Less than four years ago he was a middle school coach in a rural, western Kentucky town. His teams played incredibly hard and his players played with tremendous grit and determination. He was enormously successful. People noticed. Schools noticed.
He landed a job on a Class 5A team as a position coach. That team finished 11-1. After that one-year stint, he was hired as a head coach in Kentucky’s 2A classification.
The 5A team he left has lost 18 of the 22 games they have played since his leaving the staff. Facts.
He spent two years at a program which had barely shown a pulse for much of its program’s history. He led them to 5 wins his first year, was nominated for the AP’s Kentucky HS Coach of the Year, and was the first coach to win 5 games at this school in only his first year in decades. People noticed.
In his second year at the school, his team spent 5 consecutive weeks in the AP’s, 2A, weekly top-ten poll for the first time in program history. They finished with a winning record for the first time in nearly a half a century (since 1974). The team had some tough injuries during the year which may well have derailed the team’s really putting up an impressive and historic number of wins. Coaches certainly notices as his peers in the Kentucky Football Coach’s Association selected him the Class 2A, 2nd-District, 2019 Coach of the Year.
Rival coaches noticed this wasn’t the same program they had routinely and annually creamed. The players were harder, tougher, grittier, and better. People noticed. So did other schools in neighboring states.
Now, in an incredibly short period of time, this former middle school head football coach has been hired to guide and direct the fortunes of one of the prestigious football programs in East Tennessee. Darrell Keith is the new HC of the Clinton Dragons, an Anderson County, 5A high school which has produced the likes of Charles McCrae and Larry Seivers.
The coach we loving dubbed “The Cat in the Hat” is taking that trademark fedora of his to the big leagues of Tennessee high school football. He’s also taking with him Kentucky’s best football player in the class of 2024, his son Joshuah Keith. The Dragons will get 4 years of little Russell Wilson directing its offensive fortunes and every player who wants to benefit from playing with him.
Perhaps it is both fortuitous and telling that in 2019, the first American high school to desegregate post Brown vs. the Board of Education‘s finding that separate but equal just doesn’t add up to real equality should hire its first black, head football coach. Why not? Shouldn’t Clinton High School hire a black head football coach to head the football program at the school which gave the civil right’s movement the famed “Clinton 12?”
Borrowing from Dr. Seuss, and the poem recited from the Cat in the Hat‘s poem “I love my Job,”
Darrell loves his job, He loves the pay!/He loves it more and more each day./Darrell loves (the AD), he is the best!/Darrell loves (the Principal) and all the rest…
Yes, Coach Keith loves pretty much everyone today. This is a day he has completed an unlikely and meteoric rise straight to the heights of high school football coaching. This is the day his son will get an appropriate platform in the “big-leagues” where he can showcase his considerable talents in a football-rich area where there is plenty of college-level talent and were recruiters are accustomed to scouring in search thereof.
The Keiths have gone from being diamonds in the rough to diamonds in the diamond store. Couldn’t have happened to a finer family.
This is Coach HB Lyon, reporting for KPGFootball, and we’re JUST CALLING IT LIKE WE SEE IT!
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