Kyle Langford spent years paying his dues in coaching and that labor of love led him to the far northern reaches of Georgia. Now just four years removed from a head coaching stint in Towns County, Langford is glad to be back in familiar territory. The self-proclaimed “south Georgia boy” took the reins as Bacon County High School’s head football coach this past off-season, signaling a true homecoming.
“We are going to play hard here and are never going to quit,” says Langford. “Whether you are up 40 or down 40, you just keep playing. It’s a four-quarter deal and you need to get kids to understand that. You just play every play, see what happens, and have a lot of class.”
Honing his skills as a two-sport athlete at Crisp Academy, the Vienna native competed at the prep level in football and baseball. In fact, it was Langford’s baseball talents that took him to the next level. However, an early injury landed the Valdosta State walk-on in a cast for several months. Observers soon got in Langford’s ear about coaching, and he ultimately found himself on Coach Milt Miller’s staff at Lowndes.
“I was a quarterback and when I showed up Coach Miller said, ‘You’re coaching defensive line.’ I told him I didn’t know anything about the position and he told me I’d better figure it out,” laughs Langford. “We had 27 coaches and I was number 27, so I got all the dirty work. But it taught me a lot of respect for how organizations are run and how everyone is accountable.”
Vikings football chalked up 30 wins during Langford’s tenure as an assistant (1995-97). He then spent one year coaching running backs at Lee County, where he also served as a baseball assistant, just as he had done at Lowndes. A call to Chad Cambell at Peach County later revealed that Cambell’s brother Lee, the new head coach at Hawkinsville, had openings in both sports. “Coach (Lee) Campbell hired me at 11 o’clock in the morning and said, ‘I need you back here at 5 p.m. for baseball practice,” recalls Langford.
Subsequently, Langford enjoyed a lengthy stay at Hawkinsville (1999-2007), where he coached quarterbacks, receivers, and defensive backs through the years. He was also the school’s head baseball coach until 2006. Ultimately, Langford says time became an issue with both sports. “We were very good in baseball and won more games probably than anybody in south Georgia in the playoffs,” he says. “But I could see baseball was changing and knew I wanted to one day make that step to being a head football coach.”
Hawkinsville lost to Lincoln County in the state quarterfinals of 2006. The following Monday, Langford, who had mentioned a desire to live in the mountains, got a phone call – a tip about an opening at Towns County High School. The program in Hiawassee had never experienced a winning season dating back to 1969, a run of futility that included 10 seasons of 0-10. However, none of that deterred the young coach. “They hired me within two weeks,” he says. “I was barely 30 years old and tickled to death. Then I took a step back and said, ‘This is the toughest job in the state.’ And it was.”
Langford inherited 17 players from a team that gained fewer than 800 yards total offense the year before. The Indians were also mired in a 27-game losing streak, a trend the enthusiastic young coach was determined to reverse. They went 0-10 once more in his first season there.
“Going into that second year, I didn’t have a kid that had ever won a football game,” Langford notes. “Everybody said we were too slow to spread it out and that our kids wouldn’t come to workouts, but we went old school and had kids coming twice a day. We came out and beat Rabun County that first game and were pretty strong physically. We played everyone really tough, including some North Carolina and Tennessee teams that were really good. We played whoever we could because we were so landlocked.”
Langford guided the Indians to a 7-3 mark in 2008, as the community enjoyed its first winning campaign in the program’s nearly 40-year history. The team went from just 42 points scored the previous year to an average of 34.6 per game. They also amassed nearly 5,000 yards in total offense using the famed Hal Mumme-style offense Langford had studied at Valdosta State.
Participation at Towns County subsequently increased and the program drew upward of 40 players per year. However, players soon began to move away and the Indians won just 10 games in the ensuing four years. The 2008 team remains the only team in TCHS history to post a winning mark and Langford remains the school’s all-time winningest coach.
“It’s beautiful up there, but football was a hard sell,” says Langford. “There was a generational thing. The parents and the grandparents hadn’t played, so there wasn’t that connection as compared to down here in Bacon County.
Thrilled with a chance to return to south Georgia, Langford departed Towns County in 2012 to coach defensive line at Cook. After one season there, he followed Ken Cofer to Bacon County and has served as the Red Raiders’ defensive coordinator the past two seasons. BCHS has gone 11-10 over that stretch.
Now Langford has designs on getting the team back in the playoffs following a year’s hiatus from the post-season. His 2016 team will showcase multiple schemes on both sides of the football. The Red Raiders even got out of the shoots early with scrimmages against Appling and Atkinson County the first two weeks in August.
“We don’t talk about winning or losing because that just gets you distracted,” says Langford. “The number one predictor of success that you have is controlling your attitude. We tell our kids, ‘You chose to get up at 4 a.m. and you can choose whether to be high energy or to be an energy sucker.’ Beyond that there’s not much you can control. So I’ve tried to just make players aware of their responsibility and what we expect of them.”
Langford, who received a Bachelor’s Degree in Health and PE from Valdosta State, also holds two graduate degrees: A Master’s Degree in Technology and Education and a Specialist’s Degree in Curriculum and Instruction, both from Nova Southeastern University. His wife, Addy, teaches at Bacon County Primary School. They have three children: Allie (14), Anna Claire (11), and James (8). The family attends Pine Level Baptist Church in Alma. His faith, says Langford, has been the number one predictor of his own success.
“I give everything to my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ,” says Langford. “I am not a special human being where people look at me and say there’s anything special. The Lord has put his hand on me to be his servant. I want to serve him and our county and our kids. When they leave us, they can choose their own path, but they are going to know who Jesus Christ is.”
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Coach’s Corner – Kyle Langford, Bacon County High School
Written by John DuPont
Photo by Jennifer Carter Johnson
