John Thompson, Fellowship Christian head coach
Today’s interviewee is Fellowship Christian coach John Thompson, whose team plays at home tonight against Union County in a game that will decide the Region 8-2A championship. Thompson joined Fellowship’s staff in 2021 and was promoted from defensive coordinator for this season. He is a former defensive coordinator or co-coordinator at Southern Miss, Ole Miss, Florida, Arkansas and South Carolina. He was East Carolina’s head coach in 2003 and 2004 and was Georgia State’s first defensive coordinator under Bill Curry starting in 2008.
1. After you left college football and settled into high school coaching, did you anticipate being a head coach again? How did that come about? “I had retired after the ’15 season and was in private business. I went by to see Tim McFarlin at Blessed Trinity. I had known him since the mid-1990s. He used to visit us at Southern Miss. Tim’s defensive coordinator took another job. This was in May of ’17. So I said, ‘Yeah, I’d like to do that. That sounds like fun.’ I had some big-time players who are going to keep playing for a while – Steele Chambers at Ohio State and J.D. Bertrand at Notre Dame. Both were starting linebackers and played offense too. We won 29 of 30 games and two state championships. I went back into private business and found I’m not a businessman. The only thing I know how to do is coach. When Tim came over here, I joined him again. I had so much respect for the kind of man and coach he is. So I came here for two years. Then when Tim went to Georgia Tech, I wanted to keep coaching. So I’m happy to be the head coach. I feel blessed and grateful.”
2. What’s it like being a head coach at this level? “I’m thankful to get another opportunity. The first one [at East Carolina] was not successful. It put a dent in my career. So I’m happy to have another chance. In high school, it’s less pure nuts and bolts and Xs and Os and ball coaching. I don’t get to spend near enough time on ‘do we need to play inside leverage or outside leverage?’ It’s so much more personnel, people, organization, ‘for the good of the program’ stuff. It’s a lot of who’s on the bus and who’s in the right seat. It’s travel. It’s how you practice, when you practice, who’s on your staff. The good part is that the buck stops here. You have an opportunity to make an impact because so many of your decisions are final instead of running it up the pole. In college, we had such a support staff. You’ve got your training staff, your strength-and-conditioning staff, your operations staff, fundraising. I was able to work more Xs and Os in college because the things that ran the program were already in place. At this size school, it’s the moms. We couldn’t run this football team without the mothers, and we’ve got some great ones on our team. I had two calls when I got in this morning. One from you. One from a mother. I called her first. I didn’t envision that being so critical.”
3. You mentioned you have worked under 22 head coaches. What mentors/people shaped you the most as a head coach, and how? “It’s a cliché, but I have stolen a little bit from every one of them, but for the ones that I can highlight, I’d start with Bill Curry. I worked with him twice, once at Alabama and once at Georgia State. Just as a man, as a believer, doing it for all the right reasons, he had a major impact on my life and coaching and still does. Probably the next one is a guy named Jeff Bower, who was at Southern Miss. I talked with Jeff this morning. We talk multiple times a week. He had a gift for picking the right players. I’m looking at my wall and I look at a guy like Pat Surtain. We went down to New Orleans and saw him play point guard and thought he’d be a good corner, and he might’ve been one of the best ever. Jeff Bower built a bond. The teams we had at Southern Miss, the coaches and players, are closer than any other where I’ve coached. Obviously, I could go on to Lou Holtz to Steve Spurrier to Nick Saban. Those are three iconic guys. Holtz had a great plan. He had a plan for everything down to every detail. Spurrier was awfully fun to be around if you got the ball back to him. We tried to get the ball back to him. Let me just say that. He was a lot of fun off the field recruiting and playing golf. Houston Nutt, Ron Zook and Dennis Franchione also were really successful at a high level that I learned from.”
4. Where do you feel your Fellowship team stands at this point in the season? You’ve got quite a few college prospects for a smaller school. “We’ve got guys with P5 offers [such as] Josh Petty [an offensive lineman and top-50 prospect nationally as a junior]. Every school has been here. I can look at my board now – 82 schools across the country, Georgia, Alabama, everybody in the SEC. Our running back, C.J. Givers, has gotten a lot of attention. Evan Haynes has gotten attention. Josh Milhollin has. Our quarterback [Jonathan Gransby]. Everybody on our offensive line, not all Power 5, but people are coming to look at them. On the other hand, we have a very young team. We’ve got nine seniors. A couple are hurt. So there are not many guys that have been with us for three years. And by young, I mean 14 and 15 years old that have never been put through a program like this because it’s new. We can’t say it’s inexperienced because it’s our 10th game now. But for some of these guys, we’ve had to put them in the microwave when we would’ve loved to put them in the crock pot and tenderize them more. There’s growing pains with that. But I couldn’t be more happy coaching this team. They want to do well, and that just drives me as a coach to want to do more for them.”
