Staff photo.
Homewood head coach Sean McBride
Homewood head coach Sean McBride talks with the Lady Patriots after the AHSAA Class 6A girls State Championship game against Saint Paul at John Hunt Park in Huntsville in May 2021.
Scotland-to-Alabama is not the typical soccer pipeline you see, and Homewood High School girls soccer coach Sean McBride never expected a milestone like 400 wins and eight state titles to be the result of it.
Born in Wishaw, Scotland, McBride idolized the most popular professional soccer team in the country: Celtic FC. His boyhood dream of playing for his favorite club became a reality when he was a 16-year-old and able to leave school to play for “The Bhoys” reserve team.
“When you grow up in Scotland, soccer is like a religion,” said McBride. “When you get the opportunity to do it, you hope you can for the rest of your life.”
But injuries ended his professional playing career at age 20.
McBride came to the United States following that. After playing junior college soccer at Massasoit Community College near Boston and earning NJCAA All-American honors twice, McBride transferred to Birmingham-Southern College.
As team captain in 1997, he recorded 17 assists and earned TranSouth Athletic Conference Player of the Year and NAIA All-American
honors. These exploits with BSC won him the attention of the USL A-League, where the Cincinnati Riverhawks selected him in the third round of the 1998 draft.
Yet it was at Birmingham-Southern that McBride discovered his true calling, sticking around as a graduate assistant coach. Influenced by longtime BSC head coach Preston Goldfarb, McBride realized there was more to it than “just kicking the ball” and that he loved coaching as soon as he got into it.
He began teaching history and coaching boys soccer at Homewood High School in 2000. The success on the field started nearly immediately, as McBride and the Patriots won their first state title in 2003. He led his players to win more than 300 games and further state championships in 2005, 2006, 2014 and 2018.
McBride spent a period coaching the girls soccer team at his alma mater and was inducted into the BSC Hall of Fame in 2003.
McBride’s wife Mindy used to run the Homewood girls soccer program, and the two coaches won the school’s first state titles on the girls side in back-to-back years in 2019 and 2020, Mindy leading the program the first year and Sean the following year. Mindy likes to joke that she is a better coach in part because her title came first.
Sean added two more state titles in 2022 and 2023 and has followed with section championships the last two seasons.
A major highlight? Coaching his daughters, Mary Siena and Annie.
“They would go back home to their mother and tell her that Dad was rather loud and angry sometimes, and I would be in the doghouse,” McBride said. “They wanted me to coach the girls the same way I coached the boys, though, and I think that’s the only way to do it otherwise you’re cheating one of them. I had the time of my life.”
Annie now plays at Samford, which means McBride can step outside his classroom and watch her train across the street.
Despite his accomplishments, McBride remains humble about his 400-win milestone.
“It comes down to the players more than me,” McBride said. “Four hundred wins just tells everybody I have been doing this for a long time.”
From a boy chasing a dream in Scotland to a coach shaping generations in Alabama, McBride found something even more meaningful than the professional career he once envisioned.
