The saying goes that if you love something, let it go. If it comes back to you, it’s yours forever. If it doesn’t, then it was never meant to be.
Those words couldn’t have rang more truthful to McComb High girls track head coach Ashley Bonds, who returned to coach at the track she once ran at a decade ago.
Bonds, the Enterprise-Journal’s 2023 Education Award winner for best coach, was a multi-sport athlete at McComb. She played basketball and softball, but her passion was always track, where she was a star.
She did it all, running the 100m, 200m, 4x100m, 4x200m, 4x400m as well as the long jump and triple jump.
But a few injuries that she suffered in high school caused her to decide to step away from track once she started attending Alcorn State University.
Once Bonds graduated college, she was offered the chance to return to her alma mater in McComb as an assistant coach.
“When you love something, you can’t really stay away from it,” she said.
After spending three years as an assistant while also teaching biology, she was given the position of head coach of the girls track team this past summer. Now in her first year as head coach, Bonds said she faced a few challenges while making the transition.
“It’s quite challenging being a track athlete and then trying to be a high school coach,” she said. “I had a bunch of kids that didn’t really believe in themselves. Trying to instill confidence in kids that don’t believe in themselves is hard because you tell them the potential you see in them, but they don’t see it themselves.”
Things have changed, though. The girls are gaining confidence by seeing exactly what they’re capable of. In their first meet of the season, at Amite County on Feb. 23, the team won first-place, something they hadn’t done in quite some time.
“It was the girls’ first win in years,” Bonds said. “Hearing them say they had never won a trophy or been in first place made me want to cry. Just seeing them in that moment enjoying all their hard work paying off was rewarding.”
But that was just the first step toward what Bonds wants to accomplish with this group.
“My senior year, we lost the state championship by a point,” she said. “So, it’s very important to me that I continue the tradition of McComb. I’m going to do everything in my power to add a banner.”
LaDEREK MAGEE
The 2023 Education Awards winner for best assistant coach had a similar journey to Bonds. After cheering in college, Magee decided he was done with that part of his life.
“I told myself that once I was done with undergrad in college, the cheer life was over,” he said. “I was just going to focus on adult life. I told my friends and family that cheer was fun and I enjoyed it, but that’s it, I’m not doing anything else with cheer.”
Magee had only joined cheer in the first place to help pay for college. He didn’t do it in high school and it hadn’t even crossed his mind while attending Southwest Mississippi Community College until he was asked about it.
“There was a group of guys that asked me about becoming a cheerleader and the first thing I said was, ‘No, that’s kinda corny. I’m not doing that,’ ” Magee said. “But what convinced me was when they told me about the scholarships because that would help me pay for school, so I said I’d do it.”
So he decided to go to an open gym session and see what it was all about. The first stunt he completed was a walk-in cheer, in which he lifted and held a partner in the air. From there he progressed to learning how to do tosses and other stunts as he began to develop a love for cheer.
He decided to join the cheer squad at Southwest as a base and even continued it during his sophomore year at Alcorn State. Once he graduated in 2018 and took a teaching job at Eva Gordon Lower Elementary, he thought he had put that stuff behind him.
But last year, South Pike cheer head coach Chilita Jones asked him to join her staff and gave him a couple of days to think about it.
“I thought maybe it was a calling,” Magee said. “I figured those young scholars probably needed some guidance in some type of way. So, I figured why not use my experience and what I’ve learned to teach them?”
Now in his second year, Magee has become the voice of the South Pike cheer squad. He speaks for the team at functions and oversees all of their paperwork and documentation, such as making sure members of the team remain eligible to compete, and notifying teachers when students have to miss class for events. He also teaches stunts and handles the conditioning part of the Eagles’ practices.
After giving up cheer completely just a few years ago, Magee can now envision himself as being a head cheer coach at some point in the future if the opportunity ever becomes available.
“My mom always tells me that God has timing for everything,” he said. “So if it happens, it happens. If not, I’m perfectly fine where I’m at.”
TOKIE YOUNG-BUTLER
While 2023 best support staff winner Tokie Young-Butler may not coach an athletic team like Bonds and Magee, she’s a coach in a different way.
As the data analyst for the McComb School District, Young-Butler takes the data she gathers from student scores on midterms, benchmarks and state exams to help coach teachers on what they can do to improve results as well as help students with test prep.
“We take it a step further so that we can help principals and teachers come up with plans to respond to the data,” Young-Butler said. “We want to make those weak standards stronger as well as maintain and improve the ones that are already strong.”
Young-Butler calls herself a non-traditional educator because she was a business major in college. However, she took an assistant teaching job in 2002 and after three years, she decided to become certified and started teaching in 2005. She taught fourth grade at Kennedy Elementary School for a few years until the district reorganized grade levels, causing her to move to Higgins Middle School. But after a few years, she decided to move on to something else.
“I decided that I wanted to try something beyond the classroom,” Young-Butler said. “So when something else became available, I could stab at it.”
She became a building facilitator, assisting the principal and teachers throughout the school. Young-Butler continued to move up the ranks, becoming an instructional coach at Higgins, finding another way to still support teachers as well as students.
After holding that position for three years, she became the data analyst, which she has held for the past five years. She said she loves her position because it allows her to do what she loves on a broader scale.
“It still connects me to the classroom,” Young-Butler said. “The classroom is my first love. I didn’t leave the classroom because it wasn’t for me anymore. It was just about taking my experiences outside of the walls of the classroom, so that I could serve the broader district.
“I still get to go into buildings and classrooms. That’s the beauty of it.”
