Steve Savarese, the longtime executive director of the Alabama High School Athletic Association and a familiar name to football fans across Mobile and Baldwin counties, announced Wednesday that he will retire from the post he has held for the past 15 years. Savarese, 68, made the announcement during an afternoon press conference at the AHSAA’s Montgomery headquarters.
The announcement set in motion the first change at the top of the state’s governing body for high school athletics since 2006, a span during which the organization has navigated classification overhauls, rule changes, championship expansion and, in its final year under Savarese, an unprecedented disruption to the sports calendar. For athletic directors and coaches from the Gulf Coast to the Tennessee line, the news marked the end of an era in Alabama prep sports administration.
Only the Fourth to Hold the Job
Savarese is only the fourth full-time executive director in the organization’s history, a role he took on in 2006 after stepping away from a head coaching career that included stops at McGill-Toolen Catholic High School in Mobile and Daphne High School in Baldwin County. The short list of his predecessors is itself a history of high school athletics in Alabama, and Savarese spoke of following them with visible reverence.
“To follow icons such as Cliff Parker, Bubba Scott and Dan Washburn has been the greatest honor of my life,” Savarese said. Each of the three led the association through defining stretches, and the continuity of leadership across fewer than a handful of executives is a point of pride the AHSAA shares with few similar organizations around the country.
Savarese set his retirement date for July but said he intends to “serve at the pleasure of the AHSAA Central Board” until the organization hires and transitions in a successor. The open-ended commitment gives the board flexibility to conduct a search without a hard deadline, and Savarese made clear he does not intend to leave the association rudderless in the meantime.
The Family Decision
He said the decision ultimately came down to family, citing a desire to spend more time with his wife, Beth, their children and four grandchildren. “You know when it’s time,” Savarese said. “And when you’re 68 like me, about to be 69 in October, you just know when it’s time. Was it a certain thing? No. But I will tell you there’s a young man sitting back there — my son — he’s the one that asked me, ‘How many more birthdays you going to miss, dad? How many more celebrations are you going to miss with the kids, dad?’ And I love them more than anything in the world. So dad’s coming home, mom’s coming home.”
The exchange with his son, described in front of a room that included AHSAA staff, drew one of the afternoon’s most emotional moments. An executive director’s calendar is built around championships, board meetings and hearings in every corner of the state, and the job’s demands on family time are a known cost of the position that Savarese said he was no longer willing to pay.
“Forty-seven years is a long time, and it’s now time,” Savarese said. “I’ve had an awesome time — teaching, coaching, serving as an administrator and, most humbling, serving as executive director of the Alabama High School Athletic Association.”
“Professionally, I would not change a thing regarding my career,” he continued. “I genuinely feel that I have never worked a day in my life. I’ve tried to approach each day knowing that nothing worthwhile was ever achieved without enthusiasm. God has truly blessed me.”
A Coaching Career That Spanned Two States
Before taking the AHSAA’s top job, Savarese built a coaching résumé that stretched across two states and nearly five decades. Born in Leeds, he attended college in Kansas, where he landed his first head coaching position at Douglass High School and led the program to a state championship in 1978.
He returned to Alabama six years later to coach at Ensley High School in Birmingham, then went on to lead programs at Benjamin Russell in Alexander City before taking over at Daphne, where his 2001 squad captured a state championship. The Daphne title remains one of the signature moments in Baldwin County football history, delivered by a program that Savarese built into a contender during his years on the Eastern Shore.
His final coaching stop was McGill-Toolen, where he was the winningest active AHSAA head coach in the state at the time he left the sideline in 2006 to become the association’s executive director. The McGill-Toolen years embedded Savarese in the Mobile high school community, where the Yellow Jackets’ program and its rivalries across the archdiocese and the city are followed as closely as any in the state.
The arc of that career — small-town Kansas, Birmingham city schools, a small-city program in Tallapoosa County, a Baldwin County power and a Mobile Catholic institution — gave Savarese an unusually broad view of what high school athletics looks like in communities of every size, an asset he carried into an executive role that answers to member schools of every classification.
