By Michael A. Lough

The Sports Report

centralgasports@gmail.com

A little more than a year ago, Tattnall athletics director Matt Chambless was the person giving news to another coach that his contract wouldn’t be renewed.

Now, Chambless has been on the receiving end of some similar news.

Tattnall declined in April to renew Chambless’ contract at the school as its athletics director and head girls basketball coach, but offered him a contract for 2025-26 to return for his fourth season as the head boys basketball coach.

Chambless declined, and the school started looking for three replacements, having quickly posted the openings on assorted websites – including the GISA jobs link – in early April.

An email inquiry sent to head of school Travis Absher on April 17 was received, but not replied to. Absher confirmed the following week at a Trojans baseball game that Chambless was offered a contract as boys basketball coach and declined it, and that there would be announcements when replacements were hired.

One of those came Wednesday when the school posted on its main social media pages that Lauren Spillers Hodge had been hired as the new head girls basketball coach. An announcement about the boys job is expected in the next few days.

Meanwhile, Chambless has remained at the school fulfilling some of his normal duties. He has been one of Central Georgia’s most active school officials in getting word out about athletic accomplishments on social media as well as athletics pages on the school website.

Through the first three days of this week, for example, he has posted eight items on Facebook and eight on X/Twitter about Tattnall baseball and soccer, as well as college signings and the college transfer of a recent alumni.

Tattnall also has openings, as per listings on the GISA jobs board, for a head girls soccer coach and head volleyball coach.

The contact for those jobs is head baseball coach Jordan Brooks, a Tattnall grad, but he has not been announced as the new athletics director.

Tattnall’s girls went 11-14 in Chambless’ lone season. The boys went 14-12, 21-7, and 22-5, the 57-24 mark the program’s best three-year run since 2007-10’s 60-16 stretch under Leroy Jordan. Chambless was the fourth boys head coach since then, a list that includes current Stratford head coach Jarvis Smith.

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Chambless said contracts usually go out before spring break and require an answer upon school resuming.

“When I got back, we had our basketball banquet, and it was time to give them an answer,” Chambless said. “Me and my wife looked at the contract and prayed over it to make a decision, and felt like it was in our best interest not to renew.”

The change in jobs came with a sizable decrease in compensation.

“We just didn't feel like it was going to be in the best interest of our family,” he said. “We knew this was not what we were going to do and I didn't want to put them behind on finding who they needed to find, because that's not fair to the kids.”

It’s the latest in a blizzard of assorted changes at the school the past few years.

In late March of 2022, Tattnall head of school David Raines declined to renew the contracts of longtime head baseball coach and athletics director Joey Hiller and boys basketball coach Derrick Clay.

Hiller took over baseball at Peach County and Clay is the head girls coach and football defensive coordinator at The Walker School

Chambless, who had worked with Raines at Covenant, was then hired as athletics director and boys basketball coach, while Brooks was promoted to replace Hiller as head baseball coach.

“I was brought in to see if I could bring some stability,” Chambless said. “They had asked if I would consider being here eight to 10 years. … I said that absolutely, that's a time frame that I could work with.”

Raines was out as head of school in less than two years, to be replaced by Absher – a former multi-sport assistant at Tattnall coming from the head of school spot at Robert Toombs - in May of 2023. He became Tattnall’s sixth head of school since Barney Hester stepped aside after the 2008-09 school year.

Less than a year later, Greene, one of Central Georgia’s winningest basketball coaches, was done, telling The Central Georgia Sports Report that he was told some players, and then their parents, complained that he was too hard on them.

“When I was hired three years ago, I was hired to win,” he said in April of 2024. “I wasn’t hired to babysit. I work hard.”

Greene went 50-34 at Tattnall, which went 19-48 the three previous seasons under three different head coaches. He soon landed as an assistant for another of Central Georgia’s winningest girls coaches, Ed Smith at Stratford.

Tattnall was unable to land a replacement, so Chambless took on the girls job, in addition to being athletics director and boys head coach. Handling such a load wasn’t new to Chambless, who did the same thing at Covenant, a much smaller overall operation. Covenant won Georgia Association of Private and Parochial Schools (GAPPS) girls and boys titles in 2019 with Chambless coaching both. He also pulled double duty for a year at Central Fellowship.

In late November, head football coach John Abernathy resigned after five seasons to focus more on his position as the high school head of school.

The process of hiring a new coach reportedly did not involve Chambless, and Tattnall raised eyebrows galore in early January when it named Tattnall legend Hester as the new head coach, about a month after the board of trustees announced the football stadium would be named after Hester.

The move was a well-kept secret for a few weeks, and Hester became the program’s fourth head coach since he resigned in 2012-13 to go to Howard. Clint Morgan was dismissed after going 22-11 in three years and the school and Chance Jones separated after he went 30-15 in four seasons.

The girls coach will be Tattnall’s fifth in a decade, and the boys coach will be the fifth. The next athletics director will be the fourth in less than a decade.

The 2024-25 girls season was one of only two losing seasons in basketball, boys and girls, in Georgia for Chambless.

“Eighty percent of our scoring … we graduated a lot of those girls, and then one transferred (to a city public school) before I took the job,” noted Chambless, who with wife Leah have four children, two still of school age. “We started a freshman guard, and we starte some sophomores at the guard spot. We were very young.

“We made it to the Elite Eight with the young group. Pretty good, to be honest.”

The boys had been struggling.

“The (boys) basketball program had not had a winning season in {awhile),” he said. “And we had a winning season year one. We had a 21-win season year two. And then this season, a 22-win season. I felt like we've done a good job with that on the basketball side of things.”