High School Football

Colquitt County school board fires Rush Propst

Colquitt County football coach Rush Propst was fired Thursday afternoon by the Colquitt County Board of Education in a unanimous vote. Propst had been suspended with pay since Feb. 26 amid an investigation into undisclosed allegations of misconduct.

The decision ends of of the most successful runs of a Georgia head coach in the highest classification.

Propst’s record at Colquitt County was 119-35 in 11 seasons. His teams won state titles in 2014 and 2015, each time with a 15-0 record, and was the Class AAAAAAA runner-up the past two seasons. The Packers reached the semifinals or better nine of the past 10 seasons, the best run of consistency of its kind in the history of Georgia’s highest class.

Prior to coming to Colquitt, Propst won five state titles as the coach of Hoover, Ala., and has 295 career victories in 30 seasons. He became nationally known while at Hoover because of the MTV series ‘’Two-A-Days,’’ which followed Hoover’s 2005 and 2006 seasons.

The Hoover program was hit with allegations of grade-fixing and recruiting, though none was officially tied to Propst. He resigned during 2007 a school board meeting in which he admitted an extramarital affair and supporting a secretive second family but denied any professional wrongdoing.

Propst arrived at Colquitt after the Packers had suffered a 2-8 season. Propst’s first team was 4-6, but then reached the state semifinals for the first time since 1998. The 2014 state title was the school’s first since 1994.

In 2016, Propst was suspended by the Georgia Professional Standards Commission after he head-butted one of his players on the sidelines of a playoff game. The suspension was later reduced to a reprimand, and he did not miss any games.