How Hough’s DeShawn Baker built a football family — and a Charlotte dynasty

The first thing you notice, if you spend any time hanging around Hough High School, is that everybody seems to like 41-year-old Huskies football coach DeShawn Baker.

The players are constantly joking, hugging and laughing with him. His office may be the most popular spot on campus. Teachers often stick their heads in the door to speak. Ditto the janitors, parents and school administrators.

If there’s a more popular person at this 2,518-person school, they would be awful hard to find.

“I just think we all trust him,” Hough quarterback Ethan Royal said in June, one arm around his coach and the other holding up a large black bookbag with the school logo on it. “It’s just a trusted confidence. It just brings the team together to have that good morale.”

This is the second time that Baker, now 41, has worked at Hough, and the second time he’s tried to bring this feeling of family with him.

About 10 years ago, he was hired as an assistant coach at the Cornelius school. After four seasons as a Huskies assistant coach, followed by three as head coach at Cox Mill High in Cabarrus County, Baker came back to Hough in 2023. And this time, he was in charge of the program.

Since then, he’s turned what was a good Charlotte-area team into a national power that is now bordering on becoming a dynasty.

Baker is 39-4 at Hough and his teams have won 16 games in a row, including the school’s first state championship in December. Under Baker, Hough has never lost a conference game. Last season, Baker was named The Charlotte Observer’s high school football coach of the year as well as the top overall boys’ coach, regardless of sport, in the 2025-26 school year.

And at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Baker’s Huskies will host nationally ranked Providence Day. USA Today ranks that matchup among the top 10 high school football games in America being played this week.

And Baker said the secret to his success is easy: He’s always trying to create that family atmosphere where everyone feels welcome.

“I’m just a family man,” said Baker, who is married and a father of two — 9-year-old DJ and 5-year-old Brooke. “And I think we play just like family here at Hough. We play for each other and I think, nobody cares who get the credit. Everybody wants to win. We play for each other.”

Honestly, it’s not a bad situation for a guy who never really wanted to be head coach.

At least not at first.

While a student at the old Waddell High School in southwest Charlotte, Baker played for the legendary Bennie McMurray, who spent much of his career in South Carolina and has won state championships in multiple sports.

McMurray helped define Baker’s love of football — and showed him the same family atmosphere that he models today in his teams.

“Coach helped me so much in my childhood, going through things at home,” Baker said. “He was always a coach that I could look up to and talk to. To me, it’s bigger than football. It’s the relationships you build that can last a lifetime.”

After high school, Baker became a Hall of Fame player at S.C. State. From 2003-06, he became the school’s second all-time leading rusher (3,695 yards, 33 touchdowns) and was fifth all-time in Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference history. In 2006, as a senior, Baker was named MEAC conference player of the year.

“I always thought he was going to be an (NFL running) back,” said South Pointe High (SC) state championship coach Bobby Collins, who played with Baker at S.C. State and is his Omega Psi Phi fraternity brother. “Coming in from high school, I knew he was a tough guy. But then he hurt his knee.”

Ultimately, that knee injury closed one door.

It also opened another.

Baker was getting serious NFL attention before he played in a small college all-star game in Virginia early in 2007, just after his senior season ended. He was tackled from behind, with an opponent pulling him down by the top of his shoulder pads just behind his neck, a banned move called a horse collar tackle.

Baker landed awkwardly. He immediately knew something was wrong.

He’d torn the meniscus tendon in his knee and partially tore his ACL. That meant surgery, months before the draft. But, Baker said, being an HBCU athlete, he had to push through as the draft approached. So it also meant coming back quickly.

“As an HBCU player, if you don’t do something,” he said, “it’s not like the Group of 5 schools, where (NFL scouts) will go off stats.”

Despite his injury and surgery, Baker came back quickly, as doctors left the ACL to heal on its own. He said all 32 teams came to his pro day and the Browns invited him to camp later in 2007. He lasted the entire camp but was only about 75 percent.

Baker said he was heartbroken when Cleveland let him go.

“I couldn’t do all the things I could do before I got hurt,” he said. “I still had to wear a brace. They sent me home. They said I was a good player, that I was a quick learner and they loved everything about me being a big back. But it was discouraging. So I went to grad school and started coaching.”

And in the end, Baker said that going back to school may have been the best thing that happened to him.

For his graduate school internship, Baker returned to Waddell, his high school alma mater. Tracie West was working there, and they had a mutual friend who wanted West and Baker to meet.

A few days before an alumni basketball game at the school, West and Baker were in an office with some people, everybody just talking.

“We realized we knew all the same folks,” said Tracie West Baker, who now runs the Dream Big Events planning company. “I ran track and cheered in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. We were in the same circles, but we just didn’t know each other.”

On the day of the alumni game, they bumped into each other again.

“He came and played in the game. He was dunking the ball,” Tracie Baker said. “He had a fresh haircut. I was like, ‘OK, he’s kind of cute.’”

Just as taken by West, Baker was telling his friends that the woman he had seen just two times was going to be his wife.

Three months later, West brought her future husband home to meet her father. Turned out West’s father and Baker’s father knew each other from two jobs that often brought them together.

In fact, Baker’s father had once given West’s father a cardboard S.C. State football schedule with DeShawn Baker’s picture on the cover.

“So my dad, for years, rode around with my husband’s picture in his truck,” Tracie Baker said. “So it’s a God thing that we met.”

The Bakers were married in 2013. After getting his graduate degree, Baker started coaching at Myers Park and Waddell and later in college at J.C. Smith, but yearned to be an athletic director. And he was working as an assistant AD for game operations at S.C. State when another one of his former teammates called him.

When Baker took a visit to S.C. State in high school, Chachi Sullivan — now the Hough defensive coordinator — was his tour guide. Sullivan called his old teammate, while Baker was working in college, and told him he needed him at the high school.

“He said, ‘We’ve got two running backs that are pretty good, and we don’t have a coach for them,’” Baker said. “Me and Tracie had been talking about moving back to Charlotte. It just kind of made sense.”

So Baker came back and eventually got his first head coaching job at Cox Mill. When he got back to Hough, he had everything in place: A great staff, including Sullivan — who many coaches believe is the best at his position in the state — a good administration and a team stocked with talent that had made several deep playoff runs.

Baker felt at home. He knew the place, and he made sure to mix his real family with his new one. And that meant including the woman who took his heart the first day they’d met.

“Tracie is the backbone of our family,” Baker said of his wife. “She’s the championship wife. And the (players) love her. She treats them like they’re our kids, you know? But without her, I can’t do any of this. She makes it so easy for me to coach football and I know it’s aggravating to her sometimes, but she loves me, and she is going to make sure I’m the best coach I possibly can be, and that I have everything I need.”

Not many large class public school football teams from Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools have ever repeated as state champions. The list is short: Independence, Butler, Mallard Creek and Chambers.

This season, Hough has a real chance to join them.

South Pointe coach Collins, whose S.C. team is also a nationally ranked state championship favorite, thinks Baker and Hough will do it.

“He has his standard,” Collins said, “of how he wants things done and nobody in the state of North Carolina will beat them this year. You can quote me on that one. They will win it again.”

Last week, Hough beat Raleigh power Cardinal Gibbons at Bank of America Stadium in uptown Charlotte, 35-10. It was easy to see how much the Huskies players loved their coach, celebrating with him as much before the game as after, when former Panthers star Tre Boston handed Baker a big trophy and he held it up while his players jumped and shouted around him.

“Coaching is in his heart,” Tracie Baker said of her husband. “It’s his gift. He’s just a great person. He’s passionate about those boys. He loves the culture, the students and making a difference. And it’s not just football. Yes, he wants to succeed, but how is he going to make them greater men overall? But that’s his gift, and when you have a gift, you operate in that.”

High school coaches rarely stay on campus for 30 years the way they used to. Baker can see himself breaking that mold, but he doesn’t lie when asked if he wants to coach at the next level.

“I do dream of it,” he said. “But for me to leave Hough, it would have to be the right opportunity at the right time. This place loves my family. My family loves this place.

“It’s not a place you want to leave.”

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