Carrollton’s Gold Standard keeps King motivated, humble
Carrollton coach Joey King was talking this week about the Gold Standard.
For the Trojans, whose colors are old gold and black, the Gold Standard dates to the 1950s, when the Trojans became a state football power. Since 1951, Carrollton has had three losing seasons.
Carrollton was led by the GACA Hall of Fame coach Charlie Grisham from 1958 to 1986. Grisham, for whom Carrollton’s stadium is named, accumulated a record of 261-69-13 with 15 region and five state championships. Hugh Maddox and Ben Scott also won state titles here. Rayvan Teague averaged more than 10 wins over his 12 seasons earlier this century. He’s also in the GACA Hall of Fame.
“They say at Carrollton, if you come here and you do a good job, you’re going to stick out like a sore thumb, and if you do a great job, you’re going to blend in with everybody else,” King said.
King is blending into the greatness that came before him. In four seasons at Carrollton, King has a 51-6 record with three region championships and two title game appearances. Carrollton is still looking for its first state title since 1998, but King’s 51 wins are the most over any four-year span in program history.
Before Carrollton, King spent five seasons as head coach at Cartersville, where he helped to mold Trevor Lawrence, the No. 1 overall pick of the 2021 NFL Draft. At Cartersville, King won five region and two state championships.
In 2019, King decided to take his career to the collegiate level, first at Coastal Carolina, then the University of South Florida the following year. Although King had been successful and had just been promoted, he began to ask himself, “At what expense?”
“You get one shot at being a dad,” King said. “I want to make sure my kids know their dad. I wanted to make sure my wife and myself are here for our kids.”
King’s own upbringing in a single-family household weighed heavily on him. Now, his three children – Jay, Ty and Jesse – go to school in a building that King can see daily from his office desk because they all walk the same halls, exuding the Gold Standard.
Carrollton was a bit of a soft landing for him. He had been a Carrollton assistant under Rayvan Teague from 2008 to 2013. Together, they reached the state championship game twice (2010 and 2013) but lost both.
King has won two state championships, but none at Carrollton — though he’s been to the title game four times, most recently as against Grayson in 2024 and Mill Creek in 2022. King says someone’s always asking him, “How are we going to finish?”
“There are a lot of people that go their whole career and don’t have the opportunity to be in that situation,” King said of state championship games. “We’re in the month of June doing summer workouts, as is every other program in the state of Georgia, but not every one of them is going to pay the price to be a champion. I feel like we pay that price here.”
King says many things need to go a team’s way for it to win the final game, and there’s a process to it all. He leans on the wisdom of some of the coaching legends of yesteryear, such as Bill Walsh, the Hall of Fame coach from the San Francisco 49ers, another team that had a Gold Standard.
Walsh’s message? Control the controllables. Walsh says about 80% of the game is controllable, the other 20%, you’ve got to live with the outcome.
“There are so many factors that are out of our control,” King said. “So as long as we’re doing exactly what it takes to control that 80%, then we just pray that the other 20% takes care of itself.”
King understands that you must have good players even to give yourself a chance to be in contention to win your final game.
With great players come great egos. King has seen his fair share of great egos, but through his years of experience, he’s kept his players humble, taking it one day at a time.
“We coach them hard,” King said. “We don’t treat any kid any different if a kid’s a ‘superstar’ or ‘five-star’ or whatever. We feel like we haven’t won one yet, so they ain’t got anything to walk around overconfident about anyhow.”
King remembers coaching Trevor Lawrence and the pressure an excellent, cerebral player can put on a coach. King says guys like that have made him a better coach.
“I had to bring my A-game every day,” King said of his time with Lawrence. “If I told him one thing week one of the season and then week four of the season, I told him something that contradicted what I told him week one, He was going to say ‘Now, coach, in week one you said this.’”
The Trojans have another very talented roster heading into 2025, looking to contribute to the Gold Standard on the field.
It starts with the seniors and their leadership, he said. One thing King has always preached is that great teams are “player-led.”
Those seniors include wide receiver Ryan Mosely and offensive lineman Zykie Helton, who have committed to Georgia, and defensive back Dorian Barney, another top recruit, will be making his college choice July 5 among Georgia Tech, Texas A&M, Penn State and Michigan. They also include running back Kimauri Farmer (1,376 yards rushing, 401 receiving), wide receiver Peyton Zackary (77 receptions, 969 yards) and linebacker Kadan Spratling (team-leading seven sacks).
The biggest hole for this season’s team is at quarterback. King must replace Julian Lewis, who passed for 11,010 yards and 144 touchdowns as a three-year starter. Many compared Lewis to Lawrence, as the two became starters as freshmen. Lewis graduated a year early to join Colorado.
Mason Holtzclaw, who has offers from Georgia Tech and Florida State, has transferred in from Christ School in Asheville, N.C. C.J. Cypher, a freshman, is another contender for the job. He got an offer from Auburn on Thursday.
Entering his fifth year here, King says being back in Carrollton has been great for him and his family, and he still enjoys going to work every day and seeing the memorials to the coaches that have come before him.
“Coach Maddox, Coach Grisham, Coach Scott, they’re watching over my shoulder each and every day that I work,” King said. “This program was good a long time before Joey King, and it’s going to be good a long time after Joey King, too. I’m just trying to be a champion of it while I’m here.”
Maybe, that’s the Gold Standard.
Photo of Joey King courtesy of Brian Carmichael
2025 schedule:
8/15 Woodward Academy
8/22 Columbia
8/29 at Rome
9/5 Lithia Springs
9/12 at Gainesville
9/19 Parker High School
10/3 at Westlake
10/10 Chapel Hill
10/17 East Coweta
10/31 Douglas County