By TIM GAYLE
Special to the Elmore/Autauga News
Scott Tubbs wasn’t sure why he needed to step away from his job as the head baseball coach at Autauga Academy, but he’s certainly glad Holtville High was looking for a new coach.
“I needed something different,” Tubbs said. “And it’s something I’ve always wanted to do. I don’t know why I never made the move to a public school, maybe I was just content, but I could never find the right opportunity and this one just kind of fell into my lap. I’m really excited about it.”
Tubbs was approved by the Elmore County Board of Education at its Monday meeting and will teach physical education and health classes at the school after spending the last four years at Autauga Academy.
“They’ve got kind of a rich tradition in baseball,” Tubbs said. “It doesn’t correlate into a lot of state championships, but they’ve had a lot of great players come through there. And they’ve got a real good class coming through right now. It ought to be a fun couple of years with these guys.”
Tubbs has spent the last dozen or so years at Edgewood, Macon East and Autauga, a trio of highly successful baseball programs in the Alabama Independent School Association. At Holtville, Tubbs will step into a program where successful baseball coaches have found themselves on the wrong end of negotiations with the schools. Kevin Hall, who coached the Bulldogs from 2009-15, announced he was asked to step down at the end of the 2015 season, a charge the school denied. Hall, now the head coach at Prattville High, stepped down at the end of the 2015 season.
Michael Dismukes was next, coaching the Bulldogs in 2016 and 2017 before leaving to coach at Wetumpka High.
Torey Baird has coached the Bulldogs to a 55-26 record the last three years, but apparently was released by the school at the end of the 2020 season.
Those three coaches have led the Bulldogs to 10 playoff berths over an 11-year span, including six in a row that was cut short by the coronavirus pandemic this past spring that canceled the season in mid-March.
Among those 10 playoff berths, Hall rebuilt the program with six trips to the playoffs, including five first-round losses and a 2009 loss to Alabama Christian in the second round of the playoffs. Dismukes lost to Sipsey Valley in a first-round series in 2016 and to LAMP in a second-round loss at Paterson Field, while Baird reached the 2018 quarterfinals before losing to eventual state champ Andalusia in 2018 and to LAMP in the second round in 2019.
This past season, the Bulldogs were paired with Elmore County, Handley and Booker T. Washington in 4A Area 5. Next year, Holtville will compete in 5A for the first time, along with Elmore County, Jemison and Marbury in Area 6.
“I don’t know enough about some of the teams in the area,” Tubbs said. “The biggest thing I can do as a coach is take care of us first.”
The new start at Holtville coincides with Tubbs’ last round of chemotherapy treatments for colon cancer, which first surfaced late last summer before the start of football practice. That, along with a heavy round of rain in the early weeks of the 2020 season and the coronavirus interruption, presented him with the most challenging season of his coaching career.
“I don’t know if it was because of the cancer or what it was, I just kind of felt like I was in a lull,” he said. “(The new job at Holtville) is already making me change a little and making me enjoy getting up and giving me something new and challenging to look forward to.”
