For more than a month, Clinton County High School’s Site Based Decision Making Council has been in search of a new Lady Bulldogs head basketball coach.

That search is now over with the recent hire of Darrell Thompson for the position.

Thompson was officially hired by the site based decision making council on Friday, June 17.

Although Thompson has been out of the basketball program for several years, he is ready to get back into it.

“They’ve been through some changes through the past couple of years and I just thought maybe with me having a little experience might make a little difference,” Thompson said. “Just to be honest, I have been missing it.”

Thompson is no stranger to the head coaching position. During the past decade he has been the Lady Bat Dawgs head coach, taking his team to several regional tournaments, as well as, head coach for the Bulldogs during 2003-2004, 2004-2005 and 2005-2006 seasons.

“The biggest thing I’m proud of is we won the district in 2005 and I think we were runners-up in the All ‘A’ regional all three of those years with the boys,” Thompson said. “I think the biggest thing that will help me is all of the head coaches I’ve been around. I was sitting there the other day and counting up and I think I’ve been around nine different head coaches, so I think I can pull something from each of those coaches and come up with something that will work.”

Clinton County’s previous head coach, Carter Adams’ contract wasn’t renewed at the end of the 2011 school year, forcing the board of education to post the position for Lady Bulldogs’ head coach for 30 days.

During that 30 days, the board of education office accepted applications for the position. When that time period was up, Superintendent Micky McFall passed applications to the Clinton County High School Site Based Decision Making Council, where after interviews, decided to stay within the school district and hire Thompson for the position.

With that 30-day period of not having a coach, most of the summer period was lost for members of the team who will be playing for the 2011-2012 season, however, Thompson said the team has been practicing and hopefully will be back after the dead-period to participate in some team camps before summer is over.

“We went to camp all last week. We went to Barren County and Monticello and we thought it might be a little too early, but at least it might show us what we needed to work on. It showed me not only their weaknesses, but their strengths as well,” Thompson said. “At least now we have something to work with. We are still trying to find some camps and things to do in July. We’ve played some good competition so far. I think everybody who watched the girls last saw that we need to get stronger, we need to get better at fundamentals, and decision making on the floor.”

Thompson said he is excited about the new season and is looking forward to getting into his first year as head coach of the Lady Bulldogs.

“We are going to try and get in a full month of practice in July,” Thompson said. “We’ve been behind because of the hiring process was so late in June. We missed pretty much all of June, so we have a lot of ground we have to make up. We’ve got some scheduling we have to work on, so, yeah, I’m anxious to really get started. We’ve had two practices and it seems like the girls are like a sponge … Whatever we do, they just soak it in and that’s probably what I’m most pleased about. They are catching on really quickly.”

With Thompson being the fifth head coach in six years, he said most of the girls have had a new coach almost every year of their career as a Lady Dawg. He said it’s going to take some time to install his expectations and terminology to his players.

“It’s going to take a while and that’s one reason I think we need more practice than anything … to get everybody on the same page,” Thompson said. “We haven’t had everybody in the gym at the same time yet, with everything going on during the summer, so, I’m looking forward to getting everybody in there at once.”

Thompson feels like the transition from Adams to himself will go smoothly because he is already established as a softball coach and a teacher at Clinton County High School.

“They see me in the hall everyday, and that’s one reason we kept (assistant coach) Tim Hicks also,” Thompson said. “I think it makes them comfortable. I think they know what I expect and I’m someone they feel at ease around.”

Although Thompson has only been with the team for a couple of weeks, he said he was surprised with his younger players.

“Probably the biggest surprise to me was how good the young kids are,” Thompson said. “If you are outside looking in, you might question those seventh and eighth graders about being ready, but they held their own this week and that was probably the biggest surprise.”

Thompson said one of the biggest challenges he will face as a coach is getting the popularity of the sport back up with the students and potential players.

“We have to get the numbers up,” Thompson said. “We have to have more kids. We need to get them to stay when they come out.”

In addition to being the head coach of the Lady Dawgs, Thompson said he is going to continue to coach the softball team in hopes of being able to share athletes between the two sports.

“I don’t know if we will or not, but I’m hoping we will be able to share more athletes,” Thompson said. “Here in the past we’ve been successful in softball and in basketball, so there is no reason why we can’t do the same again. I can remember back when the Guffeys and everybody else was here, we were winning in softball and they were winning in basketball, so there is no reason why we can’t duplicate that.”