Dunbar takes over Autauga Academy football

By TIM GAYLE

Autauga Academy has made 19 consecutive trips to the state playoffs, including five appearances in the championship game in the last six games, but new coach Trey Dunbar doesn’t see that as a pressure-packed situation for a first-time head coach. 

“To do that, it means you’re looking at the end,” Dunbar said. “I think you really have to be a process-driven program. You have to look at the ‘how’ and not at ‘what happens.’ It’s how you go about doing things every day.” 

Dunbar, who worked on the Generals’ sidelines during the 2021 season, was hired to replace Bobby Carr, the ultra-successful head coach who resigned his position after he was assured he was being hired to fill a vacancy at a public school in the area.

Carr, who has since accepted a job as an offensive coordinator at a south Alabama school, offered his approval of Dunbar as the Generals’ new head coach, saying it was a good hire for the school. 

“This was our best choice,” Autauga Academy headmaster Larry Pickett said. “He’s going to be athletic director and head football coach. He’s got a master’s degree in sports management and that helps. And he really helped called the plays last year, too.”

Dunbar was among 30 candidates for the job. Virtually all of his prior coaching experience was at the collegiate level, except for a volunteer stretch he worked last summer and fall with the Generals before getting into work with BSN sports, an equipment supplier for area high schools. 

“I was working at BSN Sports and I had a great gig,” Dunbar said. “I was working with great people. But this is a good fit for me here. I had a great time coaching here in the fall. They’ve got good kids here, they get great support. I was not looking to get into high school football. It kind of just found me.”

 Dunbar earned a bachelor’s degree from Alabama and a master’s from Troy. In addition to his role as athletic director and head football coach, he will teach lifetime fitness, health class and physical education for seventh, eighth and ninth graders at the school in the fall.

He got his first coaching job at Alabama while he was a student, working as a volunteer assistant under Scott Cochran and Terry Jones in the Crimson Tide weight room and on the field under now-fulltime assistant Freddie Roach. 

“That was my first job,” Dunbar said. “I was a student assistant and helped with defense. I worked in the weight room as well. If I would have been born a little taller and a little faster, I’d still be playing. I wanted to play, but when you’ve got future first-round draft picks fighting for scout-team reps, my place on that line was way down. So Freddie Roach was actually the one who got me to be a student assistant.”

He moved on to jobs at Troy University, as a passing game coordinator and quarterback coach at Alabama State, then as an offensive coordinator at Faulkner University. While much of his time has been in the collegiate ranks, he insists it wasn’t much different from what he will face now.

“We were not the same Troy then (in 2010) that they are now,” he said. “They didn’t even have a director of football operations. It was nine position coaches and four GAs and I was starting off as one of those GAs, so the little things that you do around a program that you think high school coaches have to do that college coaches don’t, we did it.”

Dunbar was on the Autauga sidelines during the 2021 season as a volunteer coach. Prior to his volunteer work with the Generals, he worked his way up through the ranks at Troy University during a seven-year tenure, serving as an intern in the strength and conditioning program (2010), as a graduate assistant coach on the defensive side of the ball (2011-13), as an offensive analyst (2014), as director of player personnel (2015) and as assistant director of football operations (2016). 

He then moved on to Alabama State as the quarterbacks coach in 2017 and 2018, calling the plays for the Hornets during much of the 2017 season. Most recently, he served as the offensive coordinator at Faulkner University.

And, yes, he would be the first to admit there are big shoes to fill at Autauga, but when he reflects on maintaining the right attitude and keeping the program at a high level, he thinks not of his recent work but his early days of coaching at Alabama under Nick Saban.  

“Coach Saban talks about it all the time,” he said. “If you’re going to be great and you’re going to be at the top, you really don’t have a choice. You have to do things a certain way.”

He insists he is ready for his first head coaching job. It is the other aspects of the job he’s concerned about.

“I just think more of my transition to high school will come in the athletic director role,” he said. “One thing that I can tell you I’m good at is football. God blessed me and he put me around good people to learn from. I am prepared for any role in football that I can have. But now, you talk about fixing a scoreboard at the baseball field? That’s a different world.”