PREP COACHING CHANGES: Smith leaves LAMP after long tenure; Tubbs takes over baseball at Holtville
Coaching changes this summer include Chad Smith leaving LAMP’s baseball program; Scott Tubbs taking over at Holtville and Stacey Foster being let go from Success Unlimited baskeball. (Staff Photos)
COMBINED REPORTS
Chad Smith was a major cog in the development of the LAMP baseball program over the past 15 years.
As both an assistant and head coach, he was a part of the Golden Tigers’ trip to the Class 3A state finals in 2008 and the near misses in 2011 and 2017.
But he believes it’s time for someone else to lead the program.
“It’s hard to leave,” Smith said. “We are mainly going for a new and different start. I didn’t know where or have a place to go before we had this opportunity.”
Smith will move to Hartselle where he will rejoin his former boss, Rocky Smith, who is the principle at the middle school. Smith does not have plans to coach baseball at this time.
“I will teach something that I like (Agriculture). It should be a good fit for us,” he said.
The news became official the day before he and his wife gave birth to their first child last week.
“It all happened at once,” Smith said. “Everything just worked out with all of this time we had after school shut down. I was able to do some things we’ve needed to do on the house and it sold rather quickly.”
Smith was part of LAMP’s baseball program for all but its first year, initially as an assistant under Rocky Smith before taking over as the head coach in 2013.
His teams have flirted with a run for state titles, reaching the Class 4A semis in 2017 and a quarterfinal berth last year. But he believes this last group could have made the best run of the bunch.
Unfortunately, the season came to an abrupt end due to Coronavirus.
“I would have loved to see how far these guys could have gone,” Smith said. “We had a good group of close-knit seniors who had talent. I think we would have had a shot (at a championship) but we’ll never know.”
Smith said he is unsure where LAMP will turn for its next coach. He also said while his new job would not including coaching, he is aware of the tradition of the Hartselle program which won the Class 5A title in 2013 and played for another in 2010.
“If the chance arises one day, I might be interested but that’s not what this move is about,” he said. “Now I’ve got a family to raise and that area is a good place to do that. We are excited about the change.”
Tubbs to lead Holtville baseball program
Saying he needed “something different,” Scott Tubbs has stepped away from his job as the head baseball coach at Autauga Academy and taken the same job at Holtville High School.
“I don’t know why I never made the move to a public school, maybe I was just content,” Tubbs said. “But I could never find the right opportunity and this one just kind of fell into my lap. I’m really excited about it.”
Tubbs was approved by the Elmore County Board of Education at its Monday meeting and will teach physical education and health classes at the school after spending the last four years at Autauga Academy.
“They’ve got kind of a rich tradition in baseball,” Tubbs said. “It doesn’t correlate into a lot of state championships, but they’ve had a lot of great players come through there. And they’ve got a real good class coming through right now. It ought to be a fun couple of years with these guys.”
Tubbs has spent the last dozen or so years at Edgewood, Macon East and Autauga, a trio of highly successful baseball programs in the Alabama Independent School Association. At Holtville, Tubbs will step into a program where successful baseball coaches have found themselves on the wrong end of negotiations with the schools.
Torey Baird has coached the Bulldogs to a 55-26 record the last three years, but apparently was released by the school at the end of the 2020 season.
Those three coaches have led the Bulldogs to 10 playoff berths over an 11-year span, including six in a row that was cut short by the Coronavirus pandemic this past spring that canceled the season in mid-March.
The new start at Holtville coincides with Tubbs’ last round of chemotherapy treatments for colon cancer, which first surfaced late last summer before the start of football practice. That, along with a heavy round of rain in the early weeks of the 2020 season and the Coronavirus interruption, presented him with the most challenging season of his coaching career.
“I don’t know if it was because of the cancer or what it was, I just kind of felt like I was in a lull,” he said. “(The new job at Holtville) is already making me change a little and making me enjoy getting up and giving me something new and challenging to look forward to.”
