By Michael A. Lough

The Sports Report

centralgasports@gmail.com

          Bert Brown is doing things a bit differently.

          After 23 years as head football coach at Brentwood, Brown has stepped aside. He hasn’t retired, and he’s going nowhere.

          Well, he’s just changing jobs, staying in coaching, and not leaving Brentwood.

          It’s been no secret around Sandersville that Brown was resigning, first acknowledging the move to The Sports Report back in December. He’s giving up the varsity reigns – and time consumption and headaches – to take over the up and comers.

          “Right now, the plans are kind of for me to be in charge of the middle school program, with a couple young guys helping me,” Brown said. “That’s the plan right now.”

          Familiar names to War Eagle fans are, at this point, going to help Brown: Thomas and Luke Denton. Both, though, may have a short stint as an aide, depending on how college plans turn out. They’ll be volunteers, for neither is a teacher, but they have jobs that allow them some flexibility to help out.

          He also expects some help from longtime coach Tommy Cain, whose background is more in track and basketball, but it’s a successful background, covering stints at John Hancock, Brentwood, John Milledge, Trinity Christian, Bulloch Academy, Johnson County, and Briarwood.

          Cain took time off from coaching to teach, and returned to coaching, racking up his 600th basketball win in 2020.

          “Tommy’s a very young 70,” Brown said. “He’s taken good care of himself.”

          Brown is 62, “a young 62”, he said, but started thinking about the eventual end of his War Eagle varsity days in 2021.

          “I had people in recent years tell me, ‘Bert, you’ll know when it’s time,” the 1978 Westfield graduate said. “I’d gotten the feeling in the last 15, 18 months it’s time for these guys to have a younger guy wearing the head coaching whistle.”

          As the 2022 season wore on, the feeling grew. And one afternoon driving home from practice during Thanksgiving week as Brentwood prepared for Briarwood in a GIAA Class AA semifinal, he decided. He kept it to himself until the season’s end, which came a week later in a 46-7 loss to Central Fellowship in the state championship.

          Then he went in to visit with head of school Danny Howell – himself a former coach at Brentwood, John Milledge, Stratford, and Briarwood – and Adam Lord, a Brown assistant as well as boss, as Brentwood’s athletics director.

          Brown’s successor is likely to be named soon after the basketball season is over, with football assistants Adam Lord and Jamie Dickey among the top candidates.

          They’ll be following a coach who went 168-110-4, with seven region titles and nine region runner-up finishes, three GISA state titles and three runner-up finishes. Brentwood made the AA semifinals or finals 11 times under Brown.

          Brown earned five region and two state coach-of-the-year honors, as well as the Georgia Athletic Coaches Association coach of the year in 2021, four years after earning the GISA coaches Brent Cribb Distinguished Service Award.

          Brown spent nine years at Westfield in two stints, as head baseball coach and assistant football and basketball coach, as well as three years at St. Francis Day and one at John Milledge.

          He knows the move raises some eyebrows.

          “I know it sounds kooky that I want to give up coaching teen agers to coach pre-teens instead,” Brown said. “That sounds kooky, but I’m not completely ready to walk away. And I think I can be of more value to the overall program.

          “I think I can be of more value to the program working with the younger kids, teaching them the basics of all that Wing-T stuff, so that when they get to the next level, they may not recall every bit of it, but it’ll hopefully be vaguely familiar.

“I’m at peace with it.”