Al Starnes
Induction Information 2004
He has won more football games than any coach in county football history.
His teams have captured more district championships, had more winning seasons and own more victories over arch-rival Caldwell County than all of his predecessors combined.
Yet despite those accomplishments, current Rocket coach Al Starnes says that the relationships he's built over the years with players and other students are the most important milestones of his career. Armed with the strong memory of his own wayward youth, Starnes says that without the intercession of a coach many years ago, he would probably have taken the wrong path in life.
Starnes grew up the son of a military man, traveling from base to base and country to country. By the time he was in high school, Starnes admits that he was on the fast-track to nowhere. That's until he was approached by the high school football coach in Wesson, Miss., who changed his life forever.
"He told me, 'Son, I can help you make something of yourself,'" says Starnes, who called his old mentor right after learning that he'd been selected for the Hall of Fame.
"I was about to drop out of school," says Starnes, reflecting on his youthful misadventures prior to joining the football team as a high school senior.
From there, Starnes found his purpose. He excelled on the field and earned a scholarship to play at Copiah-Lincoln Junior College. Murray State came calling after two years and Starnes landed a job on the offensive line of the Racers' 1983 Ohio Valley Conference runnerup team.
When a knee injury ended his hopes of being drafted by the Dallas Cowboys, Starnes turned his attention to education.
"As a youth, I never imagined myself being a teacher and stressing to kids the importance of education, because I didn't know the importance of it at the time," he said.
Starnes spent time coaching at high schools in Lone Oak, Bruceton, Tenn., and Clarksville, Tenn., and at Murray State and Austin Peay universities.
Starnes took a team that had gone 1-9 the previous season and orchestrated consecutive 6-5 seasons in the first two years at the Rocket controls. A couple of losing seasons in 1994 and 1995 are the only blemishes on Starnes' record. Otherwise, his teams have been at least .500 during the regular season. During the late 1990s, he guided the team to a 37-11 record across four seasons and effectively built Crittenden County into one of the top Class A programs in western Kentucky. Indeed, over the past 10 years, the Rockets are the second winningest team in western Kentucky behind only Mayfield.
Into his 14th season as head coach, Starnes holds a 90-60 record, the best winning percentage of any Rocket skipper who coached more than one year. He has averaged seven wins per season over his career here and more than eights wins during the last eight seasons.