St. Stephens will have a new head coach for 2021 after the Eagles’ coach since 2017 resigned to take an athletic director position in Oregon.
Billy Brost, the Eagles’ head football coach since 2017 and also the school’s track coach, resigned Tuesday to become the athletic director at his alma mater, The Dalles High School, a Class 5A school in north-central Oregon.
Dee Harrison, who was Brost’s co-head coach in 2017 and who has been both the offensive and defensive coordinator for the Eagles since then, will be the new head coach for both the football and track teams at St. Stephens, Brost said.
“The administration feels good about moving forward with Dee, and so do I, because we built this together,” Brost said to wyoming-football.com Tuesday afternoon.
Brost and Harrison met with players Tuesday to inform them of the switch, Brost said.
Brost called his new position a “dream job” but also indicated that St. Stephens would only be a phone call away.
“I think they’re on the verge of doing something special,” Brost said. “St. Stephens will always be near and dear to my heart.”
Brost and Harrison took over coaching the Eagles’ football program together halfway through the 2017 season. Brost became head coach prior to 2018, with Harrison as the assistant.
Harrison previously coached throughout the West, including Eastern Oregon University. He was the head coach at Firth, Idaho, from 2009 to 2012, taking the Cougars from an 0-7 finish his first year to an 11-1 record and a Class 2A runner-up finish his final year. He was also a head coach at West Jefferson in Terreton, Idaho, for two years and was a junior high coach at Arapahoe, just down the road from St. Stephens.
“We’ve kind of been in this together, and we’ve kind of helped each other out for the whole four, five years we’ve been doing this,” Harrison said Tuesday. ” … It’s a just a matter of taking the reins and continuing to rebuild and hopefully building some more on it.”
The Eagles went 1-6 in both 2018 and 2019 in Class 1A six-man. St. Stephens did not play in its first year of Class 1A nine-man last year as the St. Stephens school was closed due to COVID-19.
Class 4A Laramie, Class 2A Glenrock and Class 1A nine-man Greybull and Lingle have hired new head football coaches for 2021, while Class 1A nine-man Riverside is looking for a new head coach. If you know of other head coaching changes in the state, please email me at pschmiedt@yahoo.com.
–patrick
This post was updated at 8:47 p.m. July 13 with comments and additional information from Harrison.