Aaron Everett is the new Woodland head baseball coach.
As is so often the case when a coaching change is made at a small-town high school, more than one sport is effected in the fallout.
That is the situation at Woodland where former head football coach Kevin Smith was told he would not be retained and chose put in his retirement papers with the state. (More on Smith in a moment.)
Smith was also the head baseball coach for the two seasons he was at Woodland, which meant that the Bobcats would need a man to fill that job as well.
Woodland promoted long-time assistant Charles Wood to take over for Smith as the head football coach, but the top spot on the Bobcat baseball team remained unfilled until last week.
Former Southern Union and Wadley head coach Aaron Everett was announced as the school’s new head baseball coach last Thursday.
Everett, whose son Rackley is a player on the Woodland team, is an experienced and well-traveled coach and a former pitcher at the University of Tennessee.
Since coming to Randolph County to take over as the Southern Union head baseball coach in 2020 after the retirement legendary Bison coach Jabo Jordan, Everett has bounced around between the college and high school ranks. He spent a season as an assistant coach at Auburn and a year at Jacksonville State before coaching Wadley for its 2024 season. He has had a non-coaching job at Southern Union for the past two years, but brings a wealth of baseball knowledge to the Woodland program.
Meanwhile, Handley High School is putting Kevin Smith to work. He was brought on staff at the school as contract worker to join Chris White’s staff as a football assistant. Now in addition to his role coaching defensive tackles in the fall, Smith will be in charge of the varsity softball team in the spring.
Smith will take over as head softball coach for Lon Hurst, who spent one season as the head coach and led the team to an area runner-up season and an appearance in the Class 4A Central Regional.
Smith does have some softball coaching in his background. He was the coach at Lanett when the school transitioned from slow-pitch to fast-pitch softball in the early 2000s and spent one season as an assistant to former Handley coach Randy Hall in 2006.
