By Michael A. Lough

The Sports Report

centralgasports@gmail.com

Two weeks ago, Greg Moore gathered with Bibb County public and private high schools to talk about the 2022 season.

Moore, the dean of Bibb County head coaches with 21 straight years at one school (sharing the Central Georgia honor with Brentwood’s Bert Brown), talked past, present, and future with FPD.
He didn’t talk like 22 years was enough. But he kind of had a secret, one that was let out late Monday afternoon in an email from FPD: his 22nd season was going to be his last as the football boss at FPD.

*Photo: Michael A. Lough/Central Georgia Sports Report*

Moore’s not going anywhere. Now he’ll only be the athletics director and head baseball coach, two jobs instead of three.

“I don’t want to quit coaching,” he said Monday night after practice. “I love being on the team. I love the players, I love the locker room, I love the assistant coaches, I love the parents and the fans who are on that team. I just like coaching. I’m not ready to stop doing that.

“I just don’t need to do that all year, you know?”

Brett Collier, who Moore plucked from GHSA Class A powerhouse Eagle’s Landing Christian in 2020, has been quietly the coach in waiting and will take over for Moore. Collier was named associate head coach in May. This is his second stint at FPD, after being on the Vikings staff from 2015-17.

Collier played at and graduated from Southland Academy, and went against his coaching boss in those playing days. He’s married to Katie Maddox, an FPD grad whose brother Colby Maddox passed for 3,004 yards in 2004. Soon enough, Moore started hearing about Collier from the Maddox family, and hired him after he followed his West Georgia playing career with stints at Southland and Macon County. He then went to ELCA, and returned to Macon.

“Listen, when we got Brett to come back to be our defensive coordinator and head up our strength program, we did so with the understanding that ‘this job is yours one day,’” Moore said. “We didn’t advertise it that way, and we were trying to be fair to Brett, Brett was trying to be sensitive, and I’m grateful. He was trying to be respectful to me, and we didn’t put a timetable on it.”

Moore said Collier asked one time if Moore had a timetable, and never asked again. Moore sounded like somebody who couldn’t have found a more appropriate successor.

“We’re a Christian private school, and that matters and that’s important,” Moore said. “And that matters and is important to him. I don’t have any questions that’s how he’ll run the program. He is right at home in that kind of program.

“I think he’s ready to do it, and I’m ready to step aside and let him.”

That Collier is, as Moore said, a “football junkie” adds to the confidence.

The announcement is the third personnel bomb to drop at a Macon private school in only a few months.

In April, Tattnall announced in an email to parents and staff the decreased the role of Joey Hiller, at the time the Trojans’ athletics director, head baseball and head softball coach, and suddenly he was only the Trojans’ softball coach until he resigned in June to become head baseball coach at Peach County.

Hiller was completing his 22nd year at the school.

Around the same time, Mark Farriba ended his long Stratford career – 13 seasons overall as head football coach, with two stints as head football coach and one as athletics director – with his abrupt and surprise resignation and departure after being told he would not return as athletics director. He’s now an assistant at ACE.

There are no such surprises or machinations with Moore, who chuckled the past few years at questions about how much long he was going to coach, with some speculation starting as his son Jackson neared graduation at FPD, which happened in May.

He told the team on Monday, and made sure they knew there were no health issues with him or his family. It was just time.

“I just wanted them to understand that I love ‘em and I’m excited about the 2022 football season, and I want to have a good time with all of them,” he said. “I think we can do that.”

He’s not a fan of coaches waiting until the end of the season to drop that bomb, and didn’t want to “pull the rug out” from players and assistants after the season. It also cuts down on speculation and rumors, and keeps the air clean.

“I feel like I’ve had a great run as football coach,” he said. “I’m so thankful for the guys that have played for me, and who have coached for me. But I think it’s somebody else’s turn. Things change over the course of our lives. I’m not old, but I’m older.

