Williston football coach Robby Pruitt has a chance to do something on Friday night that no other high school football coach in the country has done.
The Florida High School Football Athletics Association (FHSAA) Hall of Fame coach, who has won seven state titles, is seeking his 200th win in the Sunshine State.
If he gets it, Pruitt will become the first prep football coach in America to win 200 games in two different states.
He had 209 wins in Georgia and currently has 199 victories in Florida.
According to Kevin Askeland of MaxPreps, Pruitt is the 49th coach to win 400 games. Of those 49, only nine coached in two different states.
Of those nine, only two coached for more than 10 years in two different states – Dave Gutshall of Dorman, South Carolina, and three different North Carolina schools, and Tommy Knotts of Dutch Fork, South Carolina, and Independence, North Carolina.
Knotts is getting close to 200 wins in two different states and could become the second coach to accomplish the feat. He has 181 wins at Dutch Fork and he had over 300 in North Carolina.
Gutshall had only 138 victories in North Carolina, but he won 278 in South Carolina.
Pruitt, who got win No. 198 in a 63-0 win against Class 6A Lake Minneola a couple of weeks ago, and the Red Devils (3-1) will travel to Class 1A Trinity Catholic (Ocala) on Friday night with a chance to make history.
Ironically, he won his 400th game overall last year against Trinity Catholic, a 38-7 win at home.
Williston, which is ranked seventh in the Rural classification in the first FHSAA Football rankings released on Tuesday, has won three in a row since a season-opening, 36-35, loss at home to Chiefland.
However, Pruitt said on Wednesday that “Six to seven [players] are out” due to injury and they’re down to their third-string center. Their quarterback, John Jazikoff, is also not 100%.
Plus, running back Terrence Marshall (19 carries for 143 yards and 4 TDs in two games) is out for the season with a torn ACL.
Pruitt, who won three state titles in a row at Union County (Lake Butler) from 1994-1996, including a then-state-record 52 straight wins, became the youngest coach in Florida high school history to win 100 games in 1997.
Now he has a chance to be in a league by himself.
He has brought hope to a struggling Williston program, which won just 13 games over five years (2017-2021) before he took over as head coach in 2022.
In his first season, the Red Devils outscored their first three opponents, 147-0, en route to a 10-0 regular season. They lost at home to Wildwood, 46-35, in the first round of the Class 1R state playoffs to finish 10-1.
He followed that up with another perfect regular season in 2023, followed by a 52-17 win against Pahokee in the first round of the state playoffs. The Red Devils (11-1) lost at home to eventual state champion Hawthorne, 34-16, in the 1R-Region 4 Final.
Last year’s team struggled at times, finishing 6-4 during the regular season, but they won a pair of playoff games against Chiefland and Fort White, followed by a season-ending loss at Hawthorne, 28-7, in the Rural state semifinals to finish 8-5.
Williston entered last year’s Rural state tournament as the No. 13 seed out of 16 teams and was one win away from playing for the state title.
“I think we got as far as we could get with that team,” Pruitt said this past summer. “Hawthorne was better than we were. And really, Chiefland and Fort White could have been, but our kids played over their heads and played good. I thought we came a long way after we lost to Chiefland in the first game of the year.”
Turnovers were costly last year, with “three or four fumbles” at Eastside, a 21-14 loss, “four or five” at North Marion (Citra), a 20-14 loss, plus double-digit fumbles in the season opener against Chiefland, an 18-10 loss on the road.
“We could have won all of them,” Pruitt said. “I said we set the Guinness Book of World Records against Chiefland because I had a new center.”
Oddly enough, they are working with a new center again.
Last week they had several bad exchanges from center and held on for a 24-14 win at home against Class 3 North Marion (Citra) after building a 24-0 lead at the half.
In order to get his 200th win, the Red Devils will have to protect the football.
