Veterans taps Steve DeVoursney as new head coach, Williams approved to take over at Northside
By Michael A. Lough
The Sports Report
centralgasports@gmail.com
The suspense for one head football coaching job in Houston County was pretty much eliminated on Monday, but that left some for another one.
The Houston County Board of Education on Tuesday at its regularly scheduled meeting approved Steve DeVoursney as the new head coach at Veterans.
He is the fourth head coach at Veterans, which started playing football in 2010. The Warhawks have had three winning seasons in that span, 2013 under David Bruce and 2018-19 under Milan Turner.
Reports surfaced Monday – including in The Central Georgia Sports Report – that Northside had hired Langston Hughes head coach Daniel “Boone” Williams, which he confirmed to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Monday night and to The Sports Report early Tuesday morning.
Houston County board meetings are streamed live.
The board went into executive session at 1:57 p.m for a student matter personnel matter, and eventually returned to approve Williams, although the streaming did not return. The school posted the move on social media a little after 4 p.m.
Josh Ingram went 9-21 in three seasons at Veterans, going backwards after a 5-5 debut and finishing 1-9 in 2024. Part of Turner’s staff and promoted, he and the school separated in late November.
DeVoursney brings a 72.8 percent winning percentage to Veterans, going 182-68 in 21 seasons, 14 at Griffin (2000-13) and seven at Cairo (2015-2021).
The only DeVoursney team not to make the playoffs was at Griffin in 2000, when he took over a few games into the season. He has reached the semifinals three times and quarterfinals four times, losing in the first round only six times.
The Upson-Lee graduate resigned at Cairo in June of 2022, citing a desire to explore other jobs, including in Alabama. He quickly took a job as an assistant at Orange Beach High in Alabama.
DeVoursney led Griffin to a 15-0 record and the 2013 Class 4A state title, with former Jones County head coach Justin Rogers and former Rutland head coach Rusty Easom on the staff.
But he and his wife Jessica, a teacher at the school, resigned in April of 2014 amid charges of illegal recruiting and improper academic assistance. They denied the allegations, and were placed on administrative leave at the time.
Former Bibb County superintendent Curtis Jones was the Griffin-Spalding schools superintendent at the time. An investigator hired by the school board, according to an AJC story at the time, along with other interviews “ quoted several Griffin faculty members as expressing suspicion of cheating or misconduct in Griffin’s online course-recovery program” but quoted then-principal Keith Simmons defending both DeVoursneys.
DeVoursney was a finalist for the Veterans job back in 2010 when the program was starting.
The addition of DeVoursney and Williams means five of the six teams in Region 2-5A have a head coach with a state championship ring. And they join Perry’s Kevin Smith as GHSA head coaches in the county with that hardware.