By Dave Morrison
CHARMCO – Somewhere around Hawk’s Nest State Park, while out running some errands for his mom, Kelly Vaughan got the call telling him he had been named the head coach at Greenbrier West.
The long-time Cavaliers assistant coach began ruminating on the way time flies.
“I was thinking that 40 years ago I was out in that field as a quarterback,” Vaughan said.
Now he will walk that field as the school’s head coaching, being named during a meeting of the Greenbrier County Board of Education in late June.
Vaughan is the school’s fifth head coach and replaced Toby Harris who retired earlier this month. Harris had two stints at the school (1896-77 and 2019-2022).
“I’m excited,” Vaughan said in a recent interview. “It just felt like the timing was right. We have a bunch of hard-nosed kids here and they work hard. That’s why they have been successful.”
Vaughan was an all-state player at West and played a strange combination, quarterback/nose guard before graduating from West in 1984.
He inherits a program that went 35-8 under Harris in his second stint, and made four straight playoffs, three times going to the second round.
Vaughan coached with three of the school’s previous four coaches and all three of those coaches won over 100 games at the school, Howard Hylton, Lewis McClung, and Harris. Vaughan was on the coaching staff on teams that advanced to the state championship game twice (with Hylton in 1991 and Lewis McClung in 2013).
“I got to coach with a bunch of great guys,” Vaughan said. “We had a great, we had a lot of great kids and I learned a lot of football over the years.”
He said coaching was his calling.
“I’ve always wanted to be a high school coach,” Vaughan said. “It’s just what I wanted to do and I always knew it was what I wanted to do. I was reading something the other day about Ryan Mallet (a former NFL QB who tragically died in a drowning accident in June). I think he was coaching in Arkansas. He had told people he wanted to be a high school coach. That’s the way I feel. I think high school football is the purest form of football.”
After graduating high school, he played football at Wake Forest for four years.
“I was blessed,” Vaughan said. “I had offers from Virginia Tech, West Virginia, but Wake Forest just felt right.”
He was a starter on special teams his redshirt freshman year and then was a three-year starter at defensive end.
He said former Marshall coach Bob Pruett, an assistant at Wake during that time, was his main recruiter.
“Talking to coach (Pruett) was a big factor,” Vaughan said. “He was a local guy (from Beckley) and we spoke the same language.”
After a successful career with the Demon Deacons, Vaughan’s initial coaching job was with his former high school coach, Hylton, in 1991 when his brothers Chris and Steve helped lead the team to the Class AA state championship game where they fell to Spencer 31-22.
“I’ve coached a lot of football games over the years, and I still have not seen two scoop-and-scores like they had in that game,” Vaughan said. “That one still hurts. We were up 16-0 in that game.”
He doesn’t foresee any changes offensively or defensively.
“What we have done has worked over the years and I don’t see any reason to change what we are doing,” Vaughan said.
Vaughan will keep the coaching staff intact, needing only to replace his spot and that move could me internal.
The new head coach will have something none of the other coaches at West had when the team kicks off the season.
“I’m going to take you back to the 80s,” Vaughan said. “When I was at Wake Forest we played teams like Michigan, U.Va., and they had turf. It was like playing on hard carpet. I hated it. That turf today is nice. We played Shady Spring last year and that turf was soft. Rained the whole game and there were no problems. I’m looking forward to it and the kids will like it.”
Vaughan and his wife Marcie reside in Rainelle and the couple have one son, Lawson, a former Cavaliers player, who will be a junior at WVU.
The Cavaliers will open the Vaughan Era hosting Pendleton County on Aug. 25 at 7 p.m.
