CORINTH, Miss. (WMC) - On a Friday night in 2021, Justin Dye stood on the Corinth High School sideline, headset on, calling plays. Three days earlier, doctors had found a golf-ball-sized tumor on his brain stem. Four days later, he was in surgery.

“I was like, ‘I’ve got a game Friday,’” Dye said. “(The Doctor) let me coach in the game Friday night, and I had brain surgery Monday.”

That mindset — get through the next 48 hours, then worry about the rest — has carried Dye through some of the hardest years of his life. In that span, the 36-year-old head football coach, head powerlifting coach, and head track & field coach has survived a brain tumor & surgery, a stroke, a shunt infection that triggered meningitis, and a freak weight-room accident that nearly cost him his arm and did cost him part of his hand. Through all of it, Corinth has kept winning, and Dye has kept showing up.

“No matter what you’re going through, you can still find a way to push through to be successful, to have, to still influence and impact,” Dye said.

A tired summer, then a terrifying MRI

Dye’s ordeal began in the summer of 2021. He’d just been promoted to head football coach at Corinth, where he’d already spent more than a decade on staff. At the same time, he and his wife, Mallory, had just welcomed their second child.

“I kind of felt tired. I felt a little off,” Dye said. “I thought it was because I got promoted. We’re going through just having a newborn and all the things that come along with that.”

Then, at a JV game that summer, his vision started cutting in and out.

“I’m thinking maybe it’s the glasses, contacts, something,” he said.

An eye doctor found his eye pressure dangerously elevated and ordered an MRI. Dye tried to push it off two weeks, until fall break — he had a division game against New Albany that Friday. The doctor called him back instead and got him in immediately.

“As soon as they put me out the MRI, they called me back and I had a golf ball sized brain tumor on my brain stem,” Dye said. “It had got onto my auditory nerve, my jugular vein, and it started to close my brain stem off. That was what was causing the buildup of pressure and my eyesight to go out.”

He called his wife with the news and then went back to practice.

“‘Hey, just left the MRI, got a brain tumor, I’m going back to practice,” Dye said, recalling the conversation. “And just kind of left it at that.”

A neurosurgeon in Memphis told him surgery needed to happen immediately. Dye negotiated. He’d have the operation but not before the New Albany game.

Dye was diagnosed with Neurofibromatosis type 2 (NF2) and underwent a 20-hour surgery to remove the tumor. He now requires an MRI every year to check for new growths.

Back on the sideline, in a wheelchair

Dye missed two games recovering from surgery. He wasn’t going to miss a third.

“The whole time I’d been in the hospital, my whole mindset is like, ‘What is the checklist that I’ve got to complete to get back?’” he said. “I was still trying to get somebody to bring my computer so I could watch film.”

When he insisted on returning for game three, doctors warned needed a wheelchair. He didn’t care, as long as it got him on the sideline.

“I feel like all of my players are my kids,” he said of the decision to come back early. “If I start getting down about something that’s going on, no matter how significant it is, it’s just going to make it worse. My mindset is I’m going to make the best of every situation and continue to work through it, because that’s what I expect of them.”

Back at the field house, Mallory told his staff not to put him on the field or hand him a headset. Dye went around her.

“As soon as she walked off, I was like, ‘I need a headset,’” Dye said. “Give me a headset. I’m going to coach.”

A shunt, an infection, and a December-to-February hospital stay

The brain surgery left Dye with a shunt, placed after his head began swelling, a procedure that sent him back to the hospital even as he was still coaching games that same season.

That shunt became the source of his next crisis. Last December, his appendix ruptured at school the day before winter break.

“I thought my stomach was just hurting really bad,” Dye said.

He had an emergency appendectomy, but within days his abdomen became infected and so did his shunt. The infection led to meningitis and a near-three month stay in the hospital.

Dye had to lean on his assistant coaches to keep the powerlifting program running. He made it back for the postseason push. Corinth won its third consecutive state powerlifting title.

Later that year, it was track & field’s turn. They also won the state championship, their second straight.

As for football, the Warriors have seen an upward trajectory since Dye came into the head coaching role. His first season ended with a 2-8 record, but the following seasons ended with 5-6 (2022-23), 3-9 (2023-24), 6-5 (2024-25), and 9-3 (2025-26) records. As of this report, they’re 5-2 with playoff hopes very much alive.

A dumbbell, a scraped hand, and 13 surgeries in June

The next blow came almost as soon as that school year ended. Dye was straightening up the weight room, trying to reposition a 125-pound dumbbell that had been set down crooked.

“When I pull it up, my foot slips and the dumbbell goes down on my hand,” Dye said.

He shook it off as a scrape and didn’t think much of it. A day later, shopping with his wife, the pain hadn’t let up. Dye will tell you that he’s got a pretty high pain tolerance, so he thought it had to be extreme.

“It might be broken,” Dye thought.

An X-ray showed no fracture, but the next morning, the pain was so bad that he passed out in the shower.

Doctors ultimately diagnosed Compartment Syndrome — a dangerous buildup of pressure in the hand — which has to be surgically relieved. The wound then developed Necrotizing Fasciitis, a fast-moving flesh-eating infection. Dye underwent two surgeries at the local hospital in Corinth before being rushed to Regional One in Memphis. Doctors feared he might lose the arm entirely.

The infection had spread up to his elbow, and he was hospitalized from May 29 to June 13. He underwent multiple surgeries and lost one finger to amputation, with doctors unsure for a time whether he would lose the entire hand.

Why he keeps coming back

Ask Dye what’s gotten him through this time, and the answer always circles back to the people around him: his wife, his three children, and the players he’s coached for more than a decade.

“I’m not going to let stuff like this take me out of it because I feel like there’s too many people around me that are depending on me, too many people that I influence, too many people I take care of,” he said.

He’s just as quick to credit his wife.

“It has been an insane five years. You feel like you’re just kind of treading water when you look back at it,” Dye said. “It would be so much harder to do that without somebody like my wife.”

Dye says his approach to coaching hasn’t changed through any of it: show up, put in the time, and never ask a kid to do something he wouldn’t do himself.

He said the lessons he’s learned have less to do with football and more with how he wants to be seen by the students and community around him.

“No matter what you’re going through, you can still find a way to push through to be successful, to influence, and to impact,” he said. “When you have the support and you have close support from multiple people, it does make it a lot easier.”

How to help

Dye’s family has set up a GoFundMe to offset medical costs from his ongoing care. As of this report, the fundraiser had raised $7,213 of a $20,000 goal.

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