SEATTLE — What Seahawks head coach Mike Macdonald lacks in age, he makes up for in experience.
On the outside, the youngest head coach in the NFL might not be a symbol of a seasoned veteran.
Yet his origin story can be traced back to when he was in high school.
Centennial High School in Roswell, Georgia is where Macdonald first caught the coaching bug.
In the early 2000s, he was an 18-year-old senior, who did not look his age.
"The players weren't what I thought they were going to be," said Xarvia Smith, the head football coach at the time. "They were small. They were weak. They were undersized. I used to drive home crying about 'God, what mistake did I make by going to Centennial?'"
Smith was in his first year at his first head coaching job. An injury to one of his key players was the last thing he needed.
"He hurt his neck at the beginning of the year, and then he tried to come back and he tore up his ACL," Smith said in reference to Macdonald.
Macdonald's playing days were done, but a football mastermind was born.
"My playbook is probably about 50 pages with about 80 blitzes," Smith said.
Macdonald spent the rest of the season memorizing it and then messaging it to his teammates.
That set the scene for a phone call two years later, when Macdonald was a sophomore at the University of Georgia in Athens. Smith was the head coach at Cedar Shoals High School in Athens.
"He called me up and said, 'Coach I need a job. Would you hire me and bring me on your football staff?'" Smith said. "I said, 'You know I would.'"
Macdonald was the defensive coordinator for the ninth-grade team and helped Smith with the linebackers on varsity.
"He had six shutouts," Smith said. "On varsity, we only gave up four points a game."
Cedar Shoals had never made it to the second round of the state playoffs. The one year with Macdonald on staff, they did.
Smith said he had seen enough.
"I said Mike you know what's getting ready to happen... I said, 'You're going to go coach in the NFL,'" Smith said. "'You're going to be a linebacker coach. Then you're going to be a coordinator, and within three to five years, you'll be a head coach by the time you're 35.' And he started laughing. So I was off by one year because he's 36."
Macdonald is a 36-year-old, who's been coaching half his life.
"(It) started when I coached high school football at Cedar Shoals and had an affinity for the linebacker position and it went from there," Macdonald said at his introductory press conference in Seattle.
For Smith, it's a coaching tree with strong roots.
"He's the first coach to make it that far so it's been pretty cool to watch that," Smith said.
Consider it the time being paid in experience paid off in the end.