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Football: Booty named Sage Hill’s new coach

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The Sage Hill School football program has once again turned to a former NFL wide receiver to lead the Lightning.

The private school named Abram Booty as its new coach on Friday, 2 1/2 months after Sage Hill wrapped up a winless season in Academy League play. Sage Hill decided to go in a new direction, hiring Booty, instead of retaining Tom Kirchmeyer, who served as the interim coach last season.

Kirchmeyer took over as the interim coach when J.R. Tolver stepped down as the head coach right before last season because of personal and professional reasons. Like Tolver, Booty had a stint in the NFL, playing for the Cleveland Browns in 2001.

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Unlike Kirchmeyer, Booty will definitely have a lot more time to prepare the Lightning for the upcoming season. Kirchmeyer became the interim coach two weeks before the 2014 season opener, and Sage Hill got off to a rocky start, losing at home to Santa Ana Calvary Chapel, 42-7. The team finished 3-7 overall and 0-4 in league last season, resulting in Sage Hill’s fourth straight losing campaign.

Booty, a standout at Evangel Christian Academy in Shreveport, La., where he set national records for receptions (302), receiving yards (5,867) and touchdowns (83), expects to turn Sage Hill into a winner.

The 36-year-old is setting high expectations in his first season as a head coach on the high school level. The last football team Booty coached involved 11-, 12- and 13-year-olds on the Newport-Mesa Seahawks Pee Wee Division team, which he led to winning the Orange County Junior All-American Super Bowl in November.

Booty comes from a successful football family, his three brothers, Josh, John David and Jake, stood out at quarterback in high school and two went on to play in college and get drafted in the NFL. John David led USC to Rose Bowl wins in 2007 and ‘08, and Josh played at LSU from 1999-2000.

“My goal is to create a fun and exciting brand of football here at Sage that is not only attractive to our student athletes, but also for those in the community that come watch us compete,” Abram Booty said.

“We are going to surround our young men with a first class coaching staff that will help each of them realize their full potential.”

Booty said his three brothers would be involved with the program in some capacity, including his father, Johnny Booty, who plans to move to Newport Beach and join the family soon.

The family patriarch helped built a national powerhouse program at Evangel Christian Academy, where in 1999 the school won the USA Today national title, before Johnny helped start a new program at Calvary Baptist Academy, guiding the school to state titles in Louisiana.

The Booty family has a lot of work ahead of itself at Sage Hill, which has only one CIF Southern Section playoff win in its history, coming in 2005.

Sage Hill is coming off its second winless season in league in the past three seasons, preventing it from qualifying for the East Valley Division playoffs. Sage Hill has missed the postseason in three of the previous four years.

The program’s last two successful seasons came in 2009 and ‘10, when Sage Hill produced consecutive second-place finishes in league and went 15-7 overall and 4-2 in league. The team to beat in league every year is rival St. Margaret’s, which has never lost to the Lightning in football. The Tartans claimed league and section crowns last season, and finished runner-up in the CIF State Division IV Bowl Game.

Booty is looking forward to going up against St. Margaret’s.

“St. Margaret’s has done a phenomenal job with [its] football program,” Booty said. “I believe it is a big positive to have a team like that in our league to challenge our team.”

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