Ethan Mackenny’s aunt (Carey) and mother (Joannah) squared off in 1994-95 as members of Duke’s and Georgia Tech’s women’s basketball teams, respectively. (Duke Athletics photo)
“Lara was coaching me my freshman year (she was an assistant coach for two seasons following her playing career at Tech) and ‘NBA Inside Stuff’ came that day to see who Mom and Dad would be cheering for. It was also the game when I was shooting free throws while the Duke band chanted ‘Ca-rey’s bet-ter [clap, clap, clap-clap-clap],’” she remembered. Joannah made both free throws, then shot the band members a scowl.
(Though opponents that day, Carey delivered an invaluable assist to Joannah a few years later. While working in the Atlanta offices of Manhattan Associates in the late 90s, her company once welcomed in a group of workers from their London branch for a two-week visit. Carey implored her sister to meet one of them, a native of Folkestone on the country’s southeastern coast. That man, Matthew Mackenny, is now her husband and Ethan’s dad.)
Ethan admits he didn’t grow up around football – his father favored rugby and soccer, while his mom’s side of the family was littered with hoopers. Competitive basketball had a head start by several years. When he first expressed interest in playing the sport in the fourth grade, Joannah naturally had concerns about concussions. She went to Ethan’s pediatrician to discuss the pros and cons.
The pediatrician sized up her son and offered his sound medical opinion.
“He was like, ‘Jo, I’d be worried about the other kids on the field,’” Joannah said.
Mackenny joined the Lassiter Junior Trojans that fall, where coaches were happy to add a kid of such birth certificate-straining proportions. Mackenny’s on-field demeanor, though, didn’t initially match up to his size.
In a jamboree, he recalled, “I hurt a kid, and I went over to my coaches on the sideline and I was crying because I hurt the kid. I was like, ‘Guys, I didn’t mean to.’”
“My mom referred to me as Ferdinand, (after) ‘Ferdinand The Bull.’ I would smell the flowers and I would get stung by the bee and then I’d get mad and make something happen,” he added.
Mackenny still played basketball but soon found a love for football, rooted in the camaraderie he felt with his teammates and coaches. By his freshman year of high school, he said he also shed his Ferdinand-ish tendencies and began to relish, as he put it, “the concept of, ‘Wait, I get to hit this guy? I can legally drive this guy into the ground? I’m not going to get in trouble?’”
Mackenny played both sports when he enrolled at Lassiter High School in Marietta, Ga., where Joannah teaches in the special education department and took over as head coach of the girls’ varsity basketball team when Ethan was a freshman. He gave up the family stock-in-trade after his sophomore year; he was tired of bulking up for football, only for that newfound mass to melt away during basketball season. If he wanted a shot at a Division I football scholarship, he knew he not only needed to add weight, but keep it.
Head coach Brent Key likes to tease Mackenny by pulling up a picture on his phone of the two smiling together at a Georgia Tech lineman camp.
“I think it was the end of my sophomore year. I was 236 pounds,” Mackenny recalled. “Coach Key was telling, ‘Hey, we’re going to see if you can put on this weight, and we’ll go from there.’”
As he bulked up, his football team endured some lean times. In four years with the Lassiter varsity team, Mackenny’s best record was a 4-6 mark as a junior. Some of his teammates transferred to other schools to enhance their recruiting looks and find a more competitive environment. Mackenny opted to stay and build with the players he had known for years.
“It’s been really emotional for me. Choosing to stay and build his school team, when other people went to other places. They went and they got to have a state championship and get those accolades. Ethan never got that,” Joannah said.
“He had a lot of licking his wounds and getting back out there. He did take the harder path, but it was the path that had a lot of lessons in it. A lot of good relationships with his coaches and teammates,” she added.
Mackenny has no regrets.
“Losing a lot growing up taught me a lesson or two, really – how to get back up on my feet, not to let these losses defeat me as a person. I can push forward no matter what,” he said.
Despite those tough seasons, Mackenny’s body thickened, his highlights flashed and his nimble feet from basketball didn’t lose their quickness. Scholarship offers started trickling in, including one from his aunt Carey’s alma mater, Duke. Georgia Tech was actually one of the last schools to offer him – much to the chagrin of Joannah, who overlapped with Key for two years as undergrads at Tech. She remembers them running in similar friend groups and exchanging hellos around the Edge Athletic Center.
When Key visited Mackenny at Lassiter in the spring of his junior year, Joannah came out to meet him at the school’s fieldhouse, fully loaded with sarcasm.
“I walked up to them and went, ‘Where the hell have y’all been?’ And we just start laughing about it,” she recalled.
Mackenny was unbothered by the delay, committing to Tech in June of 2022 and becoming the first pledge of the Jackets’ 2023 recruiting class. He never took another official visit.
“I have trusted Coach Key from Day One. I knew this was the place I wanted to be. Honestly, I don’t know why I didn’t commit sooner. I knew what I was buying in on,” he said.
After a brief dip, that investment has started to pay off again.
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Asked to recall Mackenny’s debut as a true freshman, when Georgia Tech faced Louisville in the 2023 season opener at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, “played” isn’t quite the word Geep Wade uses.