Savarese was inducted into the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame in 2019, cementing a legacy that spans both the Mobile and Baldwin County prep football communities. The honor placed him among the state’s most celebrated coaches, administrators and athletes, recognition of a career that had by then succeeded at every level of the profession from head coach to chief executive of the governing body.
The Lighter Moments
The press conference was not without humor. Savarese said the students and athletes he worked with over the years have been the highlight of his career, and that those relationships remain something he treasures. He also praised his wife of 45 years, Beth, calling her the “best spouse he could possibly ask for” and drawing laughter from the room with a lighthearted jab at AHSAA associate executive director Alvin Briggs, saying his wife was a better driver than Briggs because “Alvin likes to draft, you like to pass.”
The joke, delivered with the ease of a man who had spent decades addressing rooms of coaches and athletes, was a reminder that Savarese rose through the profession as a teacher and coach before he became an administrator, and that the rapport-building that wins locker rooms had followed him to Montgomery.
What Comes Next
AHSAA Central Board president Van Phillips said the organization plans to post the job opening on the AHSAA website Thursday morning and will accept applications from all interested and qualified candidates. A seven-person search committee will review applicants before recommending a candidate to the Central Board to become the association’s next executive director.
The process leaves the door open to candidates from inside the association’s staff — where experienced associate and assistant executive directors guide sports and officiating programs — as well as to sitting administrators, coaches and superintendents from around the state. Whoever is selected will inherit an organization with a membership of hundreds of schools and a championship calendar that touches nearly every community in Alabama.
Phillips credited Savarese with steering the AHSAA to its best-ever financial stability, including the creation of a revenue-sharing initiative that has funneled more than $16 million to member schools since 2010 — a program that has benefited high schools throughout south Alabama and across the state.
The revenue-sharing program returned championship and licensing revenue directly to member schools, supplementing local athletic budgets from Courtland to Gulf Shores. For athletic departments that operate on thin margins and depend on gate receipts, the distributions have been a meaningful offset to equipment, travel and insurance costs, and the program stands as the administrative accomplishment Savarese’s successors will be measured against.
What the Job Means in South Alabama
For the schools of Mobile and Baldwin counties, Savarese’s tenure bookended decades of deep involvement in coastal Alabama athletics. His McGill-Toolen and Daphne years made him a known quantity in the region long before he took the state office, and south Alabama’s programs have regularly contended for AHSAA titles in his sports during his watch.
The region’s relationship with the AHSAA has practical stakes as well. Classification cycles that determine where Mobile and Baldwin schools compete, playoff formats that shape the road to Birmingham, and eligibility rules that govern every transfer and hardship case all flow from decisions made at the Montgomery office Savarese ran, and the coastal counties have had a former own in the executive chair advocating for them.
His tenure also coincided with enormous growth in high school sports across the state. Girl’s and boy’s championship programs expanded, e-sports and bowling were added to the association’s offerings, and the number of students participating in AHSAA-sanctioned activities grew steadily, trends that pushed the association to hire staff, upgrade its championship venues and modernize its rules processing during Savarese’s time in Montgomery.
Through all of it, Savarese maintained the low profile of an administrator who came up through coaching: visible at championship events, generally loath to seek the spotlight, and described by colleagues on Wednesday in the terms coaches reserve for their own — a teacher first.
A Career by the Numbers
Forty-seven years in the profession. Four grandchildren. Fifteen years as executive director. A state championship as a head coach in 1978 in Kansas and another in 2001 at Daphne. More than $16 million shared with member schools since 2010. Those numbers, recited across a hour of reminiscence on Wednesday, sketch the outline of a career that touched Alabama high school athletics from nearly every angle.
Savarese will hand over the association in July, or whenever his successor completes the transition, whichever comes later. The Central Board’s search begins Thursday, and the organization he leaves behind — financially stable, administratively continuous and led for the last time by the fourth executive director in its history — will spend the summer preparing for its next one.
“You know when it’s time,” he said, and for the man who spent 47 years teaching, coaching and administering the games Alabama’s students play, the time has come to go home.