FOUNTAIN LAKE -- Less than five months after getting a battlefield promotion to interim head coach, Kenny Shelton lost the interim moniker on Thursday as the Fountain Lake School Board voted to officially name him the head coach of the Cobras.
Shelton, who was joined by several members of his coaching staff at the school board meeting, said he has big plans for the Cobras football program.
"My dream was to come back to Fountain Lake, and I've achieved that dream," he said, noting that he has been part of the community for almost 30 years, off and on. "I didn't have to wait to be a head coach. I've been living that dream ever since I've been back, and it definitely was a strange turn of events that that led me here, but I think that God has a plan for all of us and sometimes we don't know it until he presents it to us.
"But I'm really excited now that the real hard work comes in. Of course, we've been having a great offseason, and our numbers are up. Hopefully they'll continue to rise, and the kids are working hard. ... And now that we've figured out what direction we can go in, we can continue to move forward."
While Fountain Lake started last preseason with a total of seven coaches working with the football team, the resignation of Barbaree followed by Robert Henderson, whose resignation was accepted minutes before Shelton was named interim, left him with just four assistants for the season. Another assistant, Devry Rhodes, resigned his duties as a coach but will remain a teacher within the district; his resignation was accepted Thursday.
Shelton and athletic director Marc Davis said that the process to fill those positions started with Shelton being named the head coach.
"We're going to get back to seven coaches, which is where we've been the last several years," Shelton said. "I think that's a that's a minimum for our conference and to fully reach all our kids. Now we've got three spots to fill, and we're going to get make sure we get the three best possible guys that we can get into to kind of help us move forward."
Davis said that he has no doubts that Shelton will find the right fit for the program.
"He's going to be able to take the guys we've got, mold those guys into where he wants to put them," he said. "He's got a lot of decisions to make, but he's grown man and a good leader. We should have a chance to hire the remaining folks that we have left, and he and I will be talking about not who I want, but what I think would be a good hire. Not who, but what. I think a little bit of youth and a little bit of maturity both go a long way, but we've got to make sure they're there in the academic world."
One thing that Shelton hopes to do is to create a program that teaches players from peewee through the high school, using the same terminology and playbook to create some stability as the players grow and continue to play.
"Definitely we want to get as many guys out as we can, and we want to make it fun," he said. "We've got to help build school spirit. Our school spirit has been kind of down, all across the board. You know numbers being down, even in peewee, and several counties I've talked to in the state have had some issues with lower numbers, maybe not as low as ours.
"Definitely they see that trend kind of continuing, so that's some things we need to look at and hopefully build a really strong peewee program. It's going to be a long haul. It's not going to happen overnight, and it didn't happen overnight to get here, and it's not gonna happen overnight to fix it."
Shelton's stint as interim head coach was less than 30 days shorter than his predecessor's tenure leading the Cobras.
Brandon Barbaree was the head coach of the Cobras for 5 1/2 months before leaving "for personal reasons." The former Gosnell Pirates head coach never coached a game at Fountain Lake, tendering his three-sentence resignation the morning before the team's annual Purple and Gold scrimmage.
A 1996 graduate of Fountain Lake, Shelton has been a member of the Cobras' coaching staff for over 10 years. He joined the staff as an assistant under former Cobras head coach Tommy Gilleran after serving as head coach at Johnson County Westside from 2008-2010. He was an assistant coach for five years at Johnson County Westside before he became the head coach.
Shelton led the Cobras to a 2-8 record, 1-6 in 4A-7 conference play, after taking over the 15 days before the team took the field for the 2019 season. The Cobras faced off against Class 5A teams Hot Springs and Lakeside to start the season before a 56-0 win over Dover on the road.
Fountain Lake then faced the top three teams in the conference -- Joe T. Robinson, Nashville and Arkadelphia, which all reached the Class 4A quarterfinals. The team limped its way through the remainder of the season before taking a 34-21 win over Ashdown to end the season.
Sports on 01/17/2020