Six former Kentucky Wildcats converge on one Lexington high school football coaching staff

The coaches at Lexington Christian Academy often joke with their players that if the KHSAA ever allowed coaches to suit up on Friday nights, they’d never lose a football game.

In all likelihood, they’re right. LCA counts five former University of Kentucky football players on its coaching staff, and a sixth — first-year defensive coordinator Cam Garner — spent eight years learning under Mark Stoops’ staff. The Wildcats-turned-Eagles go as far back as Cornell Burbage, a Lexington native and longtime area coach who played for Jerry Claiborne in the 1980s, to as newly graduated as Max Duffy, a transplant from Australia who won the Ray Guy Award in 2019.

Morgan Newton, still the last quarterback to lead UK to a win over Georgia, has coached the position at LCA for several years. Former Kentucky teammates Jacob Hyde (defensive line) and Ryan Timmons (running backs) joined the staff this season after stints elsewhere in town.

“What I can say, from being in Lexington awhile, the culture over here is a lot different,” Timmons said. “Not just school-wise, public versus private, blah, blah, blah. But the football environment: everyone’s invited in, and everyone’s bought in. That’s something that surprised me after being a high school coach a couple years, how much everyone here, from the freshmen to the seniors, is invested. This team is player-led.”

Timmons, like almost every LCA football staff member, is a paraprofessional, meaning they’ve been hired from outside the school’s system. Timmons does work at a school, though — he’s a behavior coach at Brenda Cowan Elementary. Between that, coaching football and raising two young children, he’s staying quite busy for a 30-year-old.

He doesn’t want to be a head coach, or even a coordinator, given the year-round demands required of people in those positions to be successful in 2024, even in the high school ranks. But staying involved was always a no-brainer.

“I’ve been blessed enough to know a lot about football and experience a lot, so it’d be selfish of me to hold that in and stay at home,” Timmons said. “Coaches helped me get to this point.”

Garner, a former baseball player at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, was a student equipment manager for the UK football team from 2016-2020. As a graduate student from 2020-2023, he helped Liam Coen and Brad White prepare game plans and recruit future players.

Despite never having coached at the high school level, he impressed head coach Doug Charles and associate head coach Oakley Watkins. He’s positioned himself well for a career in football that, less than a decade ago, he legitimately never would have considered as an option.

“Kentucky was such a blessing for me,” Garner said. “It opened my eyes to a lot of avenues I didn’t know would be possible. Once I got into a coaching role as a quarterbacks GA in 2020, just having that little taste really amplified my love and passion for the game. Once I got through that fourth year, I really felt good about where I’m at with my football knowledge. I know I have so much more to learn, but I felt confident I could join this staff and help these young men do some special things.”

Australia’s finest

Of all the roads taken by former Wildcats to LCA this season, Duffy’s was the most unusual.

Duffy was part of Dean Hood’s support staff at Murray State in 2023. In January, later than typical in the coaching carousel, Hood abruptly resigned from his position at Murray and the same week ended up back at UK as Mark Stoops’ director of player development.

That left Duffy’s work-visa status in unexpected flux. He was able to sort that out and ended up at a high school in Florida, where he was set to coach this season. But his second home came calling, and he joined the staff at LCA as a special teams coordinator a couple weeks before the season.

“I missed Lexington a little bit,” Duffy said. “Florida was fine, but this is the place that feels like home in America now.”

Duffy, a former professional Australian-rules football player whom Hood brought to UK, has known for some time that he wanted to coach football. He studied sports psychology while in pursuit of his master’s degree, recognizing its importance both in terms of a growing area of study and a potential differentiator to would-be employers.

The opportunity at LCA has given Duffy his first extensive opportunity to put his studies into practice.

“I can relate to the kids and actually have some data-based, scientific ways that prove how things should be done to create confidence or a good mentality or perseverance of whatever it’s going to be,” Duffy said. “I’m trying to put my toe in the water wherever I can coaching, so hopefully it works out.”

Duffy occupies a unique position in local sports. In addition to coaching, he’s an outspoken, oft-sarcastic personality affiliated with Kentucky Sports Radio, the state’s most popular talk show.

He values his role as an entertainer — a precise word, as he noted that it often gets lost on people that talking about sports is a form of entertainment. Still, Duffy recognizes that sometimes his remarks may rub people the wrong way, including folks he respects.

His own attitude toward “outside noise” is informed by years of playing sports, and seeing how teammates and coaches — many who outright lie about their consumption and awareness of media — actually react behind closed doors.

“We talk about this in our meetings,” Duffy said. “If you want a pat on the back when you do well, then you have to accept when people from the outside are telling you you’re not doing well. It’s our job on the inside to work as hard as we can, because at the end of the day, whether you do good or bad, whatever the media is saying, it’s probably right.”

That doesn’t excuse obscene behavior — he recalled two UK teammates, Miles Butler and Chance Poore, receiving hundreds of bad messages after missing field goals in games. But, especially in an era where people are more directly accessible than ever, those things are an unfortunate reality with which athletes have to reckon.

Duffy wants to prepare them for that, at LCA and beyond. He hopes to rejoin the college ranks and eventually be a special teams coordinator for a major program.

“I love talking about football,” Duffy said. “But hopefully I can get back into coaching at the college level, because I would prefer to be doing it rather than talking about it, honestly. Like I talk about with my guys playing, I’m putting in the steps that I need to give myself the best chance.”

This story was originally published October 31, 2024 at 11:49 AM.