Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Famer Mack Hawks, who won 760 games and two state titles in 37 years atop the Patriots. FILE PHOTO<\/p>\n