New era of Biloxi football: Katlan French introduced as new head coach

The Biloxi football program didn’t have to search very high or very low for its next head coach, coming in the form of former defensive coordinator Katlan French. After serving as the interim coach following Bobby Hall’s departure for the last month, French was approved as his replacement at last night’s school board meeting. Today, he was introduced as the next in-line for the Indians.
The man for the job is a man that was already on campus and has been for the entirety of Bobby Hall’s tenure with the program. Katlan French says his new promotion is a dream come true. “My goal at the end of the day was always to be a head coach, and when the job came open I put in for it. And here I am today and I can’t speak to tell you how blessed I am and how happy I am to be here,” said French.
French beat out more than 70 applicants with upwards of 80 candidates having inquired about the position. His advantage over the rest of the field was a month-long audition as the interim head man. “Basically, the thing we sold to our kids was control what you can control. You can’t control who the next head coach is, all you can control is what you do. Come out here every day working hard, getting better, things like that.”
Athletic Director Tom Gladney said,”The kids were all excited, then people in the community, because the kids were excited their parents were excited. And it’s just a lot of things began to fall together, and the more we looked at it we knew we had the man on campus that we needed.”
The Coach French era comes on the heels of Hall’s three year run at Biloxi where the Indians got a taste of the post-season as recently as 2016. That’s where Big Red looks to take a big step toward in 2018. “The playoffs, I mean you can’t get to the Big Dance without getting to the playoffs. So obviously we want to get to the playoffs, but we want to do more than just make the playoffs. We want to make noise in our district, we don’t want that fourth seed. We want to move it on up there to the top but you can’t just say it, there’s a lot of things that have to go into that.”
The 30-year-old French brings nine years of experience to the table in his second head coaching gig at the high school level. He’s got plenty of reason to believe he’s got the players to get the job done. “There is a very good group of talent here in our program right now, and so like I said and I’ve said it over and over again, I really expect big things from us.”