Johnson-Gainesville joins the coaching carousel

Johnson-Gainesville has joined the short list of teams looking for a head coach after William Harrell announced Monday that he will be stepping down at the end of the school year as head coach of the Knights.

Under Harrell, the team went 4-45, with all of those wins coming in the 2023 season. His tenure was bookended by tough years. The 2020 season saw the Knights go 0-10, being outscored 17-434 in six games. The 2024 season was very similar, with the team again going 0-10, shut out five times, and outscored 40-600.

The highlight of Harrell’s time at Johnson was the 2023 season, when the team went 4-6. They won their first game since the 2019 season, breaking a 34-game losing streak, the longest in Hall County history, beating the previous record, also held by the Knights, by 10 games.

Johnson has not made the playoffs since 2004 and has never won or hosted a playoff game. The team hasn’t posted a .500 or better record since the 2012 season and hasn’t had a winning record while playing a region schedule since 2004.

The Knights will join archrival West Hall as one of the few teams still searching for a head coach. While not a historically strong program, Johnson has had moments of success. In the two years prior to Harrell’s tenure, the team went 8-12, including narrowly missing the playoffs in 2019 by one spot in the region standings. From 2002 to 2004, the program saw more success under Blair Armstrong, losing only five regular-season games in his final two years, against top-tier teams like Gainesville and North Hall who were among the best in the state at the time.

Before taking the job at Johnson, Harrell had a successful tenure at Hephzibah, becoming only the second coach in the school’s 70-year history to lead the Rebels to back-to-back playoff appearances. He went 22-29 overall, but 15-6 in his final two seasons. Harrell plans to return to the Augusta area to be closer to family, though he has not yet lined up a new job. He is expected to take a coordinator role in the area, where he has found success before.