Kelley makes bold move: prep to college,
One’s first reaction that Kevin Kelley is leaving Pulaski Academy to coach college football?
Friday nights in the fall just got a little less predictable.
Who knows, some Class 5A team other than Pulaski Academy might be a state-title contender. Until Frank McClellan stepped aside, small schools other than Barton gave little thought to winning the big one. So great was the Barton dynasty that Bauxite’s coach displayed the game ball from a playoff win over Barton more prominently in his office than the resulting championship trophy. (As Lake Hamilton people can attest, this did not apply with Greenwood last year without Rick Jones.)
A Glenwood High man like myself (just had to throw that in), Kevin Kelley changed the room temperature. With the kickoff or his own team’s squib, the fear of instant annihilation was instilled if the opponent could not defend the pass or cover the incessant onside kicks. Defense was something his team played until it could get the ball back.
Style points were for the guys who speak at clinics about their “philosophy” of coaching football and might play creampuff schedules.
Kelley did not necessarily fill a reporter’s notebook with juicy quotes. No Joe Reese was he, one who came to Hot Springs when “they gave standing ovations for first downs.” But like Reese, first as defensive overseer to Bobby Hannon and then as head coach, Kelley’s teams took on, and often defeated, top talent.
So what if Arkansas opponents wanted no part of PA? Perhaps some school in Nashville, Tenn., or Salt Lake City might; Shreveport Evangel was usually good for a call, and what other Arkansas team would book Dallas Highland Park? In a showcase victory for Kelley’s program, the Bruins in 2015 snapped the 84-game home winning streak of the school that, years apart, groomed Bobby Layne and Matthew Stafford for the Detroit Lions.
At age 51, about to coach college football for the first time, Kelley has time to pen a second act unlike any in Arkansas coaching. Gus Malzahn comes to mind, and while Hughes to Springdale represents a quantum leap in working conditions, Malzahn proved ready for the challenge and before dipping his toe into college coaching developed some of the greatest high-school football programs (Shiloh Christian and Springdale) ever seen in Arkansas. Uniquely qualified was he for the college game, first as an offensive guru (the man who called plays for Heisman winner Cam Newton and, in his second year at the school, BCS champion Auburn). Nick Saban, whose Alabama teams bestride college football like Bear Bryant’s once did, knew Gus’ name.
With interest, we look forward to what lies in store for Kevin Kelley.
Hearing the news, one rushed to a map to find Clinton, S.C., where Presbyterian College is located. A Football Championship Subdivision school, Presbyterian is going where no football-playing college or university in Kelley’s home state dared go.
The Blue Hose have turned over the car keys to someone who passes on yellow (or at least his teams do) on Friday nights in the fall.
One whose teams generally eschew the punt and kickoff, playing pinball football.
(Here, Kelley is different from Reese, who, however loquacious, could say “the other
guy has to eat, too.” Late in a state final against Little Rock McClellan, the Bruins comfortably ahead, Kelley called a timeout and PA passed for another touchdown. “Wish you hadn’t done it,” I texted him afterward. “Couldn’t be helped,” he said, citing payback from a regular-season game.)
“If it’s an epic fail, I can live with it this way,” Kelley was quoted in Friday’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. “If I reverted back and played traditional football now that I’ve got this job, I could live with myself if it didn’t work.”
It took nine state championships and a 21629-1 record in 18 seasons for a college athletic director to dial Kelley’s number. “There are not many things that could’ve taken me away from that team and that school,” he told his players Friday, “but my dream of being a (college) head coach was one of the very, very few that could.”
Looking for clues, a Little Rock sportswriter who covered PA says he noticed a change in Kelley during the pandemic-infected 2020 Arkansas season. And, he says, the ease with which Rick Jones, with whom I rubbed shoulders at then-Harding College, moved from high school to college coaching (Greenwood to the University of Missouri) may have influenced his decision.
Kevin and I got degrees from Glenwood High 14 years apart. We do not know each other than through word of mouth and social media. GHS closed its doors in 1997; a McDonald’s,
a Subway and a Southern Bancorps branch now cover the ground we walked. But a few vignettes are worth remembering.
In Kelley’s sophomore year at Glenwood, the first-year football coach abruptly quit at halftime of a game at Bauxite. Two years later, holding the rope, that team won a conference tri-championship (Preston Stidman was coaching at Mount Ida, Wayne Mayer at Mountain Pine, to give you some idea of the landscape). Kelley and at least two GHS sophomores in 1984, when the coach bailed out, entered the coaching profession; John Bright just directed Centerpoint to the Class 3A girls’ basketball final, his daughter a star player.
As I have advised prospective sportswriters, no one should enter coaching unless it is something one cannot live without, an itch that cannot be scratched. For every Kelley who has scaled the heights, one finds a burnedout coach in an unfortunate situation, some working for an athletic director (possibly an ex-coach) who may be busy scheduling games, hiring officials and counting gate receipts.
A quote Robert Yates, then of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, gleaned from Don Campbell, the legendary “General” of Wynne football, rings true: “You get better in this profession, or you get into administration.”
Kevin Kelley, with no more worlds to conquer on the high-school level, is getting a battlefield promotion. Time to see if he’s gone loco or, with his feel for the game, has the last laugh.