By Michael A. Lough

The Sports Report

centralgasports@gmail.com

Rusty Easom is new to Rutland, and Rutland to Easom, a playoff meeting between Easom’s first full-time employer and the Hurricanes in 2013 notwithstanding.
          But Easom is anything but unfamiliar with Central Georgia.
          Rutland’s new head football coach and athletics director graduated from Upson-Lee, where he played a year under Hal Lamb, brother of Mercer head football coach Bobby Lamb.
          His sister Vanessa was Miss Upson-Lee back in the mid-1990s. Mr. Upson-Lee that year? Westside head coach and fairly recent inductee to the Thomaston-Upson Hall of Fame Spoon Risper.
          Easom followed a year playing baseball at Darton State with a transfer to Georgia Southern – a shoulder injury ended the football career of the former fullback and middle linebacker - where he became friends with Mary Persons alum Justin Elder, now the head coach at, yes, Easom’s high school alma mater.

          When Easom wanted to get closer to home, it was one Tommy Parks – a player on old Robert E. Lee’s state title team in 1988 and future Upson-Lee head coach – who convinced him to transfer to Columbus State where he could then also work with Harris County assistant Parks.
          It was then that Easom started rooming with one Justin Rogers, a young offensive assistant at Harris County, for two years. Upon graduation, Easom expected to land full time at Harris County, but teacher openings became an issue, and Griffin needed a coach, so he applied while holding out hope he’d catch on at Harris County.
Soon enough, future Bibb County superintendent and then-Griffin principal Curtis Jones, aka “Colonel”, gave him 24 hours to decide.
          He decided, and took it. Move ahead a few years, and who was on the other sideline of a first-round Class 4A playoff game in 2009? Assistant coach Justin Rogers and Harris County.
          And who convinced Rogers to come to Griffin shortly thereafter with the expectation that Rogers would soon enough become the Bears’ offensive coordinator?

Rusty Easom, then a veteran defensive coordinator with the Bears who, like the offensive coordinator he recruited, left after the perfect 2013 season, Rogers to become head coach at Jones County and Easom to the defensive coordinator spot at East Coweta.

          Fast forward to the past few months, and enter Eric DeVoursney, formerly at Rutland Middle School and who is now at Perry but has always been the nephew of Steve DeVoursney, Easom’s boss at Griffin, who was able to give Easom a little more background on Rutland.
          Yeah, Easom’s road from Upson-Lee to Rutland is loaded with Central Georgia connections. And he can chuckle about more than a few.
          Is he as, oh, colorful as Rogers?
          “I’ll plead the fifth on that.”
          In college with Elder?
          “He’s part of the reason it took me so long to get out of Georgia Southern.”
          The 38-year-old will have to make an immediate transition, barring a turnaround of unprecedented proportions.
          In his 15 years as a full-time assistant, he has been part of a 140-43 record, 108-36 as a defensive coordinator on the 4A and 7A levels. Class 4A was the GHSA’s second-largest class through the 2011 season with 6A was introduced.

Rutland can thank a lack of openings at Harris County back around 2002 in part for its new coach. Easom was finishing up at Columbus State while helping out in Hamilton, north of Columbus, as a volunteer/community coach. He was planning/hoping to catch a full-time job at Harris County upon graduation, but things were unsettled as to how many teaching openings would be available.

He was in the mix at Griffin, and Jones eventually all but ended the decision-making.

“At the time, you think you want one thing, and then the powers that be step in and provide something else,” Easom said. “Colonel’s the kind, he wants a decision. He gave me 24 hours to make a decision.”

So Easom went with the unknown but known, a new school but a solid job. He started off as linebackers and special teams coach for three years, then was promoted to defensive coordinator. And Griffin started winning, going 11-2 in his first season. The second year, the Bears started off 1-3, including two forfeits.

“I thought he was gonna fire me,” Easom said. “But we got better.”

“Had we not played each other that first-round game, no telling where we would be.”

And finished 10-4, reaching the semifinals. Deep playoff runs became the norm, including in 2009, when the Bears followed a 10-0 regular season with a visit by Harris County to open the postseason, reuniting the roommates. Before the game, Rogers and Easom planned to talk the next day and dissect how the other one did.

Griffin won 34-7, ending the 5-6 Tigers’ season. And they talked the next day, Easom bluntly telling Rogers that the triple-option offense run by Harris County was running out of gas and the spread was starting to, well, spread. Easom suggested Rogers try to move to Griffin, because Easom expected then-offensive coordinator Will Orbin – whose offense averaged 35.6 points a game that year while Easom’s defense gave up 6.4 - to move onward and upward in short order, and Rogers could learn a new offense.

Rogers became Griffin’s quarterbacks coach in 2010 and sure enough, Orbin left after that season for an assistant job in North Carolina. Rogers took over as offensive coordinator, and the Bears averaged 22.1, 35.5 and 42.8 points in the next three seasons, capped by the 2013 Class 4A title.

“Had we not played each other that first-round game,” Easom said, “no telling where we would be.”

East Coweta has gone 5-5 and 4-8 the past two seasons, the worst of Easom’s career. Even so, the Indians managed to make the playoffs and knock off No. 10/9 Marietta in the first round and lost by seven to Tift County in the second round.

Now, Easom - who helped out at Bulloch Academy for one year while at Georgia Southern - steps in to lead a program that is 44-117 since starting up in 2003, with only two winning seasons – 7-4 in 2007 and 6-5 in 2013 – and a 5-5 mark in Year 1. The Hurricanes are 3-36 the past four seasons, from George Collins’ final season through Mark Daniel’s three.

In that four-year span, Rutland has averaged 10.9 points a game and given up 36.1. Daniel in a preseason Bibb County public school media day talked of discipline and attitude problems, players quitting, and players being recruited.

On the day he announced his resignation, he reiterated those issues, disappointed he couldn’t turn things around at least a little bit.

“I feel for the kids,” he said. “None of the kids on this team that finished the season with us are laughingstocks or losers. All those kids that quit, all those kids that refused to do the work and lift weights and do what they needed to do, those are the ones that are losers.

“These kids are winners. They’re gonna gain so much from being out here and doing what they did.”

“I think there’s something to be said about kids getting in there and sweating and bleeding together.”

So, the culture Easom talks of changing is unlike any he has experienced.

His first priority is connecting with current and potential future players, and getting them into a rigid training program, to get stronger but also to develop team chemistry. That includes trying to get seventh- and eighth-graders into the weight room with the varsity.

“The biggest thing that we’ve got to do is get in there and start training the way that I expect them to train,” he said. “I think there’s something to be said about kids getting in there and sweating and bleeding together.”

He knows that Rutland has had talented players who left or were poached, and corralling the right staff to help change that is obviously a high priority. Easom has support from the county’s main office, with Jones as well as former Griffin colleagues Jamie Cassady (athletics director) and Keith Simmons (principal), now under Jones as assistant superintendent of student affairs and as chief of staff, respectively.

It’ll take more than just office support to turn things around. Easom will get started in earnest Tuesday when he’ll spend all day at Rutland, and then root on the basketball teams when they host Central, whose boys are in first place in Region 4-3A while Rutland’s girls are in second. But that support is big.

“They’re trying to change the culture,” Easom said. “They realize that you can’t just change the front man. If you’re just changing the front man, you’re just changing the fall guy.”