Inside The Chart
On The Map: The upbringing that makes newly minted special teams coordinator Jason Semore unlike almost any coach in Division I football
You’ve read this story before.
Kid grows up a small-town coach’s son. Follows his dad into the business. Grinds his way up the coaching ladder, establishing his own success.
That doesn’t make Jason Semore all that different from the scores of other coaches’ sons who populate the staffs around college football. After playing for his dad in high school, then lettering in college, Semore has spent the past 17 years hopscotching from Division II to FCS to FBS, from one side of the country to the other, from small-school coordinator to Power-5 analyst and now, finally, to linebackers coach at Georgia Tech. On Monday he was promoted to the Yellow Jackets’ special teams coordinator, a role he also held in 2015 at the University of Montana.
But Semore’s background makes him unlike any coach’s son at the Division I level. Maybe any coach in Division I, period. And the answer lies innocuously at the top of his bio.
Hometown: Ganado, Ariz.
It’s an easy piece of information to gloss over, or skim past, or remain incurious about. Every coach and player has it listed obligatorily on their roster page.
Semore’s hometown is a bit of misnomer. Ganado (population 905), in the northeastern corner of Arizona, isn’t technically a town. It’s a chapter of the Navajo Nation.
Semore spent his entire childhood on a reservation, in a place that’s 93 percent Native American according to the 2020 Census, immersed in a culture few if any of his coaching peers have ever experienced.
“It was unique in that you’re in an environment where pretty much everyone is different than you,” he said.
Ganado is all Semore has known. His grandparents moved there in the early 1970s as part of a Bureau of Indian Affairs program that placed teachers at reservation schools in exchange for paying off their student debts. They lived and worked in Ganado for several years before returning to their native Oklahoma. Semore’s father, Russ, moved his family there after getting out of the Air Force, shortly after Jason and his twin brother, Chris, were born, to be an assistant football coach at the high school.
“The reservation is very different. It’s very small towns kind of spread out in a massive area. There’s almost a million Navajo, and the all live on this sprawling, huge reservation, the largest reservation in the world,” Semore explained.
At an elevation of 6,385 feet, Ganado sits in the rural, rugged Four Corners region of the U.S. Its Navajo name, Lók’aahnteel, translates to “Patch of Wide Reeds.” Cattle and sheep ranches stretch along Highway 191 to the west. Rabbitbrush, pinons, junipers and prickly pear cactus freckle the red clay hills there. Copper colored mesas and escarpments stand sentinel in the distance, giving the area a sense of vast, ancient beauty. Hogans, the ceremonial, low-slung dwellings built with wood and packed mud, can still be found around Ganado, often standing next to families’ regular homes.
“It’s high desert plains. It’s really unique in that it’s not quite the Utah sandstone, but it’s more vegetation than high desert,” Semore explained.
He knows the stereotypes of communities like his. Ganado is rustic, but it’s not bleak or forgotten. It has its hardships, but it’s not crippled by the issues that afflict so many small reservation communities. Window Rock, the capital of the Navajo Nation, sits 25 miles to the east and has banks, grocery stores and fast food chains, and Ganado has a regional hospital and an airport. The Hubbell Trading Post is a national historic site that attracts visitors throughout the Southwest. Ganado bills itself as one of the more agriculturally progressive places on the Navajo Nation, and the area is renowned for its Navajo rug making. When Semore and his family lived there, the high school had almost 1,000 students from all over the county.