UAPB football revels in revival
Nearly five years ago, the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff football team finished a 1-10 season.
The next year, the Golden Lions posted the first of back-to-back 2-9 records, and Coach Monte Coleman’s contract was not renewed.
Wide receiver Tyrin Ralph was a freshman in 2017, and he remembers wanting to be part of a renaissance in a program that had just won the Southwestern Athletic Conference under Coleman five years earlier.
“It took a while,” Ralph said Saturday after UAPB improved to 4-0 this spring season and clinched a berth in the Southwestern Athletic Conference championship game on May 1. “The players have been here since 2016-17. We had to build this from the ground up. … I’m just happy for the team, for the players who stayed here through all the times and tribulations.”
Tight end Jeremy Brown is the elder statesman among the Golden Lions, redshirting as a freshman in 2016. He and Ralph are now playing under their third head coach at UAPB, Doc
Gamble.
The second one, Cedric Thomas, engineered a turnaround by 2019, giving the Lions their first winning season in seven years with a 6-5 record.
Ralph said this team is the same as the one nearly two years ago that took plenty of steps forward under Thomas, now the head coach at Mississippi Delta Community College.
“We just had missing pieces we just had to fill in just a little bit,” Ralph said. “It’s special, but we just had to work and excel in certain areas. We just had to make it happen.”
UAPB reaped other rewards to go with clinching the SWAC Western Division title in Saturday’s 36-31 win over Prairie View A&M. Junior quarterback Skyler Perry was named BOXTOROW National Player of the Week after throwing for four touchdowns and running for another.
It was the second time in three weeks a Golden Lion won the honor from the radio show “From the Press Box to Press Row.” Ralph was BOXTOROW National Special Teams Player of the Week after his 279 all-purpose-yard performance and
The results are a product of Gamble’s desire to see a program evolve from hard times. He passed up a chance to return to the Football Bowl Subdivision after a 2-9 mark in 2018, but he stayed long enough to be named interim head coach in February 2020 and given the permanent role two months later.
game-winning 77-yard punt return against Mississippi Valley State on April 3.
UAPB also made its first-ever appearance in the STATS Perform Football Championship Subdivision Top 25 at No. 24.
The Lions are the highest-ranked SWAC team in the poll, which is typically voted on by sports information and media relations directors as well as FCS writers and broadcasters.
UAPB has won three of its games by seven or fewer points, including 33-30 at Southern on March 6 and 2417 at Valley.
“It’s shown that we’ve grown up,” Gamble said. “We’ve learned how to win. We’re still learning how to win. That’s the big thing, is winning. Winning is winning, and learning how to win. The things we’ve put into place to teach winning — still, you have to go out there and do it against another opponent. For us, the thing about it is, we’ve done it against good football teams. Winning is winning, and we’re having fun doing it.”
Perry said it means a lot to see the progress of the program firsthand.
“A lot of people were talking about keeping faith, [and that] UAPB hadn’t done this since 2012,” Perry said. “Even when Coach T [Thomas] and Coach Gamble said, ‘It won’t always be like this,’ I always remember that.”
The results are a product of Gamble’s desire to see a program evolve from hard times. He passed up a chance to return to the Football Bowl Subdivision after a 2-9 mark in 2018, but he stayed long enough to be named interim head coach in February 2020 and given the permanent role two months later.
All he had to do was wait nearly another year to coach a game. He has yet to lose one as the head of the Lions’ den.
“When I looked at everything and I knew we could win here — and we did do that in ’19 — that’s what I wanted to do, be part of a winner,” Gamble said.