Hugh Wyatt

Hugh Wyatt grew up in the Germantown section of Philadelphia and played his high school ball as a single wing tailback at Germantown Academy. He played four years at Yale,  but after graduation he went into business and wouldn't actually get into full-time coaching for another 10 years.

Then,  after playing two years of semi-pro football in Frederick, Maryland, he was offered an opportunity to manage and coach a rival team in nearby Hagerstown.  

When the World Football League started up in 1974, he was hired as Player Personnel Director of the Philadelphia Bell. The following year, he moved to the West Coast as Assistant GM/PR Director of the Portland Thunder.

After the WFL folded, he stayed in the Northwest and began teaching and coaching high school football.

Since then, he’s gone on to be a head coach at seven different high schools - large and small, rural, inner city and suburban -   and an assistant at five different high schools, as well as coaching for seven seasons in Finland. 

In 1983 he became known as one of the first coaches in the Northwest to run the Delaware Wing-T, when he installed it at Vancouver, Washington’s Hudson’s Bay High. 

It was while coaching in Finland that he faced Coach Don Markham's famed Double-Wing offense, and he was so impressed that he incorporated Markham’s "toss" play into his Delaware Wing-T.  The toss fit in perfectly with such Wing-T staples as the Criss-Cross and Trap and Down (“G”) plays, and with the Wedge play that Coach Wyatt had been familiar with since his days as a high school player.  Using the “tight” formation that he already used, and without having to change the Delaware blocking rules he’d been using, or the numbering system and terminology he had developed, he had his version of the Double-Wing.

While in Finland, he coached two different teams to national championships.

In his last three head coaching jobs, armed with the Double-Wing offense, he took teams that had gone without success for lengthy times and turned them into winners.

In 1997, while at LaCenter, Washington,  he introduced a direct-snap version of his Double-Wing which the players suggested he call the Wildcat - because that was the school’s nickname. They ran it in their last two games, and won them both, one of them a runaway victory over a school two classes larger! After the 1998 season, he wrote an article about it - "Wildcatting With the Double Wing" -  for Coach and Athletic Director magazine,  and several years later, teams all over the country began running their own direct-snap series which they also called, for some reason (you think maybe the article?) "The Wildcat."

His last head coaching spot was at North Beach High, in Ocean Shores, Washington, where he inherited a team that had gone 1-9 the previous season and took them to a 7-3 finish. The three losses were by a total of 11 points.  North Beach rushed for 3670 yards and ranked fifth in the state in their class in scoring, outscoring opponents 353-172. He was named Pacific League Coach of the Year.

Two years later,  he returned to North Beach to assist new head coach Todd Bridge in rebuilding the program, which in the two years since he’d left had won just three games. 

In their third year together, expanding his offense to include an "Open Wing" (shotgun) package, North Beach finished 7-3. The next year they went  10-1, outscoring opponents 437-74 and giving the school its first unbeaten regular season ever. Coach Bridge was voted Pacific League Coach of the Year and, following a double overtime win over the defending league champs, was named Seattle Seahawks' State High School Coach of the Week. North Beach finished Number 4 in the final Washington State Class rankings. The next year was more of the same, as North Beach went 11-1, undefeated in the regular season for the second straight season. Its 495 points led the state in scoring for all classes.

Since 1998, Coach Wyatt has spoken about his offense(s) at more than 300 clinics and camps in more than 35 states and four foreign countries. Thanks to his coaching videos and playbooks, over 1,000 youth and high school teams have used his systems, and several of the high schools have won state championships.

In 1998 he  began  publishing a twice-weekly blog for football coaches, and since the start of the pandemic, he has been doing bi-weekly Zoom clinics. The most recent was Number 146.