Tallassee nabs O'Neal as new football coach; Epperson new DC at Alabama Christian
L.A. O’Neal was officially named head football coach of Tallassee High School on Tuesday. He leaves B.T. Washington in Tuskegee to take the position. (Michael Butler)
By TIM GAYLE
Not surprisingly, L.A. O’Neal spent his first day as Tallassee High’s new football coach at the school’s weight room.
“I feel like the weight room builds confidence,” he said. “We’ve got to hit that weight room hard. We’re going to get in that film room and evaluate how we looked last year and where we made mistakes, where we can correct some things and get better. But the biggest thing is we’ve got to get physically and mentally stronger and that’s doing the work in the weight room and the work on the field in conditioning.”
O’Neal was approved by the Tallassee Board of Education as the Tigers’ new athletic director and head football coach on Tuesday night.
While O’Neal grew up across the river at Reeltown High, the nephew of former Tallassee boys’ basketball coach, defensive coordinator and principal Carl Stewart is quite familiar with the Tigers.
“When my uncle was the principal, I used to go over there and see him,” O’Neal said. “That was my favorite uncle. He thought I was the right person for the job, not because I was his nephew, but because he thought I was the right person for the job. He thought Tallassee needed a little bit of excitement and needed somebody that not only brought the excitement but knew what they were doing in the X’s and O’s department.”
O’Neal started his coaching career as an assistant for his father, Hall of Fame coach Jackie O’Neal, at Reeltown in 2011. He continued coaching there after his father’s retirement, coaching at Reeltown under Matt Johnson for three years (2016-18) before joining the Pike Road coaching staff in 2019 and 2020 as a defensive coordinator.
In 2021, he took his first head coaching job at Booker T. Washington and made history with the Golden Tigers. In his first season, BTW went 4-6 but won two of its final three games, the first time that had happened since 2016. In 2022, BTW went 6-6, winning four in a row (for the first time since 2004), reaching the playoffs for only the second time since the school opened in 1991 and winning a playoff game for the first time ever.
This past season, BTW won a school-record nine games (9-5), reaching the 4A semifinals before losing to Catholic 28-0.
“It was extremely difficult to walk away from BTW after what we had built there,” O’Neal said. “We just ran into some road blocks that made things difficult, moving forward, so when Tallassee called -- and I never thought they would call -- we kind of evaluated the situation and everything they had and everything they were able to provide the kids and we thought it was a great landing spot.”
Jackie O’Neal retired as an assistant for his son after the 2023 season, citing recent knee surgery as an obstacle for a line coach who’s used to getting in the trenches with his players. Many wondered how the veteran Reeltown coach -- whose name is part of the stadium’s name -- would feel about his son coaching at his arch rival.
“You know, I thought it was going to be a whole lot harder than it was,” L.A. O’Neal said. “Me and him talk all the time and he told me before the season even started that he was going to retire this season because his leg was giving him problems. With him knowing all that we went through and all that we had done in Tuskegee, just the amount of work that we had to do to provide for our kids, when I brought up the job in Tallassee, he said, ‘they’ve got everything you need. That’s a no-brainer.’”
O’Neal has faced Tallassee three times in recent years -- once as an assistant at Pike Road and once in each of the last two seasons at Booker T. Washington. His task will be to build back the Tigers after Mike Battles’ 12-year run. Battles coached the Tigers to eight or more wins in five of his first six seasons but never reached that eight-win plateau again over the last six years.
“The main thing is just getting everybody on the same page,” O’Neal said. “It’s the only school in the city, so all the resources are there from the city. If we can just get everybody to get behind the kids and get behind the school system and be one community, one school, one team, there’s no telling what we can do.”
Tallassee will open the 2024 season on Aug. 23 at Montgomery Academy.
Epperson named new defensive coordinator at Alabama Christian
Alabama Christian Academy coach Michael Summers went to college to find the Eagles’ new defensive coordinator, hiring Huntingdon College defensive line coach Weston Epperson to replace Danny Madison in that position.
Summers said he locked in early on Epperson because of “the passion he recruited with and I’ve gotten to go to three or four Huntingdon games and the passion he coached with. In coaching with Coach (Mike) Turk, he’s got the highest retention rate of any position coach there. He’s coaching at probably the best Division III program in the South. The guy’s got a vision for the kind of coach he is and the kind of coach he wants to be. He’s got the kind of aggressive intense mindset that I really want our defense to play with.”
ACA allowed 323 points in 2022 and 327 points this past season, the most allowed since 2018 and a trend that needed to be reversed, Summers said.
For Epperson, it marked a return to the high school ranks where he started his coaching career in 2017 and an opportunity he couldn’t pass up.
“I’ve gotten to know Coach Summers over the last couple of years because I’ve been recruiting kids from ACA to go to Huntingdon,” Epperson said. “As I’ve gotten to know him, we see eye to eye on a lot of things and I also get to see how he is, as far as how much he cares for his players and that’s a big deal to me because Coach Turk is that way and once you work for him, you get picky about who you work for.”
Epperson finished his high school career as a Trinity linebacker in 2010 and as a Wildcat baseball player in the spring of 2011 before going to Samford to play football for Pat Sullivan. He later enrolled at Auburn and graduated from Liberty, crediting Trinity baseball coach Ken Whittle for his decision to get into coaching.
Epperson started his coaching career as a running backs coach for Barry Loyal at Trinity in 2017 and 2018, then left and went to Valiant Cross Academy in the spring of 2019. After a semester at the AISA school, he moved into the college ranks for Turk at Huntingdon College in the fall of 2019, serving as the defensive line coach for the Hawks.
“Going to ACA would give me the ability to wear a different number of hats, just have a different set of responsibilities,” Epperson explained. “Just like Coach Turk, (Summers) is very supportive of young coaches who have families with young kids and that was really attractive to me. The way he runs his program, he’s rooted in the right things, he’s rooted in Christ but he’s also a competitor.”
Epperson will start his new job next week, beginning with work in the physical education department and the weight room this spring before moving into a teaching role next fall.
“This is something that excites me for sure,” Epperson said. “I’m always going to be who I am but I want the defense to play with incredible effort and intensity that no opponent can match.”
He was hesitant to describe what to expect from an ACA defense until he evaluates the personnel, but Summers is confident he’s hired the right guy.
“On offense, we want to be able to run the ball and (on defense) we want to be able to stop the run,” Summers said. “Our last two games, that is something we did not do well. Now I think that’s more that we were beat to death at the end of the year. But he wants the players to play aggressive and that’s the same mentality I always had as a defensive coordinator.”