By Staff
Kim West
PHIL CAMPBELL – Hazlewood assistant football coach Michael Parker was hired Thursday to fill the head coaching vacancy at Phil Campbell left by Kelly Kiser, who resigned last fall after 10 seasons.
The Bobcats made the playoffs in 2005 and advanced to the state quarterfinals in 2000 and 2001 under Kiser, a former Phil Campbell quarterback, but they finished 0-10 for the first time in school history last year.
Parker, who helped guided the 12-1 Golden Bears to the Class 1A quarterfinals last season, has also coached at East Lawrence, Lawrence County and Speake.
"I'm proud to be a Phil Campbell Bobcat," said Parker, a 1989 Hatton High School graduate. "I've been coaching for 12 years, and I love the game of football and turning out better young men."
Approximately 65 varsity and junior varsity players, including 11 rising seniors, gathered in the school auditorium Monday afternoon to meet their new coach for the first time.
"I've been in this situation before at Speake, which went 0-10 the season before I started. We went 4-6 my first season and then made the state playoffs with a 7-3 record the following year," said Parker. "People have told me this job will be a challenge, but I love challenges.
"I want the players to be excited about Phil Campbell football – we're going to have fun but we're going to work hard and hit the weight room."
Last season Phil Campbell fielded a junior high team with seventh and eighth-graders while freshman played on the varsity squad. Parker will play a junior varsity squad with seventh through ninth graders and a varsity team with a mixture of freshman through seniors.
"I would like us to have 35-40 kids on the varsity, and ninth graders will play on the junior varsity. If you're a ninth grader and can play varsity, then you will play," Parker said. "I'm going to try and get my players to play basketball because I think it will improve their footwork, and coach (Gary) Odom encourages his basketball players to play both baseball and football."
He also discussed his weightlifting program, which will run four days per week and individually track players' repetitions and maxes in six-week intervals and is based on the University of Nebraska conditioning program.
"I want them to work hard in the weight room and stay in there because not only will they get stronger, they will also gain confidence," said Parker. "We can't go in there and play with this program – you have to be serious and disciplined."
Phil Campbell, which will compete this fall in Class 2A, Region 8 with Red Bay, Hatton, Clements, Tanner, Westminster Christian and Lexington, finished 0-7 in the region in 2007. The Bobcats averaged 14.8 points on offense, including a season-high 28 points against Hatton, while allowing 42.2 points per game.
Parker said he will need to evaluate the players but wants to install the veer offense, a high-scoring type of option attack that utilizes misdirection and precision and can be adjusted according to the type of players available.
"I want to run the double-wing veer attack, and I try to run it out of different formations. It's a ball-control offense that's pretty versatile," said Parker. "I'm going to have to wait and see what kind of athletes I have before I decide how we're going to run the offense. For the veer you have to have two good running backs – this is not a 4-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust type of offense. Every time I've run this offense, we've averaged 31 points per game."
The search committee, comprised of three parents, Odom and Donald Borden, interviewed six candidates and recommended Parker to Franklin County Schools superintendent Bill Moss.
"We interviewed six good applicants for this job," said Moss. "We had a committee of three parents, the assistant principal at Phil Campbell and the board member for that district, and (Parker) was the name they came back to me with.
"I think he will be a good person for the job, and he's ready to go."
Parker said he was attracted to the tradition and community support at Phil Campbell.
"I've always heard there are good people in Phil Campbell, and that the kids here love the game of football," said Parker, who lives in Hatton and has a daughter, 14, and son, 10, with wife Tracy, a teacher at Lawrence County. "They've had a run of bad luck lately, and I think we can turn it around. There have been other jobs that came open that weren't the right situation but I think this is the right place for me."