Less than a week after Beamer High opened up a search for a football head coach, the hunt is over.

The Titans filled the vacancy with a big-name hire, choosing former Gig Harbor High coach Darren McKay.

“I’m excited and happy,” McKay said. “Unless something opened up late I expected to be teaching at Gig Harbor next year and taking the year off from coaching.”

McKay marveled at the speed of the interview process.

“It moved incredibly fast,” he said
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There’s been a lot of coaching turnover among football teams in the South Sound the past few months – more than I can remember in recent years.

Here’s what I can remember on this Saturday night. If you know of others, chime in.

• Franklin Pierce’s Howard Lutton’s contract was not renewed, he fought it and, with help from public support, got his job back.
• Foss is close to announcing its new head coach.
• Chad Barrett resigned from Bonney Lake. The school is in the process of selecting a new coach.
• Jon Kitna stepped in at Lincoln

…

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The Peninsula School District fired Gig Harbor High football coach Darren McKay this afternoon. McKay remains a teacher at the school.

McKay’s firing comes less than 24 hours after an outpouring of support at the district’s school board meeting. Click here to read more about that.

UPDATE (4:50 p.m.) — Here’s my story:

Less than 24 hours after listening an outpouring of support for Darren McKay, Peninsula School District superintendent Terry Bouck fired Gig Harbor High’s football coach Friday afternoon.

“Guess I’m going to have to update my resume,” said McKay, who led the Tides for 12 seasons.

Since December, McKay has been fighting the district’s decision to place him on an improvement plan that also called for him to fire two assistant coaches – his father Mike and brother Sean – by filing a grievance.

The grievance has reached the state level and to McKay’s knowledge has not been resolved, he said. Still, on Friday he was given a termination letter, which cited his failure to cooperate with the improvement plan and not showing satisfactory improvement to his evaluators, McKay said.

“I got fired for standing up to (the district),” he said.
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Rumors about Darren McKay’s position as head football coach at Gig Harbor High have been swirling around the South Sound since December.

On Thursday, at the Peninsula School District’s monthly school board meeting, more than 100 McKay supporters crammed the district office building to show their support. Thirty-five people spoke — most used their allotted three minutes — in favor of McKay.

Here’s my story on the board meeting, which provides background on the happenings of the past four months.

That story is the nuts-and-bolts version of what happened Thursday evening. Because of space constraints, I want to mention some things didn’t make it into that story.
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