Our guest for this week’s ITG Next Florida 4 Questions with the Coach segment is Williston head football coach Robbie Pruitt. The former Coffee (GA) High football coach is now in his second season at Williston, where he has led the Red Devils to a perfect 10-0 regular season for the second straight year.
Coach Pruitt is hoping to avoid the same fate his team suffered last year, when – following a perfect regular season – the Red Devils lost in the opening round of the playoffs. That 46-35 loss brought an abrupt end to an otherwise successful debut season for Pruitt. Now, here he is again, preparing his Williston football team for a shot at redemption as they prepare for the opening round of the state playoffs. Can Pruitt avoid the same fate as the year before? Let’s ask him about that, as well as other questions surrounding the Williston Red Devils.
Q. Coach Pruitt, it is always great catching up with you. You seem to be quite happy at Williston, and I’d say there’s a lot of reasons for that. You came in before the start of last season and took over a team that had finished 1-8 the year before, and 3-7 the year before that, in 2020. As I made reference to in the opening introduction, this was a struggling Williston football team before you arrived. What were the biggest challenges you saw right away once you arrived here?
A. There were really many challenges here, Phil. There just simply was not any form of a program. We did not even have a complete set of uniforms to wear in our spring game jamboree. There was no video equipment. Just a lot of things that needed to be put in place to even start trying to build a positive culture here, but the biggest was not having a suitable weight room or any resemblance of a strength or nutrition program. The first thing we did was build a weight room in an ag shop at our stadium that we turned into a field house. The community, along with the Whitehurst family, purchased us a nice new weight facility that is as good as any in our area, regardless of classification.
Q. You were able to turn things around very quickly, but what a lot of people may not know is that you had been through a somewhat similar situation in Georgia when you arrived there to take over a struggling Coffee High program, right?
A. I would say that this program here in Williston was a lot more like the program in Fitzgerald than Coffee. I took over the job at Coffee after Jerry Odom and Ken Eldridge were there. They both had some good teams and we were able to build on what those guys started. When we took over at Fitzgerald, it was not as low as the job here at Williston, but they had struggled. They had won only nine games in the previous seven years before we got there, and they had a lot of the same Issues as far as facilities and just getting a culture built.
Q. Let’s talk about where you are at this moment. You have led your Red Devils to another undefeated season at 10-0, same as last year. But your Williston football team suffered an early playoff loss last year. What happened, and what did you learn about that to avoid similar pitfalls this year?
Q. Here in Florida in our classification, the first three rounds are against teams that are in your region. So you have to beat everyone in your region in order to represent that region in the Final Four. Last year the top five teams in the state were in our Region and this year four of the top five are in our region, with Madison County being the other top five team.
Last year we played a really good Wildwood team in the first round. We had only played two games out of our previous 10 that did not have a running clock after halftime. We did not perform well in the last part of the fourth quarter. We had over 500 yards of offense, but struggled stopping their receivers, two of whom have offers from everyone in the country. We have played a much tougher schedule this year and hopefully are more mentally ready.
We are still in a process of building the culture here. Williston had only one winning season in the last 12 years and that was a 6-4 season before we got here, so we are still learning how to win and make playoff runs, which takes as much mentally as it does physically. We play Pahokee Friday in the second round. They are one of Florida’s perennial powers, with six state titles, and they have put 15 players in the NFL. Tons of tradition.
Q. Tell us about your team and the players that make it happen. Who has been a part of the turnaround here, not just this season, but last year, also?
A. Defensively it starts with our defensive front, which is the strength of that unit, including senior NG Ira Warren, senior DE Elijah Jackson, and junior Timmy Taylor. Offensively we have been consistent all year and have only punted seven times. Our offensive line has played well and is anchored by senior C Wyatt Woodford. QB Shamon Coleman, senior RB Jace McDonald and senior Javon Brown [also have key contributors].
