Education of Marion County, Tennessee

South Pittsburg High School

Home of the Pirates, South Pittsburg, Tennessee

← Back to Education

Last updated: May 26, 2026

The Princess Theatre on Cedar Avenue in South Pittsburg, a few blocks from the school
Cedar Avenue in South Pittsburg, a few blocks from the 1898 and 1924 school sites that gave the Pirates their home. Photo: Brian Stansberry, 2015 (CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons).

South Pittsburg High School (SPHS) was established in 1924, when the city moved its school program from the 1898 frame building on Cedar Avenue into a new brick building between 7th and 8th Streets (block 39). The school is now located at 717 Elm Avenue and serves grades 7 through 12 with approximately 420 students. The Pirates' football program, with eight TSSAA state championships, is one of the most decorated small-school programs in the state of Tennessee, regularly mentioned alongside Alcoa, Brentwood Academy, and Maryville in broader coverage of the Tennessee prep football hierarchy.

Early schools in South Pittsburg

Before 1924, South Pittsburg's public school was housed in a frame building on Cedar Avenue between 5th and 6th Streets, built in 1898 near the site of today's Sequatchie Valley Electric Cooperative (SVEC) offices. That building was replaced when the city built a new brick school two blocks south; the 1898 frame building was subsequently converted into apartments and burned in 1931. The 1924 brick building served both grade and high-school students until a separate modern grammar school opened on Elm Avenue between 3rd and 4th Streets in 1938.

The 1924 structure was a two-story brick building in a restrained Classical Revival mode, common for the small-town Tennessee high schools built during the early-20th-century public-school boom. It held a combined grade-and-high-school program of a few hundred students, and its 1930s architectural photographs in the South Pittsburg Historic Preservation Society's archives show the building fronting Cedar Avenue with a symmetrical entry and a row of tall multi-light windows on each floor. After the 1938 grammar-school spin-off, the building operated strictly as a high school until 1965, when, per the SPHPS schools history, the 1924 brick building was razed and replaced with the present modern high school facility on the same block between 7th and 8th Streets. The current SPHS campus address is 717 Elm Avenue.

Football: eight state championships

South Pittsburg has won TSSAA football state championships in 1969, 1994, 1999, 2007, 2010, 2021, 2023, and 2025: eight titles in total. The program's first championship came in 1969, when the Pirates defeated Tennessee Preparatory School 26 to 6 in Nashville, in the debut season of Tennessee's classification-based playoff system. The eighth title, a 42 to 14 win over McKenzie in the 2025 Class 1A BlueCross Bowl, gave the program its eighth Gold Ball.

The Pirates' coaching history is dominated by the Grider family. Don Grider served as head coach from 1969 to 1992, compiling 192 career wins and winning the 1969 state title with a roster integrated three years after the McReynolds High School closure. Don's son Vic Grider served as head coach for 22 years starting in the early 1990s, compiling a 232-to-54 career record and winning state championships in 1999, 2007, and 2010. The 1994 championship was won under head coach Danny Wilson, with Vic Grider serving as his defensive coordinator before succeeding him as head coach.

After Vic Grider's retirement, the program went through several coaching transitions. Chris Jones, a former professional coach and a South Pittsburg alumnus, was named head coach in spring 2021 but left after only a single game to return to coaching in the Canadian Football League. Heath Grider and Wes Stone co-headed the remainder of the 2021 season, during which the Pirates won a sixth state title. Stone, an SPHS alumnus who had previously served as offensive coordinator, defensive coordinator, and special-teams coordinator, was named full head coach in March 2022. Under Stone, the Pirates won the 2023 and 2025 state championships.

The Pirates have also reached the championship game and lost on multiple occasions, including a 2024 loss to MASE that denied them a title repeat after their 2023 championship (a 14 to 7 rally past McKenzie). The program has made roughly 15 total championship game appearances, a count that has risen nearly every season since 2000. A county athletics section collects the full county-wide championship ledger across South Pittsburg, Marion County, and Whitwell, with opponent and score detail for each title.

The Marion County rivalry

The 1924 South Pittsburg team was the school's first high-school football squad. Its first game was played against Marion County High School in Jasper, which South Pittsburg won 27 to 0. The two schools played twice in 1924 and twice in 1925, and the rivalry grew into the second-oldest continuous high-school football series in Tennessee, trailing only Harriman vs. Rockwood, which began in 1921. The eight-mile distance between the two communities inspired the book Eight Hateful Miles. The annual game ended in 2021. South Pittsburg led the all-time series when the schools stopped playing, and the final game was a Pirates victory played in South Pittsburg before a packed house that outsold the stadium's permanent capacity. A full series history is on the dedicated rivalry page.

Campus and academics

The school is located at 717 Elm Avenue in South Pittsburg and serves grades 7 through 12 with roughly 420 students and 28 full-time teachers, giving a student-to-teacher ratio of about 15 to 1. SPHS offers Advanced Placement coursework, with an AP participation rate of approximately 26 percent as of the 2023-2024 school year. The 7-through-12 structure is an artifact of the consolidation decisions made in the mid-20th century; the other two Marion County Schools high schools operate on a conventional 9-through-12 structure with separate middle schools feeding in.

The school's feeder relationship with South Pittsburg Elementary, combined with the 7-through-12 structure, means students typically spend the full kindergarten-through- graduation span on two campuses within a short distance of each other. Athletic programs beyond football include basketball, baseball, softball, and other sports offered across the TSSAA Class 1A Division I schedule.

Integration and McReynolds

After the McReynolds High School fire in July 1965 and the closing of the school in 1966, Black students from the South Pittsburg area were absorbed into SPHS as part of Marion County's integration. Many of the Pirates' athletic programs in subsequent decades benefited from the family lineage of McReynolds alumni. Integration at SPHS preceded the Pirates' 1969 TSSAA state football championship, the first TSSAA football title in Marion County history, by only three years.

Feeder

The school's feeder pattern runs through South Pittsburg Elementary School. The school operates a 7-through-12 grade structure rather than the 9-through-12 model used at the county's other two high schools.

The 1938 South Pittsburg Elementary building on Elm Avenue, the grammar-school plant that had served the city's lower grades for more than half a century, was heavily damaged by fire on February 25, 1993; per Logan Carmichael's Sequatchie Valley Now history of Marion County education, only the lunchroom portion of the building survived. With the main classroom block gone, elementary students attended classes in local churches, community centers, and portions of the SPHS building while a replacement was constructed on the same Elm Avenue site. The new South Pittsburg Elementary opened midway through the 1994 to 1995 school year and continues to feed SPHS today.

Related

About the city of South Pittsburg →
About Marion County High School (rival) →
About Whitwell High School →
About McReynolds High School →
The Civil Rights Era in Marion County →
About Marion County athletics →
About the MCHS vs. SPHS rivalry →
About Marion County Schools governance →

Sources