Arnold moves William Woolf from girls to boys basketball bench

PANAMA CITY, Fla. (WJHG/WECP) -Arnold has its new head coach for the boys program there. It’s a man familiar to the Arnold faithful as the school announced Monday morning William Woolf as that new boys head coach. Woolf has run the Arnold girls program for the last four years, rather successfully you would have to say. The record for the Lady Marlins over those four seasons, 65-31 along with two State Playoff appearances in 2021 and 22. Coach Woolf does move to the boys side with experience coaching boys hoops. He’s been the head coach of four different boys programs on the prep level, with three of those gigs in Georgia, and one in North Carolina. As the head coach at Central Christian, just south of Atlanta, he led that program to back to back state titles in 2014 and 2015. Coach Woolf says the boys job at Arnold was offered to him last year after Josh Laatsch left the job, but the timing wasn’t right on the move, now he says, it is!

“I had such strong relationships with the girls and this particular graduating class,” coach Woolf told me Monday afternoon “I have raised them since they were 14 years old. And it just wasn’t the right time, in my life to leave them. I was unsure about the situation that the girls program would be left in. And just had some questions about where the boys program was headed. I have total clarity and peace now that this is the right time for me in my life.”

And moving from one Arnold bench to the other, well that certainly allows for some stability in what is usually an unstable move into a new job, says coach Woolf. “Most of the time when there’s a new hire, or in my career, my life moving to a new school, everything is new. And a lot of times when a coach is being hired it’s not uncommon for programs to be in basically chaos! And you inherit quite a mess. Here, having been close with some of the boys at the end of this season, I have a tremendous working relationship with our booster club for the boys. And then obviously the advantages of having the support of the administration, all of those are advantages.”

Woolf has been guiding the boys team into it’s off season program since it was announced TJ Jackson was not going to be renewed as head coach at Arnold a few weeks ago.

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