Cochran new boys basketball coach at Stanhope Elmore
Stanhope Elmore has promoted David Cochran to serve as the Mustangs’ head basketball coach, replacing Terry Hardy, who will continue to teach in the school system at Millbrook Middle School.
Cochran has served as an assistant for football and boys’ basketball and will now add golf to his duties as well.
He served as a varsity assistant for boys’ basketball for the past three years and also served as the junior varsity head coach before his promotion.
“I definitely want to teach and lead these young men to become better men,” Cochran said. “I grew up in a family where both my dad and my mom were coaches, so I’ve been around all the sports since I was in diapers. I’ve noticed that little things can win you games and help you take the next step. I want to continue the success that Stanhope has had and build off of that.”
He will inherit a program that has struggled to reach the postseason. Neremiah James guided the Mustangs to a school-record 29-6 record in 2002 that included a trip to the 5A state semifinals. Since then, Stanhope Elmore has reached the semifinals just three times (2003, 2009 and 2017).
Foster out at Success Unlimited
In other coaching news, administrators at Success Unlimited Academy are looking for a new boys’ basketball coach after the most successful coach in the school’s short athletic history parted ways with the school.
Stacey Foster, who led the Mustangs to a pair of state tournament appearances in their only two years as an Alabama Independent School Association member, confirmed that he was not being retained by the school despite having no contact with administrators.
“They have not contacted me but how things are going, I knew I was out the door,” Foster said, “just talking to some of the other coaches. In my mind, I had already moved on.”
Athletic director Bill Granger, after a conversation with headmaster Susan Alred, said it was news to both Alred and Granger that Foster would not be returning to the school. After a follow-up conversation between Alred and Foster, Granger confirmed that Foster would not be returning but did not wish to comment further on the matter.
Before the follow-up conversation, Granger said Alred had a one-on-one conversation with each of the school’s personnel to discuss the school’s future, as she does each year but particularly after the Coronavirus pandemic’s effect on the economy this spring. Apparently, Foster gathered from his initial conversation with Alred that the community coach who serves as a volunteer at the school would not have his contract renewed in the 2020-21 school year.
“It’s been like that every year,” Foster said. “People don’t understand what I have to deal with, coaching at Success. It’s been a rollercoaster. Every season, I don’t know if they’re going to bring me back. It’s nothing new.
“Going into the offseason, I had a conference with Mrs. Alred and I made the statement, ‘Just give me a long-term contract because I have players hanging at the end of the season. I can’t even start an offseason because I don’t know if I’m coming back and their parents are asking if I’m coming back.’
“It looks like we don’t have our stuff together. Give me a long-term contract and I can start building the program like I want to and not worry about whether I did good enough this season or did I step on some toes.”
Foster had been the longest serving coach in school history, starting with the boys’ basketball team as a coach when Alred initiated athletics at the school before hiring Granger at the start of the 2016-17 season. The school initially was a member of the Alabama Christian Sports Conference and won the league’s junior varsity girls’ basketball state tournament in 2017 and the junior varsity boys’ basketball state tournament (with a 19-0 record) in 2018. The varsity boys’ basketball team also won a state championship that season, defeating the Wiregrass Kings in the finals.
Since joining the Alabama Independent School Association, the Mustangs have struggled, posting back-to-back losing seasons in football and girls’ basketball, a losing season in baseball in 2019 and failed to field a softball team in 2019 and 2020.
The only successful program has been boys’ basketball, which reached the semifinals of the Class AAA state tournament in 2019 and the quarterfinals of the AAA tournament in 2020. Foster said it was fitting that he was leaving the program with many of the players who started under him as junior varsity players in 2016-17.
“I love all of my boys, but those guys came in with me and left out with me,” he said. “I wanted to go out with those guys, if I had to go out at all.”
He said it would be difficult to leave a team full of returning players, but said that wasn’t the case at Success Unlimited.
“I had 10 seniors,” he said, “and if I’m not there, they’re not staying. There was only a couple of guys and one of them contacted me and said he was going to Jeff Davis anyway, for financial reasons.”