“I’m on year 34 at FPD. It’s been great fun. I hope we’ve done some things that mattered in the lives of a lot of young men over the years. But I just feel like it’s time for somebody else to do it.”

He was the school’s head basketball coach when he took over as football coach before the 2000 season, and gave up basketball after a dozen seasons a few years later. Then he took over as head baseball coach after the 2020 season. That’s when the football clock started ticking a bit for the 56-year-old.

He and head of school John Patterson had conversations about the future, and Moore said Patterson left it up to him.

“He has been a blessing to me, and encouraged me,” Moore said. “… Out of respect I think for how long I’ve been doing this, … ‘we’ll do it when you want to do it.’ I’m very grateful to him and our administration, because they’ve been really supportive.

“I owe a great debt to him for letting me do this the way I wanted to do it.”

Double duty is enough. Triple duties can wear one down.

“We knew that my role as athletic director, head football coach, head baseball coach, I mean, come on,” Moore said. “You can’t do that forever. It’s just too much.”

At the end of the school year, they talked again, and Moore decided it that this would be it. Moore isn’t looking past this season, obviously, but he’s a little amped at being able to spend more time being a full-time athletics director and devote more attention to all sports, and to where he wants to build the baseball program.

Some extra family time will be pretty nice, too. Daughter Kaylee is at junior at Samford and son Jackson is a freshman at Georgia Southern.

“We’re an empty-nest world,” Moore said of his wife of 22 years, Kim. “Never been there. I don’t want her to be the only one in the nest.”

Moore graduated from FPD in 1984, and then from Alabama in 1989.

He’s been in black, red, and white and on Calvin Drive ever since, a staggering accomplishment.

“In a world that encourages coaches to move to the next big thing, that kind of commitment to one school is inspiring and should be the standard,” Patterson said in the release.

Moore has been pretty much Mr. Viking for three-plus decades.

“It’s been pretty special,” he said. “I’ve loved every second of it.”

His first school year coaching at FPD was 1989-90. Soon he was head boys basketball coach, then athletics director, taking over for Farriba in 1997. He became the head football coach in 2000, succeeding Cater Pierce, who went 17-15 in two seasons. Pierce has been at Stratford for years since then. And at Stratford, Pierce eventually worked with his predecessor at FPD, Farriba, who led the Vikings twice, 1985-90 and 1992-96.

Farriba went 78-51-2 in 11 seasons, after following Bobby Brown, owner of a 72-31-1 mark in nine seasons.

Moore? He has more than doubled those win totals, and enters his 24th football season as head coach with a 161-101 record, highlighted by six region championships, four in GISA and two in GHSA. He has three of FPD’s eight 10-win seasons since its first football season, in 1973.

Moore was a major figure in FPD’s move from the GISA to GHSA to start the 2010-11 year, the Vikings alone among the Macon private schools in that eyebrow-raising decision. They won their first game as a GHSA member, 26-8 over visiting Irwin County.

Tattnall, Stratford, and Mount de Sales followed for the 2014-15 school year.

Moore was not among the major figures pushing for the four local private schools to leave the GHSA, which they announced last December, to return to the GISA and what eventually became its athletics arm, the Georgia Independent Athletic Association.

The Vikings won the GHSA Class A Private Region 1 title in 2020 and 2021, going 5-1 in those two season against city rivals Stratford, Mount de Sales, and Tattnall.

FPD went 79-57 in the GHSA, which had separate playoffs for public and private schools for years, and then in 2019 separated the regions in the regular season to public and private, starting in the 2020-21 year. That sparked the move back to the GISA/GIAA.

None of that, though, is on the mind of Moore, who has a fair chance at going out with a state championship. The Vikings lost key players, but return some quality and have experience.

Moore will just take it all in, regardless.

“I’ll tell you how I knew it was time, and I don’t know how to explain it,” he said. “Except that I always knew that I would know. I’m so at peace. And I’m so looking forward to coaching our team one more time. I’m so looking forward to at that point stepping away.

“I have incredible peace about all of it, and I just know it’s right.”