South Marion hires Kevin Saunders as school's first ever football coach

South Marion hires Kevin Saunders as school's first ever football coach

Kevin Saunders has seen a lot in his 40-plus years of coaching football.

He found success in his home state of Virginia, then in Kentucky and Tennessee, and most recently in Georgia — compiling a 195-111 record along the way.

His 11th head coaching gig, however, will present a challenge Saunders has yet to face: being a program's first-ever football coach.

"That's probably the only thing I haven't done," Saunders joked during a phone interview with the Ocala Star-Banner.

Ocala's soon-to-open South Marion High School and athletic director Colby Wisdom named Kevin Saunders the school's football coach on Wednesday, April 15, marking a milestone for the county's newest high school.

"We are excited to announce our first head football coach for South Marion High School, coach Kevin Saunders. Coach Saunders comes to us from Georgia with over 25 years of coaching experience. A former state champion with 24 playoff appearances, knocking on the door of 200 career wins, coach Saunders brings a level of expertise that we feel very confident in," Wisdom said in a statement.

"Our administration took the hiring of this coaching position very seriously for the school and this community. We are super excited to get coach Saunders here and we look forward to an exciting start to South Marion football under his leadership."

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Saunders will arrive in Ocala with a reputation of being a program builder — a necessary quality at his newest stop considering he will be building the South Marion Bears' football program from Ground Zero.

Asked what was attractive about the South Marion job, Saunders was quick to reply.

"The challenge," he said. "Being the first coach of the program, that stuck out to me. I was very interested in it. It's nobody else's. It's just mine right now."

Kevin Saunders no stranger to stepping into new challenges

And as unique as Saunders' newest challenge might be, it won't be the first time he's stepped into the fire.

Saunders will come to South Marion after spending the previous year at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, where he took over for a program reeling from tragedy. At the time of his hiring, Saunders was replacing former Apalachee coach Mike Hancock, who stepped down to grapple with grief and depression after a shooting at Apalachee High School claimed four lives — including that of assistant football coach Ricky Aspinwall.

During his lone season at Apalachee, Saunders helped the program snap a 29-game losing streak as the Wildcats won their season opener against Chattahoochee on Aug. 16, 2025 to give the program its first win since the 2021 season.

"Those kids just wanted to get that monkey off their back with the losing streak," Saunders said of his time at Apalachee.

And, believe it or not, snapping such a losing streak wasn't a first for Saunders as he previously helped Gilmer High School end a 31-game skid in 2019.

Saunders was one-and-done at Apalachee, stepping down from the post in November and citing the commute of more than an hour each way as one of the reasons.

Though Saunders' stint at Apalachee was brief, the veteran head coach learned plenty from it.

"You've got to take care of the kids. They come first," Saunders said when asked what he learned from his time at Apalachee. "That's one of the things that's helped me be as successful as I've been. They're going to come first. We're going to do right by them and we're going to do what we do according to them. I don't believe in putting a square peg in a round hole. I'm going to make them as successful as we can make them."

Saunders will soon find himself in Marion County, where he admits he's yet to spend a ton of time.

But when he arrives, he knows he'll have to hit the ground running.

"The whole thing is getting the kids enrolled right now," Saunders said. "We've got to get all that done and then see where we are from there. The majority of the kids are going to be underclassmen first."

From there, it's hard to know what a successful first season might look like in terms of wins and losses.

It isn't, however, hard to know what a successful first season might look like in general.

Talking about a place with no tradition and no culture, establishing those things is certainly near the top of the to-do list.

"Everyone has a different definition of success," Saunders said. "Kids are going to want to win some games and be competitive. I'm a competitor so of course I want to win some games too. But the main thing is getting them out there and teach them how we want to play football.

"I'm not building a season, I'm building a program. And a program is built for many years. It'll start with this bunch and we'll lay the foundation with this team. We'll start from there and build upon it — it's like brick by brick by brick... So that's how we gotta do it. And, hey, you've got to set the standard of how we want to be. We want to act like champions on and off the field and do what champions do. But they don't know that because the school doesn't have any championships so we've gotta teach them how champions act."

This article originally appeared on Ocala Star-Banner: Ocala's South Marion High School names Kevin Saunders as first football coach