Buford is set to kick off the 2025 season tonight at the new Phillip Beard Stadium (yes, still weird to NOT say Tom Riden, but I’ll get used to it at some point) against Milton. This will be the fourth season now that the Wolves have been in the state’s largest classification.
They were in the old Class 7A for two years and now are in Class 6A. Buford coach Bryant Appling is entering his seventh season at the helm of the program, which is one of the longest tenured coaches at his team in the classification. Which means one thing...
Class 6A is tough on coaches!
The lifespan in the state’s largest classification can be hazardous to your coaching tenure. Heading into the 2025 season, 21 of the 57 head coaches in the classification are in their first or second year -- that’s 36.8 percent for those with a calculator. However, Appling is one of two of the longest tenured coaches in 6A that are in our area.
The other is Robert Craft at North Forsyth, who is entering his 10th season in Coal Mountain. Craft is one of just four coaches that have been at their school for 10 years or longer in the classification. That equates to just 7 percent of coaches making it that long at a 6A program in recent history. That's rough.
The longest tenured coach in 6A is Shane Queen of North Cobb, who is about to embark on his 20th season.
Apparently one of the state’s toughest regions on coaches is in northeast Georgia.
Region 8-A D1 saw a flurry of coaching activity since the end of the 2024 campaign. Exactly half of the programs in this highly-competitive region changed coaches since last year. Commerce, Elbert County, Providence Christian, and Rabun County all are under new management in 2025. And despite being in the lowest classification in the GHSA, they don’t mess around. The coaching competition is as fierce as the competition on the field.
Two of the programs -- Commerce and Rabun County -- hired coaches that won state titles and another (Elbert County) hired a coach that lost in the championship game in the state’s highest class.
Commerce hired Gordon Central coach Lenny Gregory to replace Mark Hollars. However, Gregory is better known for having led Collins Hill to the Class 7A title in 2021 with Travis Hunter, who is now with the Jacksonville Jaguars. Gregory is 63-53 in 11 seasons as a head coach in Georgia. He is the Tigers third coach in the past six seasons.
Rabun County hired Brookstone coach and former Wildcats alum Rance Gillespie to replace Michael Davis. Gillespie won back-to-back state titles at Peach County in 2005 and 2006 and is 170-91 in 23 seasons as a head coach. He is the third coach in five seasons and fourth in the past eight years for the Wildcats.
And former Archer head coach Andy Dyer was promoted from OC at Elbert County to replace Shannon Jarvis. Dyer was 97-52 in 13 seasons at Archer, including leading the Tigers to a Class 6A state runner-up finish in 2014. Dyer is the fourth coach in eight seasons for the Blue Devils.
Talk about "Just win Baby!" for all three of those programs! Whew!
We can’t wait to see what all this coaching royalty will bring to what was already a super-charged region for talent on the field.
