School Spotlight: King’s Fork High (Va

By: William Lamphier

King’s Fork High School – located in Suffolk, Virginia and built in 2004 – plays at the 4A level and is ranked the #14 team in the state (according to MaxPreps). The Bulldogs are home to current Baltimore Ravens starting safety Chuck Clark. This week, I had the great ability to talk with King’s Fork head coach Anthony Joffrion to talk about the team. I asked him how he got interested in being a coach, to how the team looks after starting 2-0, and who some of his top players are.

To start off, I had asked coached Joffrion how he got to the position he is in today. “I played football at Troy University, and towards the end of my career, I just… wanted to continue [being around] it. I ended up not getting a college GA job, so I ended up becoming a teacher, fresh out of college, at King’s Fork High School. I kind of just fell in love with it from there.”

As always with youth sports, the best coaching philosophy (in my opinion) is putting the players first. Joffrion’s philosophy is no different. “I really [put an emphasis] on that. Always put the kids first, and try to build a relationship with the kids. From there, that’s when you can really coach them and give them tough love. [It really is about] building a relationship with the players, their parents, the community, and just making it an overall great experience for the kids.”

Something everybody needs to learn is how to overcome adversity. The younger you are when you learn it, the better. Coach Joffrion makes sure that his players know how to do so. “Football is a great example of life. You go through different things throughout football, whether it’s practice or in the game when things go wrong. I think the more successful football programs have got to be able to overcome adversity, because something is going to go wrong in the game, and I think it correlates directly into life. In life, thing’s are not always going to go your way. You may not get promoted, you may not even get that job. How are you going to respond?”

Team-building is always important to any team, to make sure you function as a unit. Coach Joffrion knows this well. “Every Monday before practice, we have open forums where we talk about different things. If you’re going through something, most likely someone on the team is going or has gone through it as well. We have scenarios where we have players talk about what they deal with in life, whether it’s losing a grandparent or losing a parent. We have a lot of players who go through similar things, so we just try to address it as a team and have an open forum. I was kind of surprised at how many kids are going through the same thing, especially with the pandemic where it changed a lot in people’s lives.”

This season, the Bulldogs are 2-0 to start the season, and Coach Joffrion likes where his team is at. “Last season, we won the first regional championship in school history and got to the state semi. We ended up losing in the last couple of seconds of the game. So this year, we have been preaching to finish. This is my third season [as head coach], and I think we’re finally starting to reap the benefits of all the tough coaching and trying to build the culture. Now, it’s just coaching, and we don’t have to focus on discipline as much as in the past. But we’re doing really good this season. We haven’t been scored on yet and beat a pretty good team last week, so we just have to keep working towards our goal of getting to (and winning) the state championship on December 10th… we just got to take it one week at a time and focus on going 1-0 each week.”