Head Coach Has Turned Trojans into Football Powerhouse Following 40 Years of Futility
If you’re a first-time visitor to Lee County High School, you can’t miss the by-product of a successful football program: A nice stadium with a turf field and the capacity to hold 10,000 fans. It’s an outward sign that high school football at Lee County is alive and well under head coach Dean Fabrizio, now in his 14th year at the Leesburg school.
More evidence that Lee County is an elite institution is the 45,000-square-foot multi-purpose facility that serves all Trojans athletic programs. It was built in 2017, just as the football program was reaching heights it had never experienced before. At a price tag of $8 million, the facility houses coaches’ offices, a players’ locker room equipped with USB outlets at each locker, classrooms, a lecture hall for college-level classes, a trophy room, a training room, and a 9,000-square-foot, world-class weight room with 23 weight stations.
Max Preps ranks the Lee County weight room as the third-best high school weight room in the country. Inside is also a 30-yard turf field that can be used by the team and individual players for any number of purposes. On the facility’s exterior walls, the school’s region championships and state titles are recognized. You’ll see region championships were won in 2013, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021, and the school won its first-ever state titles in football in 2017 and 2018. In 2020, Lee was knocking on the door of a third state championship in four years, but fell short in a tough overtime loss.
The bottom line is this: Under Fabrizio, the Trojans are positioned to be in the hunt every year.
Four Decades of Futility
It wasn’t always like this. In fact, things were actually pretty bad. For a long time. In its 40-year history of playing football prior to Fabrizio’s arrival, Lee County High School had experienced just five winning seasons and had never enjoyed consecutive winning seasons. Not only was the on-field product suffering, but the football program was thousands of dollars in debt. There was a lot of good coming out of this South Georgia bedroom community, but high school football wasn’t one of them.
In 2009 the Lee County High administration decided that a change was necessary. Officials reached out to a long-time assistant coach who had spent time in the Orlando area but was now serving as the defensive coordinator for Chad Campbell’s Peach County Trojan squad. The new Lee County Trojan football coach was Dean Fabrizio.
Fabrizio was eager to get started, but the process of rebuilding such a struggling football program would take patience and a plan.
Lee County had been known for its baseball program and had experienced a lot of success in it. The community as a whole was heavily involved in the game; what it was not involved with very much was football. Especially at the high school level.
The year before Fabrizio was hired, the Trojans finished 0-10, and they had lost 19 of their previous 20 games. In addition to the varsity program’s struggles, the entire feeder and support programs were all winless –the middle school, 9th grade, and junior varsity teams did not manage a single victory in 2008, the year prior to Fabrizio’s arrival.
An Uphill Climb
“There were numerous things that needed to be addressed, but getting the numbers up at all levels was one of the first things we set out to do,” Fabrizio said. “We went from having 25 8th graders out for football my first year to 60 kids that came out for football. We went from 30 freshmen to over 50 in year two. We had 65 players on the 10th-12th grade varsity squad when I got here, and we grew that number to over 120 in five years.”
The coach added that he was very fortunate to have support from the Lee administration in his quest to build the football program at Lee County.
“I was blessed to have had a lot of stability in our leadership,” he said. “I have worked for two superintendents in Dr. Larry Walters and Dr. Jason Miller. Both are great advocates of what we try to do, and they fully support everything. I have two wonderful and supportive principals in Keith Dowling and Dr. Karen Hancock, who have both been a big part of our success, and you will not find two finer men to work for than the two athletic directors, Rob Williams and Hank Wright.”
Steve Glover, the current Trojans Booster Club president, has lived in Lee County since 1999 and has seen the best and worst of times in Trojan football over the years. He described how things were before Fabrizio arrived at Lee County.
“For the longest time, high school football was a social event, where you met your friends, but there were no expectations as far as wins and losses were concerned,” Glover recalled. “We were a baseball-first community with a strong recreation baseball program, and that carried over to the high school level. We were turning out really good baseball players, and everyone was fine with being a baseball community.”
High school football just wasn’t on a lot of people’s minds. That’s part of the challenge Fabrizio faced when he arrived.
“Fabrizio knew he had to change the culture, and that meant getting the young kids and their parents believing that football could be as much a part of their lives as baseball had been,” Glover said.
That included a reorganization of the middle school program that had suffered through three consecutive winless seasons prior to Fabrizio’s arrival.
Culture Change Takes Hold for Good
Changing any culture or mindset doesn’t happen overnight. It would take Fabrizio a few years of rolling up his sleeves and going out to talk with parents, kids and youth coaches in order to change a long-existing mentality.
Fabrizio averaged 7 wins per season in his first eight years at the school, from 2009-2016. Then in 2017, after working so hard to change the football culture at Lee County, things finally began to pay off. The Trojans won the 2017 1-6A region championship and the 6A state championship with a 14-1 finish.
The next season they followed that showing with another region title and a perfect 15-0 record for a second straight state title. The Trojans finished 12-2 in 2020 with another trip to the state championship game, but Lady Luck would not shine down on the Trojans that night.
The win totals say a lot. Just look at this decade-by-decade comparison of Lee County football in the pre- and post-Fabrizio eras:
- 1971-1979: 28 wins
- 1980-1989: 28 wins
- 1990-1999: 38 wins
- 2000-2008: 27 wins
Fabrizio arrives in 2009
- 2009-2019: 90 wins
- 2020: 12-2 record
- 2021: 11-2 record
- 2022 (through 6 games): 5-1 record
There’s no guarantee you’ll see Dean Fabrizio on one of those signs at the county line, alongside Luke Bryan and other notable Lee County personalities. But you can bet a lot of people certainly believes that he belongs there.
