Former Notre Dame High School head boys basketball coach Tommy Fox issued the following statement late Wednesday about his decision to leave the Irish.

Fox, the leading scorer in Chattanooga basketball history, recently announced he would be leaving to become director of sports and recreation at First Baptist Academy in Powell, Tenn., near Knoxville.

Fox coached the Irish basketball team for two years and was the head baseball coach one season. The Irish were 18-8 last year and won a district championship.

Fox’s statement:

"I want to thank God and First Baptist Church of Powell for providing me with this tremendous opportunity. My family is very excited to see what God has in store for us in Powell. I would like to thank the administration, teachers, and all the staff at Notre Dame for their kindness and support. I want to specifically thank Perry Storey, Howie Sompayrac and Freddie Eaves. I want to thank all my assistant coaches Brian Hitchcock, Stefan Carter, and Zach Byron, for their guidance and support. Lastly I want to thank my players, all the kids which played for us, as I coached some exceptional young men.

"I believe a great deal can be learned about a coach by watching how his teams compete. Our kids competed, we played hard, and even when we did not have much of a chance of winning we still competed with passion. I was proud of how hard our young men played the game and how they practiced.

"I will sorely miss being involved in the lives of my players. I have some very special relationships with the kids who played for us. The night I had to tell the kids I was leaving was extremely difficult. Seeing their reaction to the news made it even worse. I still get texts and phone calls daily from the kids who played for us. I did not want to leave them, but I prayed fervently for weeks and God made it abundantly clear the best opportunity for my family was at First Baptist. This new opportunity at First Baptist will allow me to spend more time with my wife and kids. I loved coaching at Notre Dame but it was a very time consuming job.

"We worked for three years to get the program back to where it is today. We developed our young kids which have now turned into strong role players, and we integrated those older kids with some very talented younger kids. We got much better last year as the year progressed, we beat some good basketball teams and winning the district on the road was quite a feat for our team being so young. Now the young kids are not so young and the older kids are even better. Last year we established a style of play conducive to the talents of our players and the kids really bought in to what we were trying to do defensively. This led to us winning a lot of games late in the year.

“I believe there are three future Division 1 basketball players at Notre Dame. DJ Bowles and Stedmon Ford are as good as any guards in their class. They were fortunate to play 26 varsity games last year as freshman and play in meaningful minutes. Nick Ellis and Stewart Gunter both have a good chance of playing basketball at the next level. It is extremely difficult to leave the program when it is headed for a tremendous amount of success.

“I love my players and always will, that was the best part of coaching at Notre Dame, nd I hate to leave the relationships which were built with those young men. I will miss my players and being involved in their lives. Coaching at ND was a lot of fun and that was because I coached great kids. There are many basketball coaches which are much better coaches than myself, I pray that Notre Dame gets a great coach and I hope they have a great deal of success in the future.”

(E-mail Stan Crawley at wscrawley@earthlink.net)