Olathe North High School football coach steps down, hopes to stay on as assistant
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Olathe North begins search for a new head coach after McCartney resigns.
- McCartney will stay as assistant if new coach accepts, continuing 30-year run.
- McCartney compiled an 80-38 6A record and helped reach multiple state finals.
The Olathe North High School football program will have a new head coach in the near future.
Head coach Chris McCartney, a staple with the school’s team for three decades, has stepped down as the Eagles’ head coach. But he plans to stay on as an assistant.
That is, McCartney told The Star, if the next head coach will have him. He had been the Eagles’ head coach since 2015, and the team’s defensive coordinator for 11 years before that.
Olathe North has begun the process of finding its next head coach, according to a news release.
“It’s going to take a lot of weight off of me where I can focus more on football instead of the 9,000 other things that go along with being head coach of a football program,” McCartney said Thursday.
McCartney joined Olathe North in 1996 as an assistant coach. Over his 30 years with the Eagles, he has been part of all eight state championships — 10 state-title game appearances in all — in school history.
As head coach he compiled an 80-38 record in Kansas’ 6A classification, which includes the state’s largest schools. Olathe North last reached the state championship game in 2019 but made a total of four state-semifinal appearances and won three Sunflower League titles under McCartney’s watch.
The 2022 Sunflower League Coach of the Year took over for legendary Olathe North coach Gene Weir, who won six state championships with the Eagles. (Weir stepped down as the head coach at Blue Valley North this past season.)
At Olathe North, McCartney applied for the position vacated by Weir after family members convinced him to give it a shot. After all, he’d spent considerable time around the program already, as a key assistant.
“I’ve loved this community around here,” he said. “Blue collar community that works hard and they don’t expect people to give them stuff. They feel like they need to earn it. And that’s what I thought was a very big part of why we have been very successful over the years.”
McCartney was inducted into the Greater Kansas City Football Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 2024. He said he feels satisfied after his time as the leader of the program and is ready to return to an assistant’s role.
“It’ll be different, but I think it won’t take long to get back to being what I was, which was a guy that had a lot of input, hopefully,” he said, looking forward to a role that “doesn’t have to deal with a lot of stuff that is not so fun.”
This story was originally published January 23, 2026 at 5:00 AM.
