There wil be a changing of the guard at Baldwin County High School this year, but guard will still be on campus.

Jerry Wright, the Tigers’ head baseball coach for the past 18 seasons, announced last week that he was stepping away from the diamond so that he could return to school in search of a master’s degree in administration.

Wright will remain on the BCHS athletic staff as an assistant football coach. He will remain the offensive line coach for at least one more season.

Half of Wright’s 18 baseball teams at Baldwin County won area championships and three teams won area titles in seven seasons at McGill-Toolen in Mobile.

He was also the baseball coach for one season at the now-defunct Evangel Christian Academy in Eight Mile.

“I’m at a point now where I want to do something different, and I felt like with going to school … I just didn’t have time to do baseball,” Wright said. He started taking classes this summer, some of them online, at the University of West Alabama in Livingston.

“It just takes so much of my time, I decided I want to jump in it and get it done in a couple of years,” Wright said. “I don’t want to go along three or four years trying to get it finished. I just felt like it was best to step aside and let somebody else do it.”

Interim BCHS principal Johnny Cabaniss said Monday that he and David Wofford, the school’s athletic director had personally interviewed six applicants for Wright’s old job.

Wright “has been a valuable asset for 18 years to Baldwin County High School baseball, and football. He’ll continue to work in football,” Cabaniss said last week, adding that he received “six inqueries” on Tuesday, the day after Wright turned in his resignation.

“All of them were quality people with baseball experience,” Cabaniss said, with the calls coming in from all over the state.

“It’a been a good 18 years,” Wright said. “I told somebody the other day … this day and time, when you stay somewhere 18 years, it’s hard to do that now. I was happy to have it for 18 years. It was a pleasure for me to serve this community as the baseball coach for that long and it was a pleasure for me to coach the kids that I did.

“I had great kids and great community support. The administration around here was fabulous, but it’s time for me to move on to another stage in my life and … that’s what I’m gonna do.”

At Baldwin County, Wright’s teams won about 380 games and Wright, who has about 480 coaching wins overall, became known as a coach who got the most out of his teams when they were often overmatched talent-wise.

His final team and his 2005 team each made the 6A state state playoffs despite having sub-.500 overall records in regular-season play.

The 2005 team reached the quarterfinals.

“The one thing I thought we always did; our kids played hard. We tried to teach them to play hard (and) have a lot of class when they did it, and I always thought we did,” Wright said. “They gave me everything they had. There was years we didn’t have — maybe we (were not) as talented as other schools, but some way, somehow we found a way to win, get in the playofs and do what it took to get there.

“It was a good run and I wish (the next coach) the best of luck.”