Johnson eager to bolster Oak Ridge
Anyone familiar with Orlando high school football knows that Oak Ridge has always been known as a school with the athletes to compete against the powerhouse programs of Central Florida.
As a program, however, Oak Ridge has never been able to sustain a dominating run that would make it one of Orlando’s premiere programs.
Throughout the school’s history, controversy has often been at the forefront of the football program. With coaches leaving and players transferring, it has been difficult to build successful teams.
Sure there have been phases. Head coach
now an assistant at Cypress Creek, guided the Pioneers to back-toback winning seasons (2002 and 2003) for the first time at Oak Ridge since the mid-1970s. The 8-3 2002 team was only the fourth Oak Ridge squad to make the playoffs in school history. Then along came
now the head coach at Jones, who accomplished what many had believed to be a near impossible task — resurrecting Oak Ridge and molding it into the power it once was 30-plus years ago. From 2009 to 2015, Oak Ridge had seven consecutive winning seasons and Williams proved that winning wasn’t just a dream, going 42-17 during two different stints as head coach. (He left for a year to take an assistant coaching job at FAMU before returning mid-season in 2013.)
The Pioneers even won a district title in 2014, the first for the school since 1977, when head coach
was at the end of a run of five straight winning seasons. Sadly, it only took Williams 60 games to become the alltime winningest coach at a school that started playing football in 1962.
The one thing in common during all three periods of success at Oak Ridge High was continuity. Coaches stayed, players stayed and winning was the by-product.
Coaches and players have to stay true to the program in order to build anything successful, which Oak Ridge has proven. The head coach has to believe in the task, and he has to get his players to believe in COMMENTARY him and his goals for the future. Oak Ridge players have not had a lot to believe in over the years.
If the coaches are leaving, the players will be right behind them.
is the next guy hoping to stop that revolving door. He knows the recipe. The former Notre Dame player coached under Williams at Oak Ridge for two of those successful seasons.
“It’s been an awesome process, seeing a lot of these guys develop over a year period,” said Johnson, who enters his second season at Oak Ridge after coming over from Colonial High, where he spent one year as head coach. “Oak Ridge has always had talent and so to have talent again and to be able to feel like, going into a season, you can actually compete, it’s exciting. We’re looking forward to it.”
His first year at Oak Ridge was difficult, with the Pioneers going 4-6, but Johnson is hoping that a year of getting acclimated to the program will help lead to another successful era. The most important thing is keeping Oak Ridge players at Oak Ridge, and Johnson is well aware of that chore.
“That’s been our biggest fight, trying to keep kids here. … To believe that we’ve got the right things here at Oak Ridge and we have a program here that can sustain and show them success,” Johnson said. “I think a large part of it this spring we had 59 college recruiters come through here, so kids see that and these kids are looking for offers and looking for opportunities.
“Kids are paying attention to those things and they want to be where the opportunities are.”
Johnson has a solid senior nucleus around which to build and some talented underclassmen ready to shine. Quarterback
will give Oak Ridge key leadership.
and two-way players upon whom Johnson will rely heavily, give the Pioneers plenty of reason to be optimistic.
These guys are tired of getting kicked around.
“We’re looking to make a deep run in the playoffs,” Davis said. “Last year, it was a rough season, but this year we’ve got a new brand of football team and we have the players to get the job done.”
Myers-Glover has gained the most attention from college recruiters. He has Football Bowl Subdivision scholarship offers to play cornerback at FIU, Georgia State, Troy and Louisiana Tech.
“I’ve been here since my freshman year and I’ve seen a lot of talent go to waste,” Myers-Glover said. “We’re trying to finish our senior year with a bang. We have the talent. We just gotta come together as one. Team chemistry, that’s what we gotta work on, but we’ve got the talent.”
Young, who has offers as a safety from FIU and FAU, added, “It will be way better than last year because the chemistry is here, the coaches know the players a little bit better, the players have a better bond than last year and we’ve been all training real hard together this summer.”