He was the program’s first quarterback 20 years ago. Now, he’s head coach.
Credit: Jack Leo/AJC
BOGART — Not many 35-year-old high school football coaches have the unique perspective Jon Richt does, and it’s not just because he’s the son of a UGA great.
Prince Avenue Christian School’s new head coach got a front-row seat to a daily clinic growing up. He watched his father, Mark Richt, win two SEC Championships in a 15-year tenure at Georgia.
But Jon already has experience that his College Football Hall of Fame father doesn’t. His 12-year career has seen coaching jobs on all three levels: high school, college and the NFL.
Jon Richt’s first coaching position was a UGA quality control role under his dad in 2014. He followed that with a season as an offensive assistant for the Buffalo Bills’ offensive line and tight ends.
Then it was back to college with three more years under his dad as Miami’s quarterbacks coach. That ultimately led him to Prince Avenue’s offensive coordinator role in 2021, where he has since won two state titles and coached the state’s all-time career passing yards leader, Aaron Philo.
The head coaching job made it all come full circle for Richt, who was Prince Avenue’s first varsity quarterback when the school founded its program in 2005. Now, it’s his job to maintain Prince Avenue as a statewide power, and he’ll be pulling knowledge from his traveler’s diary of career stops.
“You’re not necessarily set in ways,” Richt said. “You see how things are done differently at every level.”
The very nature of coaching looks different depending on the level, according to Richt.
For instance, he won’t have a roster full of world-class athletes when he makes his head coaching debut against Calloway on Aug. 13 — the first game of the Corky Kell Classic. But he will have a greater attention to minute details thanks to his season in the NFL coaching Pro Bowlers like Eric Wood and LeSean McCoy.
“They just kind of give you all these fantastic athletes and all that kind of stuff, and you’re really focused on, ‘ OK, well, I don’t really need to focus too much on this, that and the other, on him running and catching, right?’” Richt said. “They can do that. We’re working on the fine detail of, ‘Hey, I don’t false step 6 inches this way, I’ve got to gain ground because that guy’s going to get that6-inch advantage on me, and now I’m in trouble, right?’”
Richt learned more about the personal side of his job from coaching college and high school ball. Teaching fundamentals is part of coaching, but Richt also learned how to lead younger players in transitional periods of life.
“College, you’re working with a lot of kids who are going through life, right?” he said. “At a very difficult stage, they’re away from their family for the first time, so you’re learning how to manage them off the field a lot of the time, right, as well as teach them, coach them and prepare them on the field.
“And then you come to high school, and these kids are just trying to figure out life, period. They don’t even know who they are yet.”
For all his time working for coaching greats like his dad and Rex Ryan, Jon Richt also credited his development to his past four seasons under former Prince Avenue coach Greg Vandagriff.
“To be with Coach (Vandagriff) the past couple years and see how a good high school program’s run,” Richt said. “As good as we are, we can’t run it the same as Georgia; obviously, we can’t run it the same as Buffalo or Miami.
“And so learning how to maximize the potential of your guys wherever you are is something that I’ve really tried to learn and take from everybody.”
Richt didn’t take the Prince Avenue job with the intention to flip the program on its head. After all, the Wolverines have made the past five state championship games, winning three of them.
A winning culture is clearly established at Prince Avenue, but the program has changed hands. And in order to maintain that winning culture, Richt intends to make the program his.
“You don’t want to change too much, so you’ve got to come in and check your ego and not be like, ‘Hey, I want to change everything completely and do it this way,’ right?” he said. “But you do have to make a few tweaks and make it your own, so finding a way to build the culture the way you want the culture to look.”
One specific way Richt plans to establish his touch is by Prince Avenue’s momentum in sending players to the next level. Richt mentioned his coaching staff’s emphasis on pushing kids with the goal of creating more opportunities to play in college.
“I think there’s just certain things you do, even on the field, off the field, in between the whistle, after the whistle blows that are not necessarily things that we did bad in the past, but things that I wanted to put an emphasis on,” Richt said.
“Finding a way to create the momentum that you want to create over the summer is one of those challenges that we faced all offseason, and now we’re going to see if it paid off.”
Richt has learned his fair share of coaching lessons from all over the game of football. But perhaps one of his most important – especially if Prince Avenue is going to keep playing for state titles – is one he learned from his father long before he ever called his first play.
“Watching him grow up every day, you get to see who he is day in and day out, that he was consistent,” Richt said. “That’s who he was, and how he ran not only his team and the way he functioned, but even when he came home, he was the same guy.
“And so him setting that standard and basically upholding that standard day in and day out is something that I definitely have taken from him.”
