Veteran football coach Mark Fleetwood has retired after seven years as head coach at Huntsville High School. His plans currently are to stay on in his position as an assistant principal and athletic director.

“When this happens, you just want to say, ‘Thank you’ and move on,” Fleetwood said. “The last seven years have been amazing. I have met so many nice, wonderful people. I wish the record at Huntsville had been a little better, but a lot of times things are out of your control.”

Huntsville principal Kari Flippo said there has already been a lot of interest in the job.

“I think I have a different perspective having had the pleasure of working with Mark both as an assistant principal at Huntsville High School for the past seven years, but also, my husband (Milas) is his offensive coordinator, and my son just finished his senior year playing for Mark. I’m super proud that we had him as coach.

“I’m sure it was really a hard decision. When you have been a coach for 40 years it becomes a part of your life and your family’s life.”

Flippo said interviews would start next week and she hopes to have a new coach in place by the end of January, if not before.

Fleetwood finishes his career at Huntsville with a 30-42 record – with three forfeit losses due to COVID-19 in 2020 – after a 5-5 mark this season. He led the Crimson Panthers to trips to the state Class 7A playoffs in his first year in 21017 and last season. Before his first-round loss in 2017, Huntsville’s last postseason berth had been in 2013.

Fleetwood has been a coach for almost 40 years, starting in 1984 as a graduate assistant at the University of South Carolina, where he had been a place-kicker for coach Jim Carlen from 1981-83.

His resume includes three stints at Troy University under Larry Blakeney, including three years as offensive coordinator, and six years on Bill Burgess’ staff at Jacksonville State. Fleetwood was also offensive coordinator and assistant head coach at UT-Chattanooga and quarterbacks coach/assistant head coach at The Citadel.

Fleetwood was 8-12 as head coach at Habersham Central from 1995-96 and 42-26 from 2011-16 at Peachtree Ridge high schools in Georgia.

“I just tried to make an impact on other people every place I’ve been,” Fleetwood said. “I have been so proud and glad that I got the opportunities to coach.”

Fleetwood said when he was in the eighth grade that he told his late father – Trafton, a Georgia Tech-educated civil engineer – that he wanted to be a coach.

He played football at Lakeside High in DeKalb County, Ga., near Atlanta under Wayman Creel, who upon his death in 1990 was the winningest coach in Georgia history at 315-105-12.

“I never would have thought that the day I went to my first football practice at Briarcliff Community Sports in Atlanta when I was 6 years old that I’d be on a football team every day since then,” he said.

Fleetwood listed most of the coaches he worked for as inspirations for his life and career, but said his time as a Jacksonville State Gamecocks aide was particularly important.

“Those six years with coach Burgess at Jacksonville State were the most formative years for me as a coach,” he said. “Coach Burgess was a real person. There was no fake in him. With what I learned those six years, it made me want to be a coach even more.

“When coach Blakeney got the Troy job, he called me at about 4 in the morning and left a voice mail (seeking to hire him). Working with him was incredible with what I learned from him as a coach and, more than anything, as a person. The way he treated people really made an impact.”

The 63-year-old Fleetwood said his parents were also big influences that led him to his career due to their competitive nature.

“I probably followed closer in my mother’s footsteps,” he said. “She ran a dance school in Atlanta that my sister runs now. I bet she had 400 or 500 students with recitals and all those things. I had to learn tap and ballet and I didn’t like that. I told her, ‘I’m going to the football field.’”

His mother, Carolyn, is 94 and lives in Duluth, Ga.

Fleetwood gave credit to Aaron King, the principal who hired him at Huntsville and who is now at Hewitt-Trussville. “I owe him a bunch. What an incredible guy.”

The coach also praised his wife, Kimberly Gilmore Fleetwood of Eufaula, whose 88-year-old father is a longtime Barbour County Commission chairman.

“I loved every day going to practice and my wife has been incredible. She’s endured and gone through it. She’s someone who has never balked when we moved,” said Fleetwood, who has had 13 coaching career stops since he finished college. “She wasn’t worried about what time I came home from the office. That was unbelievable and I owe her a lot.

“Our daughter, Irelan, has been a trouper through it all. She’s been right there, wearing her cheerleader uniforms.”