The Port Arthur News
February 07, 2007 11:02 pm
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Ronnie Thompson may have another former Thomas Jefferson player coaching a local football team by the end of next week.
Cris Stump, an older brother of West Brook coach Craig Stump and a defensive back on TJ’s 1980 state championship runnerup squad, is one of four finalists for the Bridge City athletic director/head football coaching job.
Stump, Dwight Bickham, Bradley Oden and Tonny Wallis are the four finalists from a field of 55 applicants, Bridge City superintendent Darrell Myers said Wednesday.
That quartet is set to be interviewed one by one by trustees in executive session at a special meeting of the school board tonight. Myers said a second special session was planned for next Thursday at which time the board will formally vote to hire a coach to succeed Claude Tarver, who resigned late last year.
Cris Stump, 43, has been offensive coordinator at West Brook the past two seasons, helping the Bruins reach the third round of the playoffs each year. He was offensive coordinator at Katy Cinco Ranch before that.
Ironically, half the BC finalists have West Brook ties, as Oden played for and graduated from West Brook. He also played at Lamar University. Currently, he’s an assistant at Class 2A Rice.
Wallis is an assistant principal at Ennis Junior High and has been for several years. A head coach at Class 4A Red Oak in 1993-95 (10-18-2), he failed to make the list of six finalists when he applied at Little Cypress-Mauriceville two years ago.
But so did Bickham and the former Vidor and LC-M assistant has been one of the area’s top winners the past two years at Deweyville.
The 41-year-old took the Pirates to the playoffs in each of his first two years as head coach, ending an eight-year postseason drought. His record at Deweyville the past two years is 14-7.
Myers winnowed the list of original applicants to a dozen and 11 of those came for preliminary interviews with campus and district administrators. The four finalists were those who best fit the school board’s wishes for a new AD/head coach to succeed Claude Tarver the superintendent said.
Tarver resigned to follow his wife to north Texas. Under his leadership, BC qualified for the playoffs three times in five seasons. The Cardinals were 6-4 last fall.
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Jasper has a football coaching vacancy after Danny Lauve was hired last week to coach at Class 4A Elgin, a suburb of Austin.
Lauve’s teams were 44-21 in his five years at Jasper, making it to three straight Class 3A state semifinals from 2002-2004 and the Division I state final in 2002.
Butch Dean, Jasper ISD superintendent, says no applications for the job will be taken until the school board accepts Lauve’s resignation at its Monday night meeting.
Chris Coleman, the former West Brook basketball coach who is now Jasper’s director of human resources, is expected to be named interim athletic director. Coleman had been the district’s AD, but that changed about a year ago with Lauve also assuming the AD title.
Because Class 3A schools are not allowed spring training, Dean says Jasper will not be rushed to name a replacement for Lauve.
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Memorial High basketball coach Terrul Henderson wouldn’t say Wednesday if junior guard J’Covan Brown would play Friday night when the Titans host West Brook in an important District 21-5A boys’ basketball game.
Memorial is 9-3 and second place in league play, with West Brook third at 8-4 and Channelview fourth at 7-5. The Titans clinched a playoff spot with their win Tuesday over Baytown Lee, combining with Kingwood’s win over Humble to eliminate fifth-place Humble from postseason contention.
If the Titans maintain second place, they would meet the third-place District 22-5A finisher in bidistrict. A third-place finish means a second-place bidistrict opponent.
Henderson held Brown out of the Titans’ game against Lee as punishment for “a violation of team policies,” the coach said. Brown was benched for the final quarter of the Kingwood game last Friday and left the team bench while the game was still in progress.
Asked if Brown would return to play against the Bruins, Henderson said, “We’re going to take it one day at a time.”
The Kingwood game marked at least the third time this season that Brown played poorly and was held out of the fourth quarter of an important game.
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While wishing Cris Stump the best in the Bridge City coaching derby, the current coaching staff at West Brook is one for some kind of record book. Not one, not two, but three of Ron Stump, Sr., sons are coaching for the Bruins.
Ron Stump, Jr., 48, joined brothers Craig and Cris at West Brook at midterm. He had most recently coached at Houston Westbury. Prior to that, he has coached at Port Arthur's Stephen F. Austin, Anahuac, Liberty, Kountze, Hardin-Jefferson and Beaumont Central.
Don Stump, 44, is the only one of the four Stump brothers not currently at West Brook and he’s an engineer, not a coach.
Dave Rogers is a News staff writer. Contact him at drogers@panews.com.
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