Hall of Fame Georgia high school football coach Ray Lamb dies at age 90

Ray Lamb, a football coach who won 249 games and state championships at Warren County and Commerce, died Thursday in Athens. He was 90.

Lamb’s son Hal, a retired coach at Calhoun, confirmed the news to AJC Varsity.

“He touched a lot of lives on this earth,” Hal Lamb said. “He will be missed, but he lived a good life.”

Lamb’s sons, Bobby and Hal, followed their father to become head coaches. Both played for him at Commerce, Bobby a quarterback and Hal a wide receiver, and led the Tigers to their first state championship in 1981.

That title made Lamb just the fourth coach in Georgia history to win state titles at two schools. He had won at Warren County in 1965 and 1966.

Lamb was an old-school coach known for rallying small-town communities around its football team and for making good players out of ordinary talent. His teams almost never had a top college prospect.

“My philosophy about football is that you’ve got to be hard before you can be anything,” Lamb told the AJC in a 2016 interview. “You’ve got to create toughness before the X’s and O’s. Tough times don’t last, but tough people do. If you create toughness with your team, then the rest of it is downhill.”

Bobby Lamb is currently head coach of Anderson University in South Carolina. Hal Lamb retired as Calhoun’s coach after the 2018 season.

With 487 victories combined, Ray Lamb and Hal Lamb have the most football wins of any father-son coaching pair in state history. Both won three state championships.

Ray Lamb finished his coaching career as Monroe Area’s coach from 1989 to 1992. He was the University of Georgia’s coordinator for high school relations from 1993 to 2011.