FERRIDAY — After a recommendation from a good friend and a talk with Huntington headmaster Anthony Palermo, Edwin White recently accepted the head coaching job of both the varsity boys and varsity girls basketball teams.

“A good friend of mine, coach Robert Cade, recommended me for the job. He told me that he didn’t have the time to coach. I thought about it for a while. I then talked with the headmaster at the time, Mr. Palermo. I’ve never worked at a small school, a private school. He told me they haven’t been able to keep a coach over there. So I decided to take the job.”

A 1987 graduate of North Natchez High School, White, 40, was contacted after Huntington officials initially talked with Cade, the former boys head coach at Ferriday High School. Cade led the Trojans to a pair of state championships in the late 1980s.

White is no exception to winning as a head coach on the varsity girls level. He coached the Wilkinson County High School Lady Wildcats to several district championships in his nine years there.

“It’s a challenge for me. I’m the first African-American coach at Huntington,” White said.

While he said he hasn’t been able to meet with any players on the varsity boys team due to football, he said the players on the girls team and their parents have been “very nice” to him and that they’re easy to work with. He said he also wants to girls’ team to get back to its winning ways, something that hasn’t been done in a few years.

“I want to change the girls tradition,” White said. He added that he hopes to bring the winning tradition he had with the Lady Wildcats to the Lady Hounds. But that won’t be easy.

He said the biggest challenge that lies ahead as far as being the girls head coach is numbers.

“It’s such a small school. Especially the girls. They play in so many sports. They play softball, tennis and cheerleading. The group I have is young. We have just one senior, some eighth graders, some 10th graders and I even have to have some seventh-graders just to have a team. The boys won’t be so bad.”

It is indeed a big challenge after being at a Class 3A public school for nearly a decade and then going to an Class A private school. But that’s a challenge White is ready to take on.

Last year the girls’ team had just seven players on the roster and the boys team loses a lot of starters from last year’s team. White likes to run an up-tempo style with a lot of traps and motions on offense.