Our guest for this week’s 4 Questions with the Coach feature is Hapeville Charter head football coach Winston Gordon, who has been the school’s only football coach since it opened. He built the program from scratch and the hard work paid off in 2017 with a GHSA state championship. Here’s more from Coach Gordon and his time at the Fulton County school.
Q. Coach Gordon, thank you for taking time to talk to us. You had quite the responsibility of building the Hapeville Charter football program from the ground up. What was that process like?
A. Well, it is just like building your first house. You have to lay the foundation of your program and establish the culture. We knew we didn’t have anything to offer our kids but love and hope. Once we gained the trust of the first 22, we progressed every year.
Q. Tell us about the 2017 season, when it all came together and your team won the state title. I remember the season-opening win over Fitzgerald that year, which made people sit up and pay attention to your team.
A. I think it happened the year before in 2016 when we went into Cartersville and made our kids see we were just as good as any team in the state. We went to the semifinals, lost to Fitzgerald, and came back the next year and beat them in the season home opener. The only loss that season was to 7A Thompson High School in Alabama, 21-20. We had four touchdowns called back and missed a game-winning field goal with 1:10 to play in the fourth. But we went on to win 13 straight and a state title. Every senior on the team went to school and almost every one has graduated college. That is one of my biggest accomplishments as a coach.
Q. In 2020, your Hapeville Charter football team was bumped up two classes from 2A to 4A. You were able to have respectable seasons in the first two seasons as a member of Class 4A, finishing 6-4 and 6-6. Last season was disappointing, finishing with a 2-9 record. Can you talk about how tough that experience was?
A. I understand what GHSA was trying to do, but with every school there is an exception, and I don’t think we looked at the impact of the multiplier rule and how it would affect public charter schools. The enrolment at Hapeville Charter is only 586 students, and 90 percent of our athletes are in our attendance zone. Yet students who want to seek a small school setting and high academics in a charter school push the multiplier rule that triples the number of what it makes the enrollment.
It has taken a toll on our program. It was already tough enough to schedule non-region; now it looks like a 7A schedule every year. But we still have the same enrollment as most 1A schools. Last season we lost four games by one point each and still managed to make the GHSA playoffs and lost a close first-round game to Stockbridge. Regardless of the decision in the new classification, we will still prepare our kids to do more with less and play tough.
Q. Coach, I’m going to ask you to peer into your crystal ball: How do you think next season will be? Do you have a lot of returning talent on the 2023 Hapeville Charter football team?
A. I don’t ever look past the day in front of me, so I guess I can say we will always be competitive and develop kids that you never heard of who will emerge on signing day every year. We do return a lot of young guys and we will get them ready to go come August. The way of transfers and kids transit now, we are impacted just as much as we receive kids in this new era of high school athletics. Our culture is a winning culture and we stand behind our motto, “We do more with less.”
