Rutland names Mark Daniel athletics director, football head coach

Seventeen years ago, Kent Sparks joined the staff of a football program at Screven County that just had an assistant coach elevated to the head coaching position.

Sparks served one year as an assistant at Screven County, with the team going 5-6, before taking a head coaching position in Tennessee.

While the road Sparks took led him into administration, the head coach he worked under at Screven County that one year, Mark Daniel, was just starting to build that school’s program. Four seasons of 10 or more victories followed, including a 15-0 run in 2002 that led to the GHSA Class AAA championship.

Now the principal at Rutland, Sparks had a head coaching position to fill when George Collins retired at the end of the 2015 season. Daniel was in the market for a new coaching job, and they reconnected.

Daniel was named Rutland’s football head coach and athletics director Thursday, with the Bibb County School Board approving the hire at its committee meeting.

“In my 20 years of coaching, Mark was one of the best if not the best head coach I ever worked for,” Sparks said. “I worked for some good ones like Steve Chafin at Mary Persons and Jack Miller at Savannah Christian, and Mark was the best.”

Daniel, who has a 77-68 career record and will be entering his fifth head coaching stint, spent the past two seasons at Schley County. He went 6-4 in 2014, but an 0-10 season last year led to his departure from the program.

At Rutland, Daniel takes over a program that has enjoyed just two winning seasons in 13 years of varsity football, with Collins going 23-58 in his eight seasons there.

“The first thing is getting kids to work hard and take pride in the program, take pride in wearing orange and green, being positive and knowing that winning is possible,” said Daniel, a Dougherty and Austin Peay product who served four years as a Naval officer. “You just have to commit to staying and working hard. It’s never easy. Football is competitive. You have to earn everything you get.”

Daniel played for and coached under wing-T innovator Luther Welsh, whose 323 career wins place him eighth among all-time coaching leaders in Georgia.

At Schley County, Daniel installed the wing-T, and the Wildcats wound up having one of the top producing running backs in the state in 2014 in Lotravious Minter, who ran for 2,456 yards and 27 touchdowns in 10 games.

“A lot of teams like to vary (the wing-T) and spread it out,” Daniel said. “You have to get the people who are able to do it. At Schley County, we had no quarterback at all and ended up running it, and in 2014 we had the state’s leading rusher. You have to adapt to your players, but I have a preference to do things like Auburn does.”

Last year, however, was a struggle in which the Wildcats scored just 39 points the entire season. In addition to heavy graduation losses, Daniel said administrative changes in the district resulted in changes in how the school’s athletics department was run.

According to Daniel’s resume, Schley County was the only head coaching job he held that did not also carry athletics director duties with it.

“It was just a total reversal, everything changed,” Daniel said. “They took me out of the weight room, and they put an assistant baseball coach in there. That’s when it was time to look for something else.”

Daniel’s longest stretch as head coach came at Screven County, where he was head coach from 1999-2005 and finished with a 59-24 record. Daniel also spent the 2008-09 seasons as head coach at Wayne County, where he went 4-16, and the 1994-95 seasons as head coach at Fitzgerald, where he went 8-14.

In addition to the head coaching jobs, Daniel held assistant coaching positions at Riverview Academy (1987-88), Coffee County (1988-90), Camden County (1991-93 under Welsh), Screven County (1996-98 under Welsh), Thomson (2006-07 under Welsh), Greene County (2010-11), Lee County (2012) and Americus-Sumter (2013).

Daniel said one of his first priorities at Rutland will be to assemble a coaching staff. He plans to visit the school Friday afternoon and meet with the team.

“You’ve got to have good assistants,” Daniel said. “One man can’t do it all. That’s one reason why we had success at Screven County, we had good assistants.”

This story was originally published January 21, 2016 at 5:17 PM with the headline "Rutland names Mark Daniel athletics director, football head coach."