Ricky Irby pulls double duty as a football coach and AD. That's increasingly rare.

Every day around 2 p.m., Hopewell High School football coach Ricky Irby switches gears. At that point in the day, he double checks his practice schedule and makes sure everything is planned out for his team’s afternoon workout.

His focus is solely on getting his team ready for Friday night’s opponent. That is, unless an urgent phone call or email comes in for the school’s Athletic and Activities Director.

“If something comes up and I’m needed in my AD role, that’s going to take precedent over my football responsibilities,” Irby said.

Irby, who served as the school’s interim Athletic and Activities Director when Dr. Kerry Gray left the post last spring, accepted the full-time role before school started over the summer. In an increasingly rare move, Irby did so while also retaining the role of head football coach. He is the only public-school coach in the Central Region to also hold a director job at the same time.

“I really enjoyed my time as the interim athletic director here, being able to work without spring sports like boys and girls soccer. I actually went over and coached a girls tennis match one afternoon when our head tennis coach couldn’t be there for a make-up game,” he said. “It was very rewarding and I really enjoyed it, so, it’s something I ended up pursuing.”

Defying the trend

Thirty years ago, it was common, if not expected, for a school’s athletic director to also be a sitting head coach. But as years went by and schools began adding job responsibilities from events and activities outside of athletics, the dual role began to fade away. As the role of “athletic director” increasingly got replaced with “activities director,” many school districts began to discourage, if not outright ban, sitting head coaches from also holding the administrative position.

“As the position of athletic director evolved from just handling sports to also covering activities and more of an administrative position, you see less and less people doing both,” said Joe Fowler, the athletic director at Goochland High School, who spent several years as the school’s football coach before stepping down to take the administrative role.

“The workload has exploded in the past few years with a ton of duties that by themselves are not that time consuming, but when aggregated together they eat up a large amount of time.”

Fowler’s words come as a lesson that Irby quickly learned. He arrives at school every day at 6:30 a.m., first fulfilling his role as the school’s in-car driving instructor before settling in for his larger role.

“When you show up on a Monday morning, you might not think you have much to do, but you have 10 or 15 things that pop up that you have to deal with right away,” Irby said. That’s one thing I never understood about the position. I never like to leave the evening with something left on my to-do list. I try to get everything done before I leave, then when I get back the next day there’s another 10 or 15 things you need to get done that pop up on you.” 

With nearly 30 years of coaching and teaching experience, Irby has developed a long Rolodex of coaches and administrators he considers friends and colleagues. As he went through the application process for the full-time administrative position, some were skeptical of him trying to handle two large roles at once.

“They all thought I was crazy that I was going to keep coaching and do this position,” Irby said.

Crazy? Maybe. But that same circle was ready to lend a hand with any advice needed for him to be successful. Irby said he called upon Lakeland Athletic Director Michael Whittington Jr. for advice, and often called Prince George AD (and former head football coach) Bruce Carroll multiple times a day for suggestions in the first few days on the job. 

“Coach Irby is an organized, highly intelligent and hard-working individual. He will do a great job,” Carroll said.

When Irby accepted the position, he did so knowing he needed two things to be successful – a football coaching staff that was fully on board, and an administration that had his back in both spots.

“You have to have great assistant coaches that understand you’re going to be pulled in different directions, and they can pick up some slack, when need be,” he said. “You also need a great administration, and I have both of those. Our administration really wants to see me be successful in both positions.”

Administrative support

Hopewell High School Principal Judy Carter is firmly in Irby’s corner. Since arriving at the school five years ago, she’s had a hands-on approach with athletics, and it has stayed that way with Irby in charge. The administrators meet weekly to discuss budgets, security, purchasing and during football season, the plan for when Irby is busy on the sidelines.

“When he’s on the field, I want him to be able to focus on his athletes and his role as the head coach, which means we plan for that kind of stuff,” Carter said. “Especially our football events, those are some of the biggest events we have. We have to make sure we’re working together and preparing for oversight for those events, because he’s going to be on the field and he doesn’t need to worry about what’s happening.”

Carter defines Irby as student-centered and solutions-oriented, and also feels Hopewell’s relatively small size gives him the unique ability to perform both coaching and administrative duties.

“I do not think it’s optimal for all schools,” Carter said. “Our school has about 1,100 kids, and that’s rounding up.”

Nearly a decade ago, when the director’s role was vacant, Irby was asked if he was considering applying for the job. After all, he had assisted former AD Marshall Parker many times over the years in similar fashion that he recently filled in for Dr. Gray. But, at the time, Hopewell would have required an active coach to give up his position. Irby didn’t think the time was right, and felt he had a bigger impact on the field. This time around, however, he didn’t have to make that consideration.

“I’ve been coaching here for 27 years, 10 years as an assistant, 17 as the head coach. I feel like I’ve done a lot here, and if I had to give it up, who knows,” he said. “I’m glad I wasn’t faced with that decision.”