Flathead High School announced Monday morning that it will begin the hiring process for a new head football coach in January, marking the fourth time the school will have sought to hire a new head coach since early 2019.
In a press release, assistant principal and activities director Matt Allison wrote that the school thanked former head coach Caleb Aaland “for his dedication and leadership during his three years as the head coach of the Braves Football program, as the school has decided to go in a different direction.”
Aaland, who is originally from Panama City, Fla., and spent several years on the coaching staff at Troy University in Alabama, before moving to work at Glacier National Park. He spent one year at Flathead High as the football team’s quarterbacks coach, before taking over as head coach in 2022.
Aaland told the My Panhandle news outlet in 2022 that he took over a team that had not won a game since 2019. The team’s first game under Aaland was a 27-0 win against Billings Skyview, but Flathead went on to lose the rest of its games that season.
The 2023 season brought a marginal improvement in the win-loss column with a 2-7 record. In 2024, the team went 0-9, including three one-score losses, bringing Aaland’s record as the team’s head coach to 3-24.
The Flathead football program is now six years removed from a 2018 appearance in the AA state championship game, when the Braves fell to Billings West 20-14 and finished the season 9-4. It was the team’s first appearance in the state title game since 2000.
Kyle Samson, the head coach for the 2018 team, left before the next season to take a job as the quarterbacks coach and offensive coordinator at NAIA football program Montana Tech, where he is now the head coach. During five years as the head coach for Flathead, Samson’s teams went 27-27. Samson was replaced by Matt Upham, who went 2-15 across two seasons, including a shortened seven-game 2020 season, before resigning. He was replaced by Alex Cummings, who went 0-9 during the 2021 season before resigning to become the assistant principal at Kalispell Middle School.
In his statement about the coaching change and subsequent search, Allison wrote that they are looking to hire someone who can “build on the solid foundation that we currently have — talented assistant coaches and next year’s returning players.”