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County-area football coaches speak on variety of topics at Covington Rotary Club
Football Coaches at Rotary 2025
Alcovy's Spencer Fortson(left), Eastside's Jay Cawthon(middle) and Newton's Josh Skelton(right) at the Covington Rotary Club meeting. - photo by Garrett Pitts

This past week, all three of the county-area football coaches attended Covington’s Rotary Club meeting to speak on a plethora of topics.

Alcovy’s Spencer Fortson, Eastside’s Jay Cawthon and Newton’s Josh Skelton took centerstage to speak to the crowd at Covington First United Methodist Church.

The event was moderated by The Covington News managing editor Evan Newton, who facilitated questions before he opened the floor to the audience.

Whether it was the season outlook, the state of high school football or their coaching upbringings, all three gave their insights.

The talk began with an outlook on the new season, and Fortson began by sharing his thoughts on a young Alcovy team looking to improve upon a two-win season from 2024.

“We lost 25 seniors off our last year’s squad,” Fortson said. “We didn't have a good record this past season going 2-8. It was a new region, the region Eastside was in the past year. We are looking for a better outcome this year. I had 25 seniors this upcoming season as well and out of those 25 we got about three guys that have been starters since they were freshman. We had a great offseason, and got started early. We got started in December because we were behind the eight-ball in regards to some of the size of our guys.”

For Cawthon and the Eagles, the team is coming off a season in which they reached the Elite Eight in the Class AAAA playoffs.

The meeting took place after Eastside’s week two win over Hiram, and Cawthon spoke about his team’s fight to bounce back with a victory after a week one defeat.

“Coming off a pretty good season, we were 11-2 last year. Made the Elite Eight and had a special group of kids,” Cawthon said. “Had 12 kids that had the chance to go play at the next level. [We] opened the year against Newton in a hard fought game and lost to a great football team, but I was proud of the way our guys responded against Hiram. You never know how teenagers are going to respond after a big rival loss and we challenged them all week and they responded very well. We do have some pieces back from last year but we do have some inexperienced kids that have been in the program for three years and are now getting the opportunity on Friday night.”

The Rams are in year three under Skelton, and the team faced a mix of both roster and coaching turnover over the offseason.

Nevertheless, Skelton spoke about his confidence with the current group he has.

“One of our big goals in January was having good attendance and everyone working hard and buying in,” Skelton said. “I thought we did a good job of tat and obviously going into the spring I thought we did a good job. We lost some really good coaches to some good things that turned the coaches’ role. We got some other coaches that have been doing a good job of buying into what we want to do from a coaching standpoint. I thought we had a really good summer. We have a young team. We lost 14 All-Region guys, well over 20 seniors. We have a young team but we do have an older quarterback.”

One thing that all three coaches had in common was a signing class in 2024, and Skelton shared how that mission is just as important as the one on the field.

“We were able to sign 16 guys last year,” Skelton said. “A lot of those guys were Division I guys, the rest were obviously DII or lower. That's really big for us — all of us up here — to gte our guys into school and have those guys going to play at the next level. I think we all have a lot of success in terms of our guys that don't go on to play college football. They go on to do great things like go to college and also do trade [school]. We promote all of those things and do a great job of that.”

One topic that was discussed with the topic of alumni is when they come back, and Cawthon shared that his former players tend to always give back to the current team.

“Players come back,” Cawthon said. “You have some that play at the highest level in the NFL, but what they remember most of Friday nights, and they still say it. They play in the biggest arenas, but it is all about Friday night and being there with the high school kids and just blending right in.”

When the questionnaire opened up to the audience, the talks shifted to player safety during the heat of summer.

Cawthon shed light on a system that all three coaches use to put player safety at the forefront.

“Hopefully we are past the heat, that's the main thing, but our No. 1 goal is the safety of our kids,” Cawthon said. “We use the WetBulb— all three of us do — where it is a mixture of the temperature and the humidity and if the WetBulb gives you the reading of a certain number, you can't go outside. [If it’s] a certain number and you can only be out there for a few hours or for one hour. I am taking the readings every single day, even now just to see. We had to go inside a lot this summer. I don't think being inside one or two days is going to cost you a championship, so the first day of pads that was legal in Georgia we only had five days of outside practice with pads on leading up to our first scrimmage.”

Fortson then brought up another aspect of player safety — nutrition.

“One of things we all do is talk about nutrition,” Fortson said. “We are not in this thing alone when it comes to being the head coach of a program. We try to get our families involved as well. Because the biggest thing is that we can only control what we can control, so we have to make sure they are doing the right things when they are at home. We have to make sure they are hydrating at home.”

One topic that was discussed was the emergence of name, image and likeness(NIL) in high school athletics.

Although it is not directly involved with the coaches currently, all shared the same sentiment that it will become more of a factor over time.

“I don’t see NIL affecting high school football as much, I see kids who make apparel deals. I don't see a football player at high school yet getting $500,000 or anything like that,” Skelton said. “Not to say it's not coming, you have to educate those guys in terms of them going to college.”

One of the final topics that was discussed is how the coaches and their staff shape their players off the field and in everyday life.

“One of the things we have is that we do a leadership meeting,” Fortson said. “What we do is we get people to come in from FCA and people from the community to come and talk with our guys. We formed a senior leadership meeting as well, a few weeks ago we had our seniors come together and talk about their experiences. Talk about their experiences not only in football but in life. We were able to sit down and have a pow-wow meeting just to be able to tell the young players some of the things they have gone through in life when it comes to academics and when it comes to football as well.”

Skelton shared some of the same ideas, but also mentioned how he pushes for his team to get out in the community as well.

“We have things we call ‘real talk sessions,’” Skelton said. “What we do is we bring in people from all over to talk about different subjects to our team. Bring someone in to talk about financial  literacy, we bring someone in to talk about mental health and how important it is. Bring women in to talk about domestic violence and how to treat women. We do a large part of that, we partner and feed the homeless as well. All these things have been good and have helped with the development of our kids."