From QB to Coach, Twenty Years of Evolving Roles in Montgomery County Football

For the past 20 years, if you were looking for Larry Hurd on a Friday night in the fall, there has only been one place to find him: on a high school football field.

From a starting quarterback leading his team, Quince Orchard, to the state championship in 1991 to an award-winning head coach at Clarksburg, Hurd has been a Montgomery County mainstay for more than two decades. 

In fact, Hurd has spent his entire adult life devoted to high school athletics in the county. And it all began at as a junior varsity football player during the school's first season in 1988.

They may not have known it at the time, but Hurd and his teammates would go on to accomplish great things as the first class to be at the school for four years. Hurd's senior year, he quarterbacked the team to the 1991 state championship. It was all thanks to a simple philosophy instilled in the players during those early years on junior varsity that both the varsity and JV coaching staff embraced.

"Coach [Ernie] Ceccato put on our T-shirts a simple slogan, 'Every player, every play.' I believe that," Hurd said. "The only thing that matters is the scoreboard and it takes every player on every play to get it done. To this day I believe in that. Every bit of my heart and soul believes that."

Hurd stated that "no one was above anyone else" on that championship team. It's a lesson that has stayed with him, and a philosophy he has tried to instill in his own players at Clarksburg. Hurd is now in his sixth year as head coach at Clarksburg, where he started the program from scratch in 2006. He spent three years at Poolesville High School before that, where he guided the Falcons to three consecutive winning seasons, including back-to-back 11-1 seasons in 2003 and 2004.

So far this year, Hurd has guided the Coyotes to a 3-1 start and just last week, he was named the Washington Redskins High School Coach of the Week, a program designed to recognize and reward excellence in high school football coaching.

In total, Hurd has amassed a 70-20 win-loss record as a head coach in Montgomery County and before he became a head coach, he had stints as an assistant at several county schools, including Northwest, Watkins Mill, Good Counsel and his alma mater, QO.  And he credits the guys he learned from at QO, both as a player and later as a colleague, for much of his success.

"When I was in high school, I was fortunate to play for some great coaches," Hurd said. "When you have role models like coach and [JV coach Paul] Foringer…those two gentlemen shaped my life as a young person. There are no two people, other than my father, who had a bigger impact on my life. They are every bit who I want to be and am striving to be as a head coach and person."

Hurd knew even then, as a player for Quince Orchard, that he would one day end up as a coach in Montgomery County. There is no other place he could imagine himself being.

"Most people who knew me back then knew how much I wanted to be a coach," said Hurd, who also coaches basketball at Clarksburg and did at Poolesville as well. "I was already coaching youth basketball and interning at a local elementary school, poised to become a teacher, before I graduated high school. This was the course I knew I wanted to take."

His teammates from high school agree.

"He's always been a great athlete whether it be football or basketball, but what separated him from everyone else was from day one, we knew he was without question a leader," said Richard Tyler, a member of the 1991 championship team. "I don't think anyone ever challenged that or questioned that. I couldn't have imagined him doing anything else but coaching. He was a coach even when he played."

This weekend, Hurd will join many former coaches and teammates, including Tyler, when the and recognized during the Oct. 1 game against Seneca Valley. Hurd, like many of his teammates from that season, looks back 20 years later with great pride.

"When you get old, memory fades about specific details of each game," Hurd said. "But the one thing that doesn't fade is the closeness you feel toward the guys on the team. Pre-game bus rides, post-game bus rides, team dinners, all the things you did together on and off the field. That's what you remember most."