West Laurens promotes McClain to head football coach

West Laurens has had its periods of instability in the football coaching ranks.

Since Tim Dixon left after going 3-7 in 2000, the Raiders have had five head coaches.

They had to start looking again last week when Stacy Nobles resigned after six seasons for a variety of positions — including assistant football coach and assistant athletics director — at Bleckley County.

But the Raiders will operate in 2017 with a large measure of continuity with the Laurens County Board of Education approving assistant coach Kagan McClain on Tuesday to take over.

“I’m pretty excited,” McClain said. “It was really unexpected, and sudden. No one really expected Stacy to make the move that he made.”

Nobles and McClain talked about Nobles’ conundrum, and McClain didn’t think Nobles would leave.

“When he came out and did it, I was stunned,” McClain said. “Then I was thinking about where I was going to be putting my resume in.”

School officials quickly talked to McClain about taking over, and the man who didn’t necessarily foresee himself as a head coach was on pace to become a head coach within a week.

McClain’s appointment leaves Central, Twiggs County and Lamar County still looking for head coaches in Middle Georgia.

Kagan is 39, and he and wife Amy are the parents of two daughters and a son, ranging in age from 3 to 13 years old. He graduated from Norcross, and attended ABAC and Georgia Southwestern.

His introduction to coaching came as a student assistant to head coach Erik Soliday at Americus, and he was part of the team’s two state championships at the start of the century.

“He let me learn and come out and help,” McClain said. “It was a great experience just to be around it.”

McClain was initially interviewed by Chad Simmons, West Laurens’ head coach in 2010, for a position, but Simmons left after one season. He gave his successor, Nobles, McClain’s resume and information, and Nobles hired him as a football assistant and to head the strength program.

He shared co-defensive coordinator duties his second year with Von Lassiter, now Nobles’ boss at Bleckley County, and took over after that, serving as defensive coordinator the past four seasons.

McClain said he’ll likely remain as defensive coordinator — and eventually share the role — and coach defensive backs. Assistants Chuck Hill and Dwayne Gibson will take over the ninth-grade program, but the staff otherwise should remain basically intact.

Nobles mentioned staffing numbers last week as something of a sticking point.

“Sometimes, we just don’t have a lot of (teaching) slots,” McClain said. “That’s just one of the things we have to deal with.”

McClain has also been a defensive coordinator at Americus-Sumter, including under Mark Wilson, now head coach at Taylor County.

A large part of McClain’s role upon arrival at West Laurens was bolstering up weight training.

“One thing we did right away was we made weight training mandatory,” he said. “If you’re not in our weight program, you’re not playing football. Those first couple years, the kids took awhile to get used to that. Then the culture kind of changed and they started really buying in. We started going to meets and winning championships.”

And winning football games. The Raiders went 5-5, 5-5 and 3-7 the first three years, but have gone 24-13 the past three seasons, the program’s best three-year run since going 24-11 from 1994-96 under Dixon, who is currently superintendent in Meriwether County.

“We’re not super athletic at West Laurens, let’s be honest,” McClain said. “But the kids are tough and they work hard, and they’re good kids. And they believe in that weight room. And we’ve built our program around being strong and being physical and being tough.

“When you can’t outrun people, you better be able to grab them and hold on.”

The Raiders had one of the top defenses in Middle Georgia in 2016, allowing only two teams to score more than 21 points, Wayne County (a 28-22 West Laurens win in the opener) and Upson-Lee (a 42-21 loss in late October). They held four teams to single digits.

But the Raiders lose 16 starters, a few more on offense than defense.

“The group we have now, all they know is success,” McClain said. “It’s going to be a little bit of a rebuild, but the starters we’ve got coming back are good ones, and we’ve got some young kids that can step up and contribute.

“I don’t know how much success we’ll have, but we’re going to work out hard in that weight room, we’re going to practice hard and we’re going to play hard, and let the chips fall where they may.”

This story was originally published March 28, 2017 at 6:38 PM with the headline "West Laurens promotes McClain to head football coach."