Ward takes over duties as MA girls basketball coach

Wright Ward is the new girls head basketball coach at Montgomery Academy. (File photo)

By TIM GAYLE

Montgomery Academy officials searched for a girls’ basketball coach before ultimately deciding they already had a quality candidate among their faculty. 

Athletic director Wright Ward will add basketball coaching duties to his job responsibilities immediately as he helps the Eagles with their rebuilding efforts for the 2024-25 season. 

Ward will replace Reg Mantooth, a community coach lured out of retirement by former athletic director Robert Johnson. Mantooth had coached the Eagles for four seasons, including last year’s 6-18 team. 

 “First of all, Reg did a fantastic job and we’re grateful for the time he put in,” Ward said. “It’s not easy coming in and taking over a well established program like MA had, much less when you’re a community coach and not on campus every day. But Reg did a great job and when the season ended, we met and he felt he couldn’t give the program the appropriate time it deserved.”

Mantooth has said on several occasions that the rebuilding efforts with the girls’ basketball program required a coach who was on campus, but Ward said there were no restrictions on community coaches in the hiring process.

“You can have community coaches that show up when it’s time for practice and they only show up in season,” Ward said, “but you have some great community coaches out there that are involved to the point that you don’t know they’re community coaches. If you’re just going to say I don’t want a community coach and I’m not going to go that direction, I feel like you’re selling yourself short. So we took all applications. Now, do I also believe it’s extremely important to have coaches who are full-time employees? Yes, I think anybody’s going to prefer that.”

So as school administrators filtered through the list of applicants with no success, Ward suggested that he would take over the coaching duties as evaluations for next year’s varsity, junior varsity and middle school squads were made and then he asked the school’s administrators and associate athletic director Julie Gordon to use his resume as a comparison as the process continued.  

“We had some very quality candidates come through,” he said. “We looked at a lot of different resumes but ultimately things just didn’t work out. The search was still open and we were getting toward the end of the (school) year and we had to do evals and I felt comfortable running those. We continued to get resumes but we were at a point where I also submitted a resume and asked the people I submitted it to to remove my name and just look at the resume and tell me how it stacks up.” 

“I really enjoyed evals, getting back out there and coaching the kids. The energy was there, the girls got after it, they’re hungry, looking forward to working this summer and to me it was also about consistency. With summer approaching, I did not want to put the program in a situation where we still don’t know what’s going on.”

Ward, now just 11 months into his tenure as athletic director, broke into the coaching ranks in 2007-08 as the freshman team boys coach at Marist School before serving the next five years as the assistant head coach for boys basketball at the Westminster Schools in Atlanta, Ga. 

In 2013, he became the head coach of the girls basketball team at Randolph, serving for three years before moving over to boys, then taking the position again in 2019. In his first season as the girls’ coach (2013-14), Randolph edged Guntersville in a sub-regional game and advanced to the 4A regionals before losing to Anniston in the semifinals.

Becoming the girls’ basketball coach won’t affect Ward’s duties as athletic director, he insisted.

“I don’t want that to change,” he said. “I don’t see that changing. We’re going in a good direction as an athletic department and I don’t want to take a step back there.”

Montgomery Academy lost just two seniors to graduation, but hasn’t made it to the postseason since the 2021 team went 26-3 and earned the program its 17th consecutive berth in the state playoffs. The Eagles have won just a combined 21 games in the last three seasons -- a sub-standard number of wins for one season at MA -- but Ward cautioned fans on their expectations as the rebuilding process continues.    

“We’ve got kids that want to work,” he said. “We’ve got great kids, we’ve got smart kids, we’ve got athletic kids. When you look back at those teams when MA was rolling, how many kids were on that team where basketball was the primary sport? They played multiple sports, but you knew basketball was No. 1. I don’t think it’s fair to ask any coach that you’ve got to get us back to that in Year One. Because it’s just not going to happen. It’s going to take time. It’s going to take a lot of work.”