Once his playing career came to an end, Rayna Stewart knew he wanted to coach high school football.
However, the former Northern Arizona defensive back felt the college ranks required too much time away from his family.
"When I first finished, I had zero desire to coach in college. I just thought it was too time consuming. This quality of life, there was just no way I am going to do it," Stewart said. "There was no question of whether or not I was going to coach high school football.
"At the end of the day, in my core, I am a coach. How that manifests itself at what level, that changes, but at the end of the day, I am a coach. I can't imagine living my life without the game or coaching."
Now a special teams assistant coach for Vanderbilt, the All-American and NFL veteran found a home in Tennessee following his time in Flagstaff.
FINDING A NEW HOME
Drafted by the Houston Oilers in the fifth round of the 1996 NFL Draft, Stewart spent one season in the city he grew up in before moving to Tennessee as the Oilers relocated. After one season in Miami and another two in Jacksonville, Stewart's NFL career came to an end in 2000. In the meantime, he had found a home in the state of Tennessee.
"We really loved our church family here from when we moved here initially in '97. We figured we would set up a home base here for the length of my career, however long that lasted," Stewart said. "It was a familiar place with a good group of people that we knew and cared about."
Stewart and his family made the jump to Chicago a few years, where he coached high school football and spent time as a graduate assistant at Northwestern before once again returning to Nashville as he landed a position as a defensive quality control coach for the Titans.
"My wife is kind of sentimental in the fact that she always wanted to give the kids a place to come back to. She was born and raised Albuquerque, New Mexico and it was a place that she knew as her childhood home. I grew up in Houston and LA, I'd kind of been all over and never had a physical place to come back to."
The move to Nashville for Stewart came with little expectations after his time in Houston, Los Angeles and Flagstaff.
"In my mind, everybody in Tennessee wore straw hats and had hay sticking out of their mouth," Stewart said with a laugh thinking back in hindsight. "That's fully what I expected and when I got here, it was a completely different, eye-opening experience. That term of Southern hospitality is real."
Both Stewart and his wife Sonia found their place in the community over the years. Sonia Stewart earned a doctorate of education from Vanderbilt and has spent more than a decade with the Metro Nashville Public Schools, with a recent promotion to executive officer of organizational development in the school district.
TRANSITIONING FROM HIGH SCHOOL TO COLLEGE
With years of experience at the high school level, both coaching and teaching, Stewart prided himself on his work with younger players still developing and learning. Hired in 2015, Stewart served as Vanderbilt's director of high school relations and director of player development as he first transitioned into the collegiate level on Derek Mason's staff.
"One of the things about Coach Mason that I so appreciate is it is not a matter of consuming time, it is not a matter of being here and guarding your desk," Stewart said of Vanderbilt's head coach and teammate at Northern Arizona University. "It is get the work done and that's all I ask of you."
Stewart admitted while the time commitment required as a college coach appeared daunting while he was younger, balancing life and work has become easier with more experience in the profession. Additionally, Stewart said he's enjoyed working with players at a similar stage of their life and careers as high school.
While the first taste of the collegiate level at Northwestern led included multiple day stretches without seeing his children, Stewart said his philosophy for managing the demands of his career started with his position coach in Flagstaff.
"Bronco Mendenhall who was pivotal for me at NAU. He totally created a different paradigm for me as to what a coach was to a player," Stewart said of the current Virginia head coach. "Bronco was phenomenal for me in shaping my coaching philosophy.
"Bronco used to run with us, all of our conditioning Bronco would run with us. We'd get up early and we'd come down to the stadium, and we'd be shooting our hands against the turf because we played a lot of bump and run coverage, and Bronco would be there," Stewart said. "It was one of those things where this coach was pouring into us. He was all about who you are as a person and not just what you do as a player. I just totally gravitated toward it."
Stewart said he came away from his time under Mendenhall believing the sport should not steal all your time away from your family.
"If you can't get the work done in this amount of time, then I've got to find somebody who can because I'm not going to be the responsible party for your family falling apart," Stewart added.
ON-FIELD REFLECTIONS
After playing for Chatsworth High School in Southern California, under the tutelage of Bill Paden, the father of former Lumberjack Khalil Paden, Stewart landed at Northern Arizona after also considering Columbia.
"I'm so grateful for (Steve Axman) and for that staff in taking a chance on me, especially when I was told that I was too small and too slow to play college football," said Stewart, who stands 5-10, but holds Northern Arizona's top two season-records in passes defended with 19 in both 1994 and 1995.
"If I could catch, I would have the all-time interception record at NAU. That's one thing I'll be mad at myself is that I didn't work enough on my hands," Stewart said laughing. "My last year in the league I dropped seven picks. I'm not talking about 'oh that would have been amazing', no I dropped seven picks that just clanked up against my hands. If I could catch, I would have just retired five years ago instead of 18. That's my story and I'm sticking to it."
Stewart credits Scott Pelluer, Northern Arizona's defensive coordinator from 1993-95 and former NFL player, with planting the seeds for his future on-field success.
"He was the first person that ever said to me 'Hey, I think you have a chance'," Stewart said. "That just spoke life to play the game, play it with confidence and to pursue it truly."
The highlight of Stewart's professional career came in the 1999 season with the Jaguars, as Jacksonville set its franchise record with a 14-2 regular season record and finished atop the AFC standings.
Reaching the AFC title game with a divisional round victory against the Dolphins, Stewart's team from the previous season, the Jaguars ran into another familiar opponent for the former Lumberjack.
After twice falling to Tennessee, in its first year as the Titans, during the regular season, Jacksonville faced off with Stewart's other former team with a spot in the Super Bowl on the line.
"Going into that game, and obviously I knew 80 percent of the guys on the Titans team, I was like there is no way they can beat us three games in the same season," Stewart said. "Not that I was arrogant, but I was definitely confident that we, as a team, were going to play well and figure out all of the things that we needed to get figured out. But (Steve) McNair was so good, we just could not figure it out."
When Stewart returned to the Titans in 2009 as a member of the team's coaching staff, he found images from Tennessee's 33-14 victory commemorated at the team's offices.
"There was a montage on the wall in the space between the locker room and weight room at the Titans' facility that had that '99 season on it," Stewart said. "Sure enough, there was a picture of Derrick Mason running back the kick for a touchdown that happened in that game, and sure enough, over his shoulder, it's me in my Jaguars uniform."
While the Titans went on to fall to the Rams in the Super Bowl, notable for coming one-yard short of the potential tying touchdown as time expired, Stewart looks back and said he feels the Jaguars could have beaten the Rams, though it "matters not one single bit".
"It was honestly awful. I laugh about it now, but it still conjures up all these bad feelings. We were the best team in the league, we were 14-2. The Titans were 13-3. It's not like they were a marginal team, any team that goes 13-3 in a season is a pretty phenomenal team, we just happened to be 14-2."
