Meadowdale hires Leonard as football coach

Published 8:54 pm Wednesday, June 3, 2015

With seven 3A state playoff appearances in the last eight years, including four trips to the quarterfinals, the Meadowdale football program has established itself as a perennial power.

Former head coach Mark Stewart, now the head coach at Mariner after a brief stint as head coach at Garfield High School in Seattle, started the tradition and his friend Mike Don made sure it continued in his two seasons as the head coach.

Now it’s Matt Leonard’s turn.

Leonard, who is coming off two seasons as head coach at Foster High School in Tukwila, has been hired by Meadowdale and becomes the team’s third head coach in four years.

“We are extremely excited to have Matt Leonard join our Meadowdale community,” the school’s athletic director Beth Mariott said. “He brings passion for the game of football as well as passion for young athletes and their development.”

Leonard is excited for his second head coaching job and knows expectations will be high.

“My immediate thoughts are I better produce, but in general I’m just really excited,” Leonard said. “It’s a great group of kids with a great pedigree of success. They expect to be successful. They expect to win at a high level. I love that attitude. I’m the same way.”

Leonard replaces Don, who resigned earlier this year to take the head coaching job at Eastmont High School in Wenatchee. Don led the Mavericks to the state playoffs in both of his seasons at the helm, including a trip to the quarterfinals in his first season.

“I looked at Meadowdale and the more I researched, it’s a diamond in the rough,” Leonard said. “It’s just kind of sitting there and not a lot of people know a lot about it. If you look up (the Mavericks) record, they’ve been very good and it’s a school that I can lay down roots and a community that I can raise a family in and kind of grow old in. I’m looking at it as where I want to be for as long as they’ll have me.”

Leonard played football at Bothell High School and remained a part of the program after he graduated as a volunteer and later as an assistant coach. He coached as an assistant for two years at Interlake High School in Bellevue before taking the head coaching job at Foster.

“I’ve had two years at Interlake and two years at Foster and hopefully 20 to 25 at Meadowdale if things go well,” Leonard said.

Leonard will be joined at Meadowdale by his father Al Leonard, who will be an assistant for the Mavericks after being an assistant coach at Bothell since 1989.

Under Don, the Mavericks used more of a spread offense than they were accustomed when Stewart was the head coach. That evolution is likely to continue under Leonard.

“It will be a little of what you’ve seen the past few years, but I’m definitely more true spread (offense) than Mike is,” Leonard said. “You’re going to see the up-tempo Oregon-style offense — that new-age way that everybody is doing. I’ve had a lot of success with it.”

In Leonard’s career as an assistant and his two years as a head coach, he said the only year he didn’t make the playoffs was his first year at Foster. That team had just two returning starters and finished 2-7 the year before.

Defensively, Leonard likes what the Mavericks have done in recent seasons.

“If it’s not broken then you don’t need to fix it,” Leonard said. “They’ve got a great group of guys that I’ve met with and talked with and they’ve had a lot of success and they do things right and the kids play hard. You’re going to see a very similar approach defensively to what you’ve seen.”