Today’s interviewee is Stockbridge first-year coach Kendrick Callier, whose team is 5-1 entering its Henry County showdown Friday night with undefeated Ola. Callier was the offensive coordinator for 2023 Class 3A champion Cedar Grove last season and a member of the Saints’ coaching staff for all five state championships won since 2016.
1. What’s the biggest difference going from assistant to head coach? “Overseeing everything and dealing with the entire team and organizational things like the paperwork, but I’ve worked under some great head coaches, starting with Eric Williams at Jackson [of Atlanta] and of course Jimmy Smith and Miguel Patrick and John Adams at Cedar Grove. I still reach out to some of those guys and the assistants on those teams for help. We’re all over the place right now. [Former Cedar Grove head coaches Smith, Patrick and Adams are all coaching college ball now.] Their best advice is just don’t put too much pressure on yourself. Just do what we’ve been doing. We’ve got the blueprint on how to handle things and how to win. Just follow the same blueprint.”
2. What’s your team like this year? We know it’s young. You’ve got a sophomore quarterback and a pair of freshman wide receivers. “We are young, but we are older in the right places. We’ve got some older guys like Chase Taylor, Christofer Noble and Xavier Spikes that can bridge the gap between youth and older guys. We’ve been through everything as far as scenarios. We’ve been down. We’ve been up. We’ve come back. We almost let people come back. We won twice on the last play. The way this team handles adversity has been great. We’ve grown every week. Against Locust Grove, we had to score with three seconds left, and it was like chaos. Being down two touchdowns to explosive Jones County [four weeks later], and it was no pressure. We came back and won with 16 seconds left this time. We practice those scenarios every Wednesday, and we have a sophomore quarterback, and he always cracks a joke on the last drive of the game. He’s loose and ready.” [The sophomore quarterback is Joshua Scott. Taylor and Noble are key defensive leaders. Taylor is committed to Michigan. Spikes is an offensive lineman committed to Georgia State. Against Locust Grove, Stockbridge scored two touchdowns in the final two minutes to win 49-42. The game winner was Scott’s 40-yard pass to Maki Turner. Against Jones County, a 28-21 win, Zion McGregor scored on a 29-yard run to break a 21-21 tie. Stockbridge trailed 21-7 in the fourth quarter.]
3. What does Ola do well? “They held Jones County to three points [in a 7-3 victory], so they’ve got something special going on. We were laughing about this in the office last week that we played Jones County, and they throw it like every play, and we have to turn around and play a team that grounds and pounds. They have great backs and great linebackers. Ola is one of the bigger names in Henry County. They’re real strong and well-coached. Coach [Justin] Adkins does a great job. It’s going to be fun, to be honest.”
4. Your former team, Ceder Grove, hired a new coach, Roderick Moore, this past offseason, and you applied for the job but chose to come to Stockbridge before any decision was made. Why did you take that route? “There were some changes going on at Cedar Grove, and it was just time, to be honest. I felt like Henry is one of the rising football counties right now in Georgia. I thought I would just go and try something new and see what’s going on here. The talent in Henry County speaks for itself, and it wasn’t that far from me. I live in between both schools. It’s not an issue for travel, and the staff felt the same too. Cedar Grove was great to me. It changed my life being there. I’m forever in debt to Cedar Grove and the things we did and learned. But it was just time to try something new.”
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