Ragsdale names Stevenson as football coach
May 3—JAMESTOWN — Antwon Stevenson will be the next varsity football coach at Ragsdale, the school announced Thursday.
Stevenson — who starred as a player at High Point Central in the 1990s — has been head coach at Glenn since 2015. He will take over for Johnny Boykin, who stepped down earlier this spring to coach at Clinton, his alma mater.
"The expectations I have of myself will always be greater than anyone else's," Stevenson said in a release from Ragsdale. "I want the Diamond R to shine bright."
Stevenson, a High Point Central hall of famer who helped the Bison reach the 1995 3A state championship game, played at Elon and was a mainstay at Glenn as an assistant coach for 13 years under Dickie Cline and Aldine Payne, for whom Stevenson stepped in for occasionally as Payne dealt with health issues.
In 2015, Stevenson was promoted to head coach. In nine seasons, the Bobcats went 58-44, including 28-22 in conference play. That included winning the Piedmont Triad 4A championship outright in 2016 and shares of Central Piedmont 4A titles in 2020 and 2021.
Glenn won 10 games in 2017 and nine games in 2021 and 2019. It made six playoff appearances, reaching the third round in 2021 and 2019. But it struggled to a pair of three-win seasons and sixth-place conference finishes the last two years. Stevenson left Glenn earlier this year to coach at Northeast Guilford.
But that stint was short once Boykin — a longtime coach in the area whose stops included High Point Central under Gary Whitman and T.W. Andrews under Derek Anderson before joining Tommy Norwood's staff at Ragsdale — decided to return to his hometown.
The Tigers, members of the Metro 4A Conference, are a very familiar foe — squaring off against Stevenson's Bobcats eight times. Glenn was victorious in seven of those games, including in the first round of the 2018 playoffs. Ragsdale, perennial contenders in the late aughts and early 2010s, have won just two games each of the last two seasons.
