Redding to stay at Mansfield as AD, football coach.

The Mansfield High School athletic program should be in good shape going forward as Mike Redding, the Hornets' long-time football coach, has confirmed he will stay in that job and add the role of athletic director to his duties beginning next year.

Redding will replace Joe Russo, Mansfield's AD for the past decade, who is retiring.

Mansfield football coach Mike Redding.

Redding recently announced that he would leave the girls' basketball coaching post he had held for the past 22 years as well as retire from teaching. He had amassed 309 victories with the girls' basketball program, which he took over from Margaret Conaty in the 1998-99 season.

The former North Attleboro High School and Holy Cross football standout set about the task of changing the athletic culture at Mansfield High when he succeeded George Kelly as head football coach midway through the 1988 season. Within a year, he brought Mansfield to its first football Super Bowl; through the 2019 season, Mansfield has appeared in 33 playoff games and won 24 of them, including eight high school Super Bowl championships.

His 2019 team won the Division 2 Super Bowl over Lincoln-Sudbury, 42-0, earning him the honor of statewide Coach of the Year.

The successes of the football program were the vanguard of an athletic Renaissance at Mansfield High, whose other teams have been close to the top of the Division 1 environment over the past decade.

"As a coach in the school district, he set the bar," Mansfield boys' basketball coach Mike Vaughan said of Redding during an episode of my podcast, "The Owner's Box."

Redding takes over at a time when significant change is coming to Massachusetts high school sports, most notably the change to statewide tournaments in all sports beginning in 2021 and the move to MaxPreps for tournament seeding beginning in the fall.