Daniel Evans
The Selma Times-Journal

As it stands today, Barry Colburn is still the interim head football coach at Dallas County High School.

“I am not the head [football] coach at Dallas County High School. I am a health instructor,” Colburn said when asked about his status as football coach. “I am officially under contract to teach health education. Right now, I am still the interim coach until the board I guess decides what direction it is going.”

Although many in the community believe Colburn will eventually be named the Hornets’ head coach, he is still working under the interim label.

“Currently we do not have an available teaching position, so we will be looking at filling [the position] from within the staff,” Dallas County Schools’ Assistant Superintendent Don Willingham said. “We have not discussed it in detail with the board and we hope to do that at the next meeting.”

According to the Dallas County Schools website, the next meeting will be Thursday, July 25 at 5:30 p.m.

No matter what the board’s decision is, Colburn is focused on the task at hand: Continuing to move Dallas County football in the right direction.

Wednesday, the Hornets will participate in Southside’s 7-on-7 drills and on Thursday they will head to Chilton County to participate in another 7-on-7.

“We are playing Wednesday night at Southside and that will be about four games for our varsity kids,” Colburn said. “On Thursday, we are going to Chilton County and we are going to take our varsity and our junior varsity.”

The opportunity to get multiple looks at different players is a big part of why Colburn is excited for the 7-on-7 drills.

“The key for us — and I can’t speak for anyone else’s program — is it is more about experience than anything else. On those two days, we will use three quarterbacks for the varsity and three quarterbacks for the junior varsity team,”

Colburn said. “That means we’ve got six quarterbacks getting experience — taking snaps, doing footwork and steps, and delivering passes and that kind of stuff. So, that’s pretty good. That’s good experience for us and for our kids.”

Colburn joked that it is not every day a team can work six quarterbacks.

“The experience you get from going to things like [the 7-on-7], you can’t get at practice. You can’t do it,” Colburn said. “This is a great experience — getting to compete against different kids that have different body sizes and different kinds of talent, different amounts of speed from what you see everyday in practice. It’s a great experience for the kids.”

For a team like the Hornets that likes to run the football, playing in a 7-on-7 does offer up some challenges.

“We are a running team. We line up with a tight end and with a fullback and tailback. In this situation, you don’t have those things, so we don’t really run our regular offense,” Colburn said. “We have a separate offense we run for 7-on-7, but our plays for 7-on-7 have all of our terminology and have all of our routes that we use in our regular offense during the year